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Category Archives: Online PR

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The UFC: Black Belts in Social Media Marketing

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According to Ultimate Fighting Championship President, Dana White “Twitter is the greatest Marketing tool in the history of the world”.

Dana White’s social media presence is most prominent on Twitter where the outspoken head honcho at the UFC regularly posts the latest fight announcements, UFC events, and fan contests to his nearly 2 million followers. White is notorious for his fan interaction on Twitter, and it’s common to see him engaged in heated Twitter beefs with MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) fans. Often responding to negative messages from folks with his own not so sweet tweets (see screen shot). White does what most company executives would avoid. However, it is in part his brashness and willingness to interact with fans that makes Dana White so popular among fans – and the UFC such a force in social media.

 

Tune into any UFC event and you’ll notice that when fighters are introduced their Twitter handle is prominently displayed on screen alongside their name.  Not only does the UFC promote several Twitter accounts for various marketing efforts, but the organization also encourages all of its fighters to have an active Twitter account. The current UFC roster contains over 300 fighters, so the idea is brilliant in that fans can interact with fighters after seeing them perform, and the UFC can expand its social media marketing efforts even wider through its employees (something all companies should consider doing).

While it’s obvious how much Dana White loves Twitter, the marketing gurus social media presence doesn’t stop there. Perhaps even more prominent is the UFC’s Facebook page. With over 8 million “Likes” the page is one of the most popular business pages on Facebook, and a large part of that success is due to what the UFC offers to fans of the page.

The UFC currently live streams free preliminary fights for fans of the page. If you’re not familiar with the UFC, “prelim fights” are not aired live on their Pay-Per-View, but as all MMA fans know these fights are often exciting with lesser known fighters giving it their all in hopes of breaking to thru to the main card.  The innovative idea constantly pulls in new fans and draws existing fans back to the page, giving the UFC yet another opportunity to promote their events online and drawn in additional PPV buys.

In addition to the UFC’s YouTube channel that promotes upcoming matches, Dana White also regularly posts a popular video blog that gives viewers a fascinating behind the scenes look at the UFC. The blog follows White in the days leading up to an event at press conferences, weigh-ins, cage side, and even backstage.  This allows fans to get an up close look at what happens before and after the fights.

Through all these efforts, it’s clear that the UFC understands the power of social media and engaging fans online. And just as UFC fighters use a mix of martial arts disciplines to succeed in the cage so does the organization mix social media marketing efforts to propel business.

The UFC’s immense social media success speaks to its overall non-stop barrage of marketing which has helped further expand the organization worldwide with events held in Brazil, Japan, Australia and Sweden this year alone. In addition to recent plans to broadcast UFC programming in India and the rest of the sub-continent, the organization recently landed a groundbreaking 7-year deal with FOX to further position MMA as the fastest growing sport in the world.

As an MMA fanatic and an online marketing geek I found the UFC to be a great example of effective social media marketing that not only got my attention, but one I think other companies could learn a few techniques from.

 

Posted in Online Marketing, Online PR, Social Media

 

Lost Rankings? How To Recover from Google Penalties

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Over optimization tipsThere are two types of SEOs: those that chase Google’s algorithm using tactics that work now but won’t in the future, and then there are SEOs that take a more sustainable approach to optimization, avoiding tactics that have a limited life-span. Prior to 2012 algorithm chasers were able, for the most part, to achieve rankings success for clients with a few setbacks from Panda. The various algorithm changes that Google announced this year (and it’s only April) have really dealt a blow to the algorithm chasers and, unfortunately, many companies that employed them to manage their SEO.

Given the new landscape, it’s not uncommon for online marketing agencies to acquire accounts with websites that have been worked over by unscrupulous SEOs in the past. These websites face a mountain of obstacles to overcome, but they can be overcome. It just may take some time depending on the severity of bad SEO.

If you have a website or you are working with a website that Google no longer loves, you’re going to need to take a different approach. Quality content and a strong social presence will earn Google’s trust again in time, but here are some suggestions you can implement now to get you back on track.

Address over-optimization on-site

A good place to start is with scaling back keyword density and any abundance of optimized internal links on your website. If you use your browser’s “find” function to highlight a keyword on a page that used to rank and it looks like you are staring into the sun, that’s a good sign you need to remove excessive mentions of that keyword from your content (or break out a thesaurus). You should also look to adjust your internal linking strategy by either removing some links or linking from related long-tail phrases.

