The Art of Deep Linking

Ever since the Google Penguin update more SEO's (search engine optimization experts) have been talking about the concept of deep linking.  Over the past few weeks, I've received a large amount of email about the concept of deep linking, asking what it is, and why it works.  Today, I share my knowledge and examples of how deep linking can improve your overall organic listings.

Deep Linking Defined
The concept of deep linking isn't new, in fact, any inbound link to your website that doesn't point to your home page can be considered deep linking. For a long time, there's been some debate about the value of building links to web pages other than your home page.  For example, a company trying to optimize their site organically for a variety of phrases may want to send all of their traffic to their home page but directing traffic for 100+ keywords to the home page just isn't feasible (you should only optimize your pages for 2-3 keyword phrases).  The best way to get multiple rankings is to develop pages focused on specific keywords.

A company that manufactures products for seniors, assume they are trying to rank well organically for keywords such as: walk in bathtubs, walk in tubs, and walk in showers.  They could certainly try to optimize their home page for all of these and associated keywords but there are literally hundreds of phrases and misspellings they would have to target.  The bottom line is that optimizing the home page properly to improve organic rankings for each phrase is nearly impossible and certainly not optimal.

Deep linking in action

To fully take advantage of 'on page optimization' and everything we know about improving organic rankings, this company should apply a deep linking strategy.  Although primary keywords (2-3) could point to the home page, additional keywords should be thought of as silos and point to individual pages - supported by deep linking of course.  

Let's take for example the keyword 'walk in tub'.  Assuming their home page is optimized for 'walk in bathtubs', creating and optimizing an individual page for walk in bathrooms would be better, allowing them to focus on 'tub' specific keywords. This way, the company could customize meta data and on-page content around a single keyword phrase and not have to water it down to accommodate competing keywords.

To build up page authority, a link in the navigation or from the home page would be required. Additionally link building would have to be a key strategy to help Google pass authority to the deep level page.  Over time, the page would start to rank well for the chosen keyword.

The same could be said for 'walk in shower'.  Again, it's not ideal to use the home page for all of your keyword optimization.  Besides, if someone was interested in walk in showers as opposed to walk in bathtubs, wouldn't you want to send them to a page that is focused on walk in showers?  Of course you would.  Having a consistent user experience, giving them what they are looking for, will increase time on site and other key performance indicators.

The Scoop on Deep Linking

Okay, here's what it all boils down to.  When engaging in any search engine optimization type campaign, look beyond your website home page.  Although you can generally optimize a webpage for multiple phrases, its best to keep things simple.  What I mean is that if you have different silos of phrases - in this example walk in tubs vs. bathtubs vs. showers, create individual pages to promote them.  Focus on the concept of deep linking, building links to these underlying pages, and you'll see better search results.

The good news is that deep linking also helps to improve the overall authority of your website.  As you build additional web pages and start linking at all levels, it shows search engines that many people reference different pages on your site.  This add to your site's credibility and grandeur.  Add deep linking to your optimization strategy and see improved results!

Monkey 555 Brooms : Branding a Commodity

Brand : Monkey 555 brooms
Company : Vibhava Industries, Hubli

Brand Analysis Count : # 523

It takes lot of guts to venture into branding a commodity. It requires more than guts to brand your product as Monkey 555. Meet a unique brand " Monkey 555 " - brand of broom sticks which the company sells nationwide. 

I was surprised to see the ad of a grass broom brand on the back-page of a leading Malayalam weekly . The brand name was too loud to be missed by anyone. The offer was buy a broom and get a dust-pan free. This evoked lot of laughter from the ladies at home.

The brand name of Monkey555 is very unique and I am sure there will be some story behind that name however when one starts advertising this brand, it evokes some amount of laughter.There was a period in Indian branding scene where companies used the name of animals and birds as brand names. Eg: Robin Blue, Camel, Kiwi, Lion Dates. Even now firms use such names as Mango , LMN etc so why not Monkey !

Probably this Quirky name may benefit the brand in creating " stickiness" or awareness.The logo of the brand is a monkey sitting on a brand with a broom .  The picture of the ecstatic lady with the broom adds to the fun.All these, although seems funny, makes this brand a little different. Sometimes being funny or quirky is the best way to break the clutter.

