Use Brand Jacking To Put Other Competitor’s Customers Into Your Marketing Funnel

Brand jacking is when your website appears in the search results while searchers look for information about another company’s brand.

And it’s an incredibly powerful technique.

The company you are brand jacking is putting their customers and prospects in your funnel.

The more money they spend on marketing and the more people Google their brand name, the more people end up on your website, where you can capture their contact details.

Or follow them around the internet using a LinkedIn or Facebook pixel.

Here are two examples.

Brand Jacking Microsoft

Archive360 wants to build awareness with the audience that is searching for information about a specific feature in Microsoft’s Office 365.

Archive360’s page about that feature is the first search result after Microsoft.

In order to rank well, Archive360’s page needs to give users what they’re expecting – to learn more about the Office 365 journaling feature.

Then the page transitions to educating the reader about deficiencies in Microsoft’s solution and scenarios where organizations seek 3rd party solutions like Archive360.

Learn how we consistently rank above bigger brands, with larger budgets and more backlinks.

Brand Jacking Ubisoft

Uplay is Ubisoft’s digital distribution platform. Ubisoft generated $1.7B in 2019 with a market cap of $8.2B.

Every month, tens of thousands of people google for some variation of uplay support.

And for a lot of those terms, searchers will find DoNotPay.com ranking above Ubisoft.

DoNotPay is an iPhone app that uses a robo-dialer to connect humans to a real human being at giant companies like Ubisoft without waiting on hold.

People looking for Ubisoft support are exactly the same type of people who download, use and subscribe to DoNotPay.

This makes sense if you understand how Google actually works

Who can I Brand Jack?

There are five things you need to align to implement an impactful brandjacking campaign.

Competitors OR complimentary brands

Brandjacking works best when you’re targeting competitors (self-explanatory), or complementary brands.

Complimentary brands are brands that your customers often use in conjunction with your product.

In the Archive360 example above, using Office 365 is a prerequisite of using Archive360 – they are an add-on that sits on top of Office 365.

Think about your customer’s software stack and identify overlap in buyer persona and audience.

Aligning your offer and audience

The brandjacking targets you pick must generate an audience that your offer will resonate with.

I’ve implemented campaigns that successfully generated tens of thousands of visitors searching for Instagram and Shopify branded terms.

But the traffic didn’t convert because our offer didn’t resonate.

Do 3rd party websites already rank?

If other 3rd party websites already rank for the branded search term we’re targeting, that indicates there we can also rank for that branded term.

The fact that GetHuman.com, a DoNotPay competitor, Reddit, and TrustPilot rank for uplay customer support indicated to us that we could also rank for this term.

Likewise, the fact that non-Microsoft pages were ranking for Office 365 journaling told us we could rank for that branded term too.

You need to satisfy search intent to brand jack

Google Analytics is deployed on every website that matters.

And Google uses this data to understand how users react to the pages it serves in its search results.

Pages with better bounce rates, time on site, pages visited, referral traffic and overall engagement will rank better than sites with lower user engagement metrics.

If your page doesn’t satisfy a user’s intent behind their search, Google will bounce you off the first page.

Your content needs to rank

Most companies have problems with content distribution. According to Sirius Decisions, 70% of B2B content created by marketing organizations doesn’t add business value.

And I suspect there is a similar percentage of underutilized content investments in B2C organizations.

We’ve worked with companies that have spent $250,000+ on content over 4 years created by very talented, and knowledgeable writers, that Google Analytics indicates has been viewed less than 20 times in the last 12 months – from any channel.

When your content aligns with what people are searching for, you’re creating a company asset that will create business impact 6, 12, 18, 24 months after making your investment.

Learn how to turn any writer into an SEO content writer

How do I Brand Jack?

I accidentally discovered brandjacking after outranking Instagram and Shopify for ‘Instagram support‘ and ‘is Shopify safe‘

This technique was featured in Josh Fechter’s growth hacking bible, with over 2,100+ upvotes it was the #1 product of the week.

You can find it here on page 274.

Or you can watch the video I made below.

I highly recommend you subscribe to stay in the loop on more actionable tactics you can begin implementing while you learn.

You can Brand Jack too

The examples shown above aren’t flukes.

Brand Jacking is consistently successful when:

1. You’re targeting a competitor or complementary brand
2. Your offer aligns with the audience you’re generating
3. Other 3rd party websites already rank for the branded term
4. Your content matches the searcher’s intent
5. Your content ranks

The final tip I have is Brand Jacking works best at scale.

Any given piece of content may or may not rank, but if you push out dozens and dozens of pieces of content, you will see week over week and month over month increases in qualified traffic.

Discover the #1 lever you can pull to get the fastest SEO results

What does Brand Jacking at scale look like?

Brand Jacking at scale is a beautiful thing.

Especially when you’re Brand Jacking some of the largest technology companies in the world.

And the traffic is converting like crazy.

Brand Jacking B2B Brands

Brand Jacking Dell

Dell has a market cap of $29B and we’re Brand Jacking them on multiple product lines in the email space.

Dell EMC SourceOne

Dell EMS MessageOne

Dell EMC EmailXtender

Brand Jacking Symantec

Symantec was acquired by Broadcom for $10B in 2019.

Symantec EV Cloud

Brand Jacking MicroFocus

MicroFocus has 14,000 employees and $4.5+B in revenue.

MicroFocus Gwava Retain

Get the process docs we use to turn any writer into an SEO content writer

Brand Jacking Consumer Brands

This tactic also works really well against consumer brands.

Mojang support

Rockstar game support

Ubisoft customer support number

Calculate the ROI of a Brand Jacking campaign

Interested?

The next step is to forecast potential ROI on your Brand Jacking investment.

Check out our SEO ROI calculator to forecast various outcomes.

Our best content

Want to learn how we’ve grown 4 websites from approximately zero to 100,000 visitors per month, with the biggest one doing 500,000 in just 17 months?

We share it all.

1. How to turn any writer into an SEO content writer
2. Brand Jacking (ranking for your competitor’s brands)
3. How Google actually works (based on 65,000 page 1 keywords)
4. How we crush B2B SaaS SEO
5. How to find and hire the highest quality, most affordable writers on the internet
6. How we crush B2C SaaS SEO
7. How to rank without backlinks
8. SEO ROI Calculator
9. The #1 lever to get the fastest SEO results
10. The greatest SEO case study of 2020: 0 to 479,000 monthly organic in 16 months