Balance over-optimization off-site with branded links

To diagnose over-optimized links, run your page through Open Site Explorer and click over to the “Anchor Text” tab. If you don’t see your brand name or domain name in the top 5 then it’s time to put your brand first and your keywords second. You might be able to score some quick wins by changing off-site links you can control, but ultimately you need to change your linking strategy. Some purists will tell you to forget anchor text entirely. Realistically, targeting a mix of branded links and longer-tail keyword links from other websites will probably yield better results, quicker.

Combat bad links with high-quality content strategies

Bad links may be the most difficult thing to tackle on a site that has lost Google’s trust. If it is possible to easily remove bad, low-quality links, do it. In most cases, however, your time will be better spent creating quality content that can get you quality links. Either way, it’s going to take time (more time than it took to acquire the bad links). Many websites will be able to implement quality link outreach campaigns right away through public relations or sweepstakes-oriented promotions. Infographic creation and distribution can also get you some good links in a relatively short amount of time. Long-term, your strategy needs to lay the groundwork that will allow you to scale content distribution and quality link building efforts in the future. To do this you will need to do the following:

  • Construct an authoritative blog with engaging content people want to link to –authorship is important so make sure there are people and faces connected to blog posts
  • Create a social media strategy that builds followers who interact with your business
  • Develop and promote people at your company who are experts in the industry
  • Aim to build relationships, not links

The goal for any SEO or website today should be to create a sustainable optimization strategy both on-site and off-site. Many businesses learn the hard way that it takes much longer to regain rankings that are lost when Google updates its search signals. Whether or not your site has been penalized –consider implementing sustainable optimization strategies sooner rather than later.

Posted in Google, Link-Building, Online PR, SEO, Social Media

 

To Blog or Not to Blog – It’s Not Even a Question!

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It’s funny how certain items, activities and even fashion trends catch on while others are left behind,seemingly in the dust. Take Beta videotape, for example—predicted to be a hot commodity, it was totally left behind by the VHS format instead.  And then there was this supposedly amazing Britsh rock band of the early 1990s who were supposed to explode in transcendant flame and dominate the indie world forever: The Fatima Mansions. Ever heard of them? Nope, I thought not.

Currently, the business world has been drawn in by the allure and relative ease of social media antics—the Facebooks, LinkedIns and Twitters of the Internet world. Everyone is radio-gaga for tweets and Facebook postings and blah blah blah, even if much of the content is about nothing interesting, let alone vital to the business lead-gen market. And while there is strong value in social media BECAUSE everyone else is paying attention to it, you better be putting some quality content in your social media strategies or else you’re generating so much fluff and flotsom and jetsam…and how long can THAT really last as a workable strategy?

Meanwhile, the authornauts of the Blogosphere continue to generate really good content on lots of important subjects….fitness, politics, culture, the environment…and yes, the business world too. Blogging, time-wise, is still a remarkably valuable activity and it adds great value to business websites. Increasing your voice of authority in your particular industry, developing loyal readers who will trust you and your brand promises, not to mention creating fresh content with keywords—oh! how the search engines love THAT stuff…blogging is heartily recommended and we encourage all our clients to do it.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s an interesting and relevant post from Brian Gardner, a partner at Copyblogger Media, talking all about the great value that blogging brings to a business website. Read it and enjoy it, folks!

After that, if you’re still curious, check out previous Fathom posts on content development and blogging. We didn’t write the book on this stuff, but we add to that volume of marketing literature on a daily basis!