Brooms are a  commodity. No one really cares what brand of brooms that they buy. Although I have heard ladies at home complaining about the broom's quality, purchase of brooms were never on brands. Ofcourse, there is a new set of household mops from the likes of 3M which is carving a niche in the market.

In my home state Kerala, the popular brooms were made from Coco- sticks. But increasingly the coco-stick based brooms are being replaced by the grass brooms especially for use inside the home.

Monkey 555 brooms are priced at around Rs 55 which makes it expensive compared to other brooms. The brand has tried hard to convince the customer about the quality of the broom through the copy in the packing. One blogger has written a funny piece on the same ( read here)

Monkey 555 boasts that it is made of the finest " Garo Hill Grass" which refers to the place in Assam and North-East where these grasses are cultivated in plenty. Secondly the brand talks about quality handle which is perfumed !. Monkey 555 also claims to be the largest selling grass-broom brand in India .

What ever said and done, Monkey 555 is a bold move indeed. The brand may be releasing one or two such campaigns ( or ads) but it is sufficient to create the awareness and probably the consumer may chose this brand from the market when the need arises.

  

Brand Update : 7 Up , I feel Down !

7 Up's 2013 commercial is undoubtedly the worst campaign I have seen in the recent times. Especially the ad featuring Kathakali - which is a very revered art-form of my state Kerala.

This feeling has been shared by many of my friends who felt that the art-form was cheaply depicted in the advertisement. Ofcourse the creatives who did the ads have every right to do their stuff but it should make some marketing sense . I felt bad not because of any soft-corner for the artform but the ad makes no sense at all. 

Watch the ad here : 7 Up Kathakali

                              7 Up Japanese Ad

The brand has been losing its charm these years and is struggling for finding a meaningful mindspace. The last campaign was featuring the bollywood actor Sharman Joshi . The brand is right now having the tagline : 7 Up : I feel up.

The current campaign is plain amusing than anything else. Both the Kathakali and Japanese ad does not convey what the brands aims to communicate. Its sad that a brand like 7 Up can stoop to such a creative low when competition is too hot.

Your Brand Isn’t Yours, It’s “theirs”

How to Maintain Your Brand’s Image by Targeting Influencers
Influencers play a huge part in shaping your brand’s image. For us marketers with control issues (ahem), this can be a hard reality to face. We no longer define our brand, someone tweets it for us. Not to mention, damage control is pretty much nonexistent now because negative reviews spread faster through the web than fire through a drought stricken forest. One of the best ways to keep the mentions positive and exert any control over our brand’s image is to align with influencers. 

Inside of the C2C  (consumer to consumer) model, consumers look to other consumers when choosing a brand and the majority of “marketing” is being spout all over the social web from influential consumers. To make our brand look good, we now target the influencers and not the audience as a whole. It sounds like this practice would be less time consuming than the B2C model where so much effort and creative juices were leaked in to media advertisements, but it’s not.

Getting influencers on your side to make desirable mentions and recommendations of your company is a strategic and lengthy process. I can’t wrap it up neatly in one post but I can give you a place to start while sharing the best practices that I’ve learned along the way.

Who Are the Influencers?
First and foremost we need to grasp and hold on to the fact that influencers vary for each brand and often times, each brand’s campaign. For example, if you represent multiple clients, you wouldn’t use the influencers you used for a fashion campaign that you used for a restaurant campaign. Though they may be in the right city, their audience is there to read about fashion. 
An influencer is a contextual fit before it’s a numerical fit. What I mean by that is an influencer is an influencer for your brand because their content is an exact fit for your brand’s niche. Of course if they are a good fit and have a lot of Twitter followers and blog traffic than this a bonus but followers and other stats shouldn’t be the first priority. 

Influencers almost always have a blog so to make the outreach process a lot easier on ourselves, targeting bloggers is the way to go. 

Define an Influencer for Your Brand
You should design the influencers you would like to target before you even start to locate them. Here is the influencer outline that I use before I start any of my outreach campaigns.

--Genre of my influencer. This should be no more than two. Examples include fashion, food, mommy blogs, etc.

--Niche(s) of my influencer. For example if my genre was food my niches may be vegetarian and vegan or if my genre was marketing my niche may be inbound marketing.

