Brand Protection: How Online Counterfeiting Is Eating Your ROI
In today's dynamic online world, the threats to your brand mount with each passing day. The threats from PPC (Pay-Per-Click Ads) violations, counterfeiters, typo squatters, domain squatters and the like are all out to profit at your expense . So what can you do? Sure, a small business getting by with just using free monitoring tools is a way to go, but it could be time consuming as well as spotty in identifying and assessing the level of risk that each of these threats represent to your brand.
The global-wide practice of producing counterfeit items and distributing them is a threat to brands across all markets. Every industry is targeted, from Fashion to Auto Parts to Baby products.. Somewhere down the road, you will decide that implementing a brand protection tool is in the cards. With marketing budgets fluctuating as new initiatives come to fruition, you need to take a look at the ROI you would most definitely realize by implementing a brand protection tool.
Do the benefits outweigh the costs? All signs point to YES as benefits do indeed outweigh the costs 99% of the time. In this post, I will discuss how identifying lost sales due to counterfeiting can right there justify the implementation of a brand protection tool.
Traffic Diversions
Along with strong popular brands, comes literally thousands of websites that are set up and designed just so they can steal traffic away from a brand's rightful owner and cut into your profit, piggybacking on the brand that marketing folks have invested so much time and money in building.
In a lot of cases, these sites use a trademark in their URL such as CheapNike.com or via the use of trademarked words within PPC ads that drive unsuspecting consumers to these counterfeit sites.
These shady practices can cause large amounts in stolen traffic and within that - stolen sales. It is fortunate that these tactics can be measured, and you can estimate the number of visitors navigating to those counterfeit sites. This will enable you to see which websites are stealing the majority of your traffic and to come to a monetary figure as to how much money you are losing to online counterfeiting.
When assessing how many of the visits to these websites appear to be stolen, you can calculate how many of those visits would have turned into paying customers, based on your conversion rate history and average purchase amount per visit. This is also a terrific opportunity to rally all stakeholders involved and show them how these consumers could have been yours if you used a brand protection tool while providing them with the numbers. This is just one number that will be part of your realized ROI when implementing brand protection.
Keeping Online Counterfeiters Away
Just one big brand, implementing a brand protection tool can cut into the damage that counterfeiters cause a particular market. Going beyond, brand owners would quickly realize that they would hold an advantage over their competitors by implementing brand protection, and hence increase their market share, and ROI.
In the course of protecting the assets that make up your brand, you will face many threats that can erode your brand's reputation and the relationship you've worked so hard in building with your customers. Besides financial, this is one of the top threats that online counterfeiting poses. Implementing a brand protection tool that will monitor the web round-the-clock using sophisticated algorithms will make it harder for these online counterfeiters to operate, and hence allow your brand's identity to flourish and thrive Without a brand protection mechanism in place, your brand's identity will suffer.