Posted in Content Creation, Online Marketing, Online PR, SEO | Tagged , , , , ,

 

SEO and Your Company Profile

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The Company Profile – Why you’re missing the mark for SEO

On my down time, I read a lot of press releases, product announcements and general business news.  I must have issues, because it’s something I really enjoy!  Point being, I often read a piece of interesting content, e.g. a new product announcement, and am intrigued to learn more about the company.  Within the announcement, the company information is most often contained in a standard footer paragraph that has been approved by PR, and is very, very bland.  Not only bland, but it’s not catered in ANY way to the audience reading the given announcement, i.e. me.  Here are some ideas on how this could be done better, and why:

Positioning
Part of my job is sales.  I work for a company that has a great deal of experience with technology and education clients.  If I’m speaking to an organization in the education industry, do you think I’m telling them about our wonderful experience and history with tech companies?  Of course not!  Take the same course with your public-facing content on the Web.  If you’re sending a press release about your new software product, then you might want to cater the company information to the audience that is reading the press release.  Instead of regurgitating your company history, ticker symbol and basic information – perhaps you could give the background of the product’s history and how it was created, with sprinkles of ticker symbols and company info to appease your PR and exec teams.  Think of this as your first impression with a potential prospect.  How much of the information within your “About Us” paragraph does the prospect really care about?

How does this help with SEO?
Typically, every press release, article, blog post and any other content on the Web has the exact same company info paragraph with the exact same links pointing to the homepage.  Boring!  Mix it up, and your readers (along with Google) will thank you for it.  You’ll have a better range of anchor text and diversification of incoming links, both good for SEO.

Conversion
This goes hand-in-hand with the positioning bullet point.  If I’m reading about your new product (this is a good time to clarify that it doesn’t have to be a press release … it could be a summary of one of your products on another external site or a video about your new features, etc.), then I’m also going to read about your company.  Typically, that’s when I’m going to click on a link to learn more.  If your company description is not catered to my needs, or if your website content doesn’t match the product I was previously reading about, then I’m likely to go away.  However, if I’m reading an external article that highlights a company’s attributes, then sends me to a corporate webpage that also speaks to this, your conversion rates will increase.

Implementing something like this can be tricky—I get it!  Start small.  Write a few versions of your company boilerplate and walk over to the PR office and ask for approval.  They’re busy folks, but are more likely to green-light something like this if you’ve taken the initiative.  Or, if you’re working with an agency like Fathom, we’ll take the initiative, and you can take the credit!

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Image courtesy of joshme17 via Flickr.

Posted in Content Creation, Conversion Optimization, Google, Link-Building, Online PR, Search Engines, SEO

 

Stats to Make Any Online Retailer Smile

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Almost $20 billion. That’s how much money shoppers have spent with online retailers this holiday season.

As many of you probably know, the Thanksgiving weekend online shopping extravaganza, which also includes Cyber Monday, was the biggest in history.

No one is particularly surprised, but you might be interested to find out just how big it really was. I’m not a numbers person. However, I know where to find people who can take tons of data and put it into easily digestible stats even my fellow English majors and I can understand.

This time, I found those people on the Google Commerce Blog and the Google Retail Blog (thanks guys!). In this fantastic post, they crunched the numbers and came up with some pretty impressive online shopping trends you’ll definitely want to take the time to read and digest:

  • Searches for “black friday deals” were up 30% from last year
  • Searches for “cyber monday deals” and “cyber monday coupons” grew 15% year over year
  • On Black Friday, 50% of the top 20 rising searches on Google were centered around specific retailers or their promotions
  • On Cyber Monday the term “cyber monday deals 2011” was in the top five growing search terms (not to mention that it was the most profitable day in ecommerce history)

Aside from using the Internet to search for the best promotions, people were also using it to create a shopping plan of attack. “Black Friday store map” and “Black Friday store hours” were some of the popular choices.

Finally, we all know that  these searches weren’t all coming from desktops and laptops. And let’s be honest, a conversation about online shopping wouldn’t be complete unless we covered some of the mobile trends:

  1. “Mobile coupons” searches were up 90% from last year
  2. Retail-related mobile searches on Black Friday were up 200% over last year

What are some of the major retail-related mobile searches? Location-based inquiries and price comparisons are two of the biggest, so keep that in mind when designing your mobile site (you do have one in the works, right?).

Online shopping has been steadily growing in popularity, but this time around the stats blew past years out of the water. Ecommerce retailers should definitely be standing up and paying attention, because the opportunities to grow your customer base and increase your ROI are better than they’ve ever been.

My only question for you is: What is your website and mobile site doing to encourage customers to buy online from you?

 

 

 

*Image provided by Shorts and Longs | The Both And on Flickr

 

 

 

 

Posted in E-commerce, Google, Online Marketing, Online PR, SEO, Usability | Tagged , , , ,

 

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