By Alex Gutman, Published November 12, 2014
Ecommerce is on the rise, shattering records with every holiday season. If Alibaba’s recent IPO on Wall St. is any indication, the time is now to double your efforts in the ecommerce arena. However, with these amazing opportunities to grow your brand’s bottom line, come efforts to exploit it, and cut into it, empowering the likes of online counterfeiting thieves to profit at your expense.
Now, you shouldn’t be scared, but you should be focused on this explosive development. With each passing day, as over 1400 new gTLDs are being gradually released, come more and more threats. To think this is only happening to big brands is a HUGE mistake. You should definitely be planning for a portion of your budget to go towards protecting your brand from this band of cyberthieves. Not only can online counterfeiters steal from you, they can also cause your brand irreversible brand damage, damage that is not so easily fixed. A solid brand protection strategy in the form of some type of brand protection tool should be in the cards.
Marketing budgets are not static. They are adjusted over time. The sooner you realize that these threats should be addressed, the quicker you can be combating these threats and realizing a higher brand ROI.
So, you might be wondering how exactly these online counterfeiters operate. A major part of how they do their damage is via diverting the traffic you work so hard in gaining, from your legitimate site(s) to their phony sites.
Your Brand Needs Protection
In the world of ecommerce, the competition is fierce. Marketing VPs, directors and managers all have their work cut out for them and are always on the lookout for new ways to drive customers to their digital assets. Brand protection has definitely brought a new hook into marketing budgeting. Remember, whenever there is a new avenue to promote your brand there are just as many avenues to exploit it and cause it damage.
The online counterfeiting threat lies at the core of cyber crime, where scammers, squatters and the likes of them can divert traffic from your legitimate brand to their phony sites. These cyber thieves have been working on perfecting the science of launching professional looking websites on a day’s notice, sites that can also be taken down within minutes once they are discovered. These sites have fooled the most savviest consumers into thinking they are the real deal. They have perfected Search Engine Marketing and SEO, using some of your own branded keywords, to steal your traffic.
Online marketers put a lot of time, effort and money into marketing their sites and increasing their conversions. Why would anyone want to throw that all away and have their efforts being taken hostage and be used against them? Would you?
All in the Numbers
Take a long hard look at the numbers to see things in perspective. Across the board, companies budget over 13 Billion Dollars for Search Engine Marketing. A recent study by Experian Hitwise conducted a study and published a report which said that 14 percent of branded searches fall victim to traffic diversion to sites other than legitimate brands. That’s a lot of your wasted time and resources.
Heightening ROI
As a brand marketer, you need to come to an estimation of the ROI you will be realizing by implementing a brand protection tool. I feel that hands down, you will realize that stopping online counterfeiting and the financial and reputation damage it causes in its tracks will be enough to warrant brand protection to protect your brand.
See how much of your traffic gets diverted. Come to a number of conversions that weren’t made on your offerings, but on those of bogus copies of yours. How many leads have you lost to online counterfeiters? You will see a pattern and will discover the revenue number that you have lost.
Marketing accountability is increasingly being judged and marketing strategies refined, so as to come to a heightened ROI. When you see how much you stand to lose, you will realize how much you stand to gain by combating online counterfeiting to protect your brand.
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