--Post topics. A contextual fit is a tight one, no room for wiggling. So, we need to look for specific post topics to determine if the blogger really is a potential influencer for our brand. Say we have decided to target food bloggers who fall in to a vegan niche and our campaign is to promote soy alternative recipes. We would need to read through the blog to make sure that the blogger doesn’t advocate for soy before we pitch them.

--Tactics. You need to define the tactic you plan to use before reaching out to a blogger and then see if the blogger uses those tactics on their blog. You may be executing a guest blogging campaign but not all bloggers accept guest posts.

Once you have your ideal influencer outlined in more detail than you have ever used to outline your ideal spouse, it’s time to go looking for them!

Where to Find These Influencers
This report  rom Technorati shows us that over 86% of influencers operate a blog. So, the most obvious place to start is to target influential bloggers. Bloggers almost always also have an active social media presence so their opinions and recommendations are hitting many mediums.

Blogger outreach has been a common component of a successful marketing strategy for a few years now so most are familiar with the process. If you’re not, there is still time to catch up and I recommend starting with this all-encompassing guide.

Because blogger outreach has become the primary way to target influencers, there are a few tools that make the process easier. Doing it manually with Google searches is fine if you only plan to dabble but investing in a tool like GroupHigh  is a good idea if you are going to make blogger outreach a continual part of your strategy because of the huge time saving components.

How to Get Influencers on Your Side 
Again, outreach is a strategic process. Many successful marketers engage with their targets before “pitching.” Make yourself a familiar face by commenting on their posts and tweeting at them or tweeting their posts to your own followers. Other marketers still dive right in to the pitch. It just depends what works for you.

The most important part is that when you do send that first email, it should be super personalized. Take the time to find the first name in which to address your email, reference a blog post you like to make it apparent that they two of you are a good contextual fit and offer something in return for a mention instead of asking to create a one sided relationship. Common offers include a unique piece of content that you know their audience would love, a good or service from your brand or monetary in the form of a sponsored post. 

Don’t forget to nurture your relationships with all of your influencers just like you would maintain your real life relationships. Influencer targeting is no one night stand… 

Special thanks to Kristen Matthews for providing this post.  Kristen is the Marketing and Community Manager for GroupHigh. For any writing requests email her at Kristen@GroupHigh.com and/or follow her on Twitter @KristenWords and @GroupHigh.

Digital Strategy Decisions: Owned Media vs Paid Media vs Earned Media

In the early days of the internet, the extent of the average company's digital strategy was deciding whether or not to set up a website. These days it's rare to find even a relatively small business without an online presence and there's far more to consider than basic website design. The internet is where people talk about your brand. They might visit your website to see what you have to offer, engage with you directly via a social media site and recommend you to friends. The strands of the web are all linked and what you do in one area can directly affect what happens in another.

Owned media
The most obvious example of digital owned media is your company website. This can act as a virtual shop window for your business and should reflect all the qualities you'd like people to associate with your brand.

Your social media profiles are also generally classed as owned media, although 'partially owned' might be a more accurate description. They're hosted on somebody else's platform but you still have control over the content. Social media marketing has been a buzz-phrase for some time now but there's far more to using these sites successfully than just going for the hard sell. They give you the opportunity to spread your brand message but social media sites are uniquely placed to provide opportunities to pro-actively engage with your customers. 

Ideally your owned media platforms should all be linked. Don't think of them as separate entities but different strands emanating from a central brand hub.

Paid media
Traditional types of paid media include advertisements on the radio, TV and print. In digital terms you now have display ads, site sponsorships and paid search. There is, however, evidence that people put less trust in adverts they see online. A study by advertising industry think tank Credos found that just under 50% of consumers said they had some degree of trust in digital marketing channels and that 34% didn’t trust it at all. This compares to 69% who claimed they trust print advertisements to some extent, with just 20% showing no trust at all. 


Despite this, paid media can be one of the quickest ways to get your name out there. Beyond direct sales, pay-per-click campaigns and similar techniques can extend brand awareness and serve as a catalyst, drawing people into your other media channels.

Earned media
Earned media is perhaps both the most valuable and hardest to attain. Having a word-of-mouth campaign go viral, earning 'likes' and 'shares' can be marketing gold, and sites such as Pinterest can be massively influential.

