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Search Engine Optimization (revisited)

Viral marketing

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MBA 563WEEK 5

VIRAL MARKETING

Before we start….

• Why videos go viral Kevin Allocca TED 2011 (7 minutes)

• So what is going on here?

Viral marketing – what is it?• A marketing phenomenon that encourages

people to pass along a marketing message in such a way that it spreads like a virus or a meme– Compulsive reading, listening or viewing

• Can be text, image, video, sound file

– So amazing that people have the urge to share with others

• Social media is the engine for viral marketing because of the “network effect”

• WoM is trustedBased on: eMarketing eXcellence. 2008. Chaffey et al. BH

Engaging in the conversation – balancing control and credibility

Traditional marketing communications and PR

CONTROL

CREDIBILITY

Spontaneity

Dialogue

Monologue

Conversation

Community

“a person like yourself”

Advertising

Based on ideas from Edelman’s Trust Barometer

Viral marketing (word-of-mouth direct marketing)

• Viral includes any strategy that encourages people to pass on your message to others– Word of mouth is the most trusted form of communication

(because the message is coming from “a person like yourself”

• Let the users of the Internet do your marketing for you – traditionally by eMail, but now by using social networking sites, blogs and video sharing sites

• Built-in mechanism to pass on to someone else– It works (sometimes), and it’s free or low cost (sometimes)– VERY difficult to plan for and do successfully – especially as it has

been around for more than 20 years – people become jaded

Viral marketing – having “remarkable” products

• Seth Godin on How to Get Your Ideas to Spread “sliced bread and other marketing delights” - getting people to talk about you and your products (17 minutes)

• TED conference, 2003

Using social media sites for viral marketing – watch out!

• "While these sites may appear to be the most effective manner of delivering a message regardless of brand appropriateness," he said, "by failing to truly understand the audience, viral marketers stand to alienate as many consumers as they interest." – David Schatsky, President, JupiterResearch, on the pitfalls of social networking sites:

• Undercover or “stealth” marketing - be careful of customer perception that they are being “used” – people are increasingly sophisticated and cynical– Fake bloggers etc (eg. Mazda commercials disguised as user generated

videos)

• Watch out for people to highjack your campaign with parody videos, or highjacking of your hashtag

Elements of a viral marketing campaign

1. Creative material – the viral agent (text, image, video)

– Consider meme-jacking?

2. Seeding – identifying websites, blogs, or people (influencers) to start the message moving

– Understand and exploit existing communications networks – go where the people are

3. Tracking – to monitor the effect, to assess the return from the cost of developing the viral agent and seeding

• Based on: eMarketing eXcellence. 2008. Chaffey et al. BH

Can virality be predicted or reproduced?

• Tod Maffin’s Six Genetic Markers of Viral Marketing1. AAC Matching2. Simple concept3. Sentiment4. Reward sharing5. Embrace unofficials6. Successive rounds

Tod Maffin. Viral Marketing. The Six Genetic Markers

AAC matching

• The target Audience must match the Creative, which must match the Call-to-Action

• No mixed messages

Tod Maffin. Viral Marketing. The Six Genetic Markers

Simple Concept

• Plots and developed characters do not get traction

• Keep the campaign simple• One idea at a time• Stop over-thinking

Tod Maffin. Viral Marketing. The Six Genetic Markers

Sentiment

• Your campaign should be either– Serious– Silly– Stunning

• Don’t experiment with other tones– Definitely don’t mix them

Tod Maffin. Viral Marketing. The Six Genetic Markers

Reward sharing

• Incentivize people to share your content and they will share it for you

• Don’t rely on freebies or begging (or bribing)• Give recognition• How about gamification?

Tod Maffin. Viral Marketing. The Six Genetic Markers

Embrace unofficials

• When a fan uses your brand imagery to praise you, embrace them

• Don’t shut them down• Enough with the cease and desist letters

Tod Maffin. Viral Marketing. The Six Genetic Markers

Successive Rounds

• Keep a good idea going (because then it might become a meme?) – build on recognition

• Plan to have at least three “rounds” of content which riffs on your first release.

Tod Maffin. Viral Marketing. The Six Genetic Markers

Then there is this….

• “DisneyCollectorBR is a faceless YouTube channel giant that is consistently among the site’s top most viewed per month. In April, the channel was the third-most viewed worldwide. During the week of July 4 [2014], the DisneyCollectorBR channel received more views in the United States — 55 million — than any other channel on YouTube.” Buzzfeed

Some successful viral marketing campaigns

• Hotmail launch – 1.5 million subscribers in the first 18 months– Gmail strategy?

