The Marketing Innovation Blog

Today, we live in a “Google world” where everything is searchable via the touch of a few buttons.  As such, understanding what your target market is searching for and then developing an online strategy based around that is essential to your brand’s success.  Google currently offers key tools that give companies insight into content and keywords related to their brands, and is constantly looking for ways to update those tools to make them more effective for its clients.  In fact, just yesterday (12/1/11), Google changed how it indexes content in order to place greater emphasis on the ‘freshness’ of content in web searches.  Our very own Director of Digital, Dustin Ruoff, stresses that, “fresh content delivered through social media channels and ‘owned’ sources, such as corporate blogs and RSS feeds from content updates, all contribute to an increased ‘relevance’ of a brand’s keyword based content.”

More and more brands and public figures are cleverly aligning their strategic marketing campaigns with popular keyword searches that are relative to their target market. Most recently, brands like State Farm, Progressive, Safeway and The BBQ Guys all created YouTube marketing campaigns that were focused on proven-to-be-popular Thanksgiving keywords like “fried turkey” and “deep-fried turkey.” This year from October 11 to November 23, searches for “fried turkey” in the U.S. were up 615 percent, amounting to over 3,900 fried turkey-related YouTube searches alone.  Though some of the campaigns promoted and others opposed “fried turkey,” each uniquely placed their brand in front of thousands of internet users and positioned their products/services in a way that made them relevant to this particular turkey-frying audience.

Public figures, including Presidential candidates like Herman Cain, also use keyword strategies to help shape/control the conversations about them online.  Cain’s campaign successfully cashed in on the sexual harassment allegations against him by buying Google ads triggered by keywords like “Herman Cain and harassment” and “Herman Cain and allegations.”  Once those and similar keywords were searched, one of the first sites pulled up was “caintruth.com:” a site that addressed the allegations and encouraged supporters to donate to the campaign.  During the height of the scandal, Cain’s campaign was able to raise $9 million in only six weeks, some of which could be attributed to their online keyword strategy.

What other unique keyword strategies have you discovered or deployed?

Jenaleigh Landers is an Account Coordinator at Griffin York & Krause.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 2nd, 2011 at 7:16 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.