• Dove Evolution – “Campaign for natural beauty”

• The Old Spice Guy wins an Emmy for social media campaign

• LOTS of examples at Viral Friday

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO) REVISITED

Search engine marketing – 2 major methods

• TWO MAJOR METHODS - OBJECTIVE IS TO BE IN THE TOP FEW SEARCH RESULTS

1. Search engine optimization (SEO) - built into the design of web pages / inbound link quality (organic positioning) - TODAY

2. Search engine advertising: Pay-per-Click (next class)

Trust in search engine providers relies on the fact that organic search is not tainted by payment…

Paid listings

SEO -Organic listings

Search engine optimization (for organic listings)

• Objective: top position in search engine results pages (SERPS) - without paying the search engine for the position by bidding on key words

• A way to reach those who are ALREADY interested in your product or service – but may not even know that your firm exists

• What we are optimizing for are RELEVANCE and IMPORTANCE– Optimizing the web page CONTENT (and code) for search

engine indexing– Link strategy

Search engine optimization• Focuses on:

1. ON-PAGE optimization• designing web pages that are friendly to search

engine spiders and are optimized for your keywords/phrases

• making sure that the elements that are indexed by search engines are all optimal for your page goals

2. OFF-PAGE optimization• Having high-quality in-bound links

Chaffey, D. et al. Internet Marketing. 2007

How search engines work

• Search engine indexing – GoogleBot and its sister spiders– How do search engines work? (Google video 3 minutes)

– Relevancy ranking algorithms – Google PageRank and other factors

• Google Tutorial on Ranking: relevance and importance

• Remember, they all search engines use different ranking algorithms and methods• Google has around 65% market share– Target some engines and do your research

• SearchEngineWatch.com and SearchEngineLand.com

Changes in Google’s relevancy ranking algorithm that impact SEO

• Some pundits say that “SEO is dead”• It isn’t, but is has changed and become even

more challenging: Search metrics rank correlation factors report

• Looser keyword matching • Social signals becoming increasingly important

• The fundamentals don’t change much – we will focus on those

Steps involved in SEO

1. Create a content-rich site that real people will find valuable (but remember, each page is in competition)

2. Use clean, simple code3. Research competition and keywords / phrases.

Identify and select keywords and phrases for optimization, then validate them for popularity

4. Add your keywords to the content (do not spam)5. Get inbound links from other reputable sites6. Submit to search engines7. Repeat – this is NOT a one-off effort – the playing-

field changes continually

1. Create a content-rich site that real people will find valuable

• Search engines reward sites with good content – this is the most important element of all

• Create high quality, relevant content– create content your target audience is genuinely

interested in– Search engines reward sites that have valuable

information– Do some test searches and note that it is not

always the best looking sites that are at the top…it is the ones with the best CONTENT

• Eg. Digital camera review site versus digital camera eCommerce site• Wikipedia

– Think about how this works for image and video search..

2. Use clean, simple code

• What you see…..

• What GoogleBot sees…..

• XHTML and CSS – separation of structure and content from presentation elements helps (make sure that your developer is following current web standards from the W3C)

• Make sure that any firm that you hire to build a website understands how SEO works

3. Select your Keywords/keyphrases

• This is the most important concept to grasp in search marketing

• What are members of your target market actually typing into search engines?

– Those are the keywords/keyphrases that you must optimize for

Identify and select keywords and phrases then validate them for popularity

• “Keywords” or “key phrases” are the search terms people type into search engines– Brainstorm and research– Do test searches– Try out keywords from generators– eg. Google’s Keyword Planner (lots of data about

traffic and trends)– or download the Bing Ads Intelligence tool– Keyword Generator: Wordtracker (no longer free)– Google search trends might be interesting

Long-tail keywords (based on power law concept)

• Distinguish “long-tail” keywords from “head” keywords– running shoes = “head term”– compare grip new balance and nike trail running =

“long-tail term”• These search terms have good ROI because

they are less competitive and give higher user satisfaction (lower bounce rates?)

• Example of a long-tail keyword generator

The impact of changes in Google’s search interface and algorithm

• The impact of Google Instant on the SERPs and on search behaviour?– How Google Instant affects SEO (Bruce Clay)

• The other thing to take into account is that Google personalizes search results according to search / web history– A competing search engine explains the impact

• Google changes its algorithm quite frequently (algorithm change history) – most recently to favour sites optimized for mobile

3. Research your competition

• Use your target search engines and perform analysis of top results for your keywords

• Track and analyze what your competitors are doing– See how they rank for keywords / phrases– Look at their code to see what keywords they use

and how they use them

4. Add your keywords to the content (do not spam!)

• Page body text: content / page copy• Title tag• Heading tags• Graphics: alt tags• Hypertext links• Meta tags• How to Look at Your Website the Way Goog

le Does

Page body text: content / page copy

• Page copy - make sure your keywords are well represented– Higher in the page the better (definitely in the first 25

words)– Use your customer’s language: not all marketing copy

uses the words that your customers use

• Relationship of a keyword phrase to the total number of words on a page = keyword density– Keyword density is a good indication of relevancy– But remember balance: higher is not always better

(boring for users and penalized as spam!)

Title tag• Probably the most important page element tag• Should always contain your most important keywords

or key terms• Each page of your site should have a different title tag• Example of a good TITLE tag that will generate traffic

from people searching for “Leonardo da Vinci” the renaissance artist: – <TITLE>Leonardo da Vinci. Art of the renaissance</TITLE>

(absolute relevance)• This example is less relevant (but contains other

useful info – remember to balance marketing needs)– <TITLE>Artefacts: Leonardo da Vinci. High quality prints and

framing</TITLE> • This one will put you out of business:

– <TITLE>Welcome to your Number One Online Resource for Wall Art Solutions!!!</TITLE>

Heading tags• <H1>, <H2>, <H3> etc• Used to indicate importance: ie. page

heading or paragraph headings• Should therefore be a good indicator of

content - these should indicate the theme of the page or section

• Use your keywords in heading tags• Use heading tags when coding - Never just

make the text bigger using font size

Graphics: alt tags• Spiders can’t see or read graphics• Make sure all graphics have relevant and

descriptive ALT tags (not photo34643)• Use your keywords – especially in places like the

alt tags for your logo• Especially important for navigation graphics (you

don’t want a spider to get stuck on a page)

• Also….think about how image search works…

Hypertext links to other parts of your site

– use your keywords in hypertext links

– Never use “click here”! – does that look like relevant or interesting content to a spider?

– make it easy for spiders to follow links

– Include text links for navigation in addition to javascript jump or hierarchical menus

Meta tags (description and keyword tags)

• No longer useful as sole tactic to influence rankings

• keywords used in meta tags should match those in the visible body text

• BUT search engines often use title and description in the listings themselves– Example of a VIU listing on Google

5. Get inbound links from other reputable sites

• What gives your site “authority”?• Link popularity strongly influences relevance ranking (it

signals importance)• Number and quality of other sites that link to yours

(inbound links)– must be content relevant (don’t spam!)– request links from relevant high-ranking sites– get a listing in a directory

• Google moves against “link farms, content farms, and spam sites” – the losers and JC Penney

• Find out who links to you now– link:www.nanaimo.ca

• Think about the “landing page” – remember individual pages are competing - not your entire site

• Google’s new Link Disavowal tool

URL strategy and landing pages

• If we are going to drive traffic to our site one of the most important pieces of marketing real estate is the URL

• Not just a question of selecting the right domain name

• URL strategy relates to placement of landing page in folder so web address itself is meaningful (Google now uses this explicitly)

• Campaign URLs (CURLS)

6. Submit to search engines

• If you don’t play, you can’t win• Check which pages are already indexed –

inurl:viu.ca or Google’s Site Status Wizard• Decide which search engines to target, and read all the

information for submission and ranking eg. Google for webmasters

• Google Tutorial on how to get pages into Google

– Then submit your URL to Bing– And to Google– And to Yahoo

7. Repeat all steps again

• Search engines change their algorithms constantly

• Search engines constantly on guard against spam

• There are no guarantees of position with SEO

• Good SEO involves constant monitoring, analysis and tweaking

• The Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors (from Search Engine Watch)

Don’t try to SPAM search engines!

• Google’s Guide for Webmasters

• Deceptive and manipulative behaviour - Black hat SEO and search engine SPAM– An example: bmw.de

Changes in the search scene• Search shifting from search engines to social

networking sites– Facebook– Twitter

• Real-time search (Google Instant) and customized search

• Social search– Bing now using Facebook data to personalize

search (WSJ video)• Google “cards”

Enhance a search listing with Google Places for Business

• A free tool from Google to help you bring your business to prominence when people are searching: Google My Business

• Add extra features to your business listing– Photos– Reviews of your business– Indoor business photos (sometimes)Example: Modern Café Nanaimo