It refers to what people are saying about you online and this can be influenced both by your owned and paid media but also - perhaps more importantly - by how you behave as a business. You should be prepared for the online conversation to throw out negative as well as positive comments and try to use both to your advantage. Negative responses can actually be very useful as feedback and the way you respond to criticism can affect how consumers view your business.

Advantages and disadvantages
Owned media allows the greatest amount of control over your content. You can tailor it to promote your core values and messages and build long-term relationships with existing and potential new customers. There may be a level of distrust or a lack of credibility in 'the company line' however and that lack of credibility can be even more pronounced in paid media. Paid media does have an immediate guaranteed reach however that the other two types simply can't match.

Earned media can be the most difficult type to achieve and maintain. You have little control and reactions can be negative. If you earn positive attention from others online however, it can be invaluable. The online community (in as much as it can be considered as a whole) tends to put far more trust in the opinions of other users than it does in the opinions of businesses and media suppliers. 

Blurring the boundaries
Owned, paid and earned media do not sit in isolated, airtight boxes. Take, for example, a branded YouTube channel. You have control over the content. It costs money to maintain and the success of it depends on the reaction of the viewers. The old saying, 'there's no such thing as bad publicity' does not always hold true when a landslide of negative comments can influence how newcomers react to a message.

A successful strategy tends to be a joined up one that pulls all the threads together. It takes a sustained effort but as one type of media feeds and supports the others it can help give you the edge in an increasingly competitive market.

Guest post by...

Christian Arno is the founder of professional translation services provider Lingo24, Inc. Launched in 2001 Lingo24, Inc. now has over 180 employees spanning three continents and clients in over sixty countries. In the past twelve months, they have translated over forty million words for businesses in every industry sector, including the likes of MTV and World Bank. Follow Lingo24, Inc.  on Twitter: @Lingo24.

B'lue : At Your Best , Hamesha

Brand : B'lue
Company : Danone Narang Pvt Ltd

Brand Analysis Count : # 522

Danone, the French foods major has launched a new product in India branded as  B'lue. B'lue is a restorative water drink enriched with proteins and minerals. With the launch of B'lue, the Rs 10,000 crore packaged drinking water market is going to see the emergence of a new segment.

The bottled water segment has more than 3300 registered plants manufacturing this product. The branded segment is lead by Bisleri followed by Kinley and Aquafina. 

 The popularity of the bottled water among the Indian consumer has prompted the market to explore the possibility of fortified water based drinks. These drinks have the advantage of " healthy" tag since it is devoid of any additions compared to the bevarages like colas.

B'lue hence can be termed as the first brand to nationally launch a water based restorative drink. The brand is running a campaign across television channel featuring the celebrity Vir Das.

Watch the ad here : B'lue ad

The ad positions the brand as a drink that makes you alive, restores the freshness naturally. The brand  is  launched in two flavors - Apple and Guava.The brand has the tagline " At Your Best , Hamesha".

The price of B'lue is Rs 30 for a 500 ml bottle.

The challenge for the brand is to convince the customer to see value in spending Rs 30 for a " small bottle" of water. Why because, the brand has taken membership in the category of " Water" hence naturally there will be comparison with the ordinary 1 litre bottle which costs Rs 15.

The USP of the B'lue is that it is water-based and is fortified with vitamins and minerals. The target group would be the upwordly mobile consumers who would like to have something more than just bottled plain water . 

B'lue would definitely create a new segment in the other wise boring bottled water market. The young consumers would take a look at this product although the product is priced steeply. The dampener is that the competitor can kill this brand's first-mover advantage by launching a flavored water at a lower price. The current positioning of B'lue doesn't seem to justify the premium and offers room for competitors to move in and kill this brand by predatory pricing. " Fortified with minerals and vitamins " is a claim that can be made by any marketer and thus B'lue lacks a defendable sustainable advantage against competitors. B'lue could have invented some formula or ingredient brand and promoted that as the USP rather than the generic 'vitamins and minerals 'stuff.

With many major beverage marketers have announced interest in the value-added bottled water segment , this will be an interesting segment to watch.

Online Reputation Managment.. Making the Transition

At some point in your marketing career, you need to take stock.  

Are you happy with what you're doing?  Are you feeling fulfilled and satisfied? Late last year, I started asking myself these questions and more as my responsibilities grew beyond my capacity. And if you're anything like me, you'd probably start with the basics - what you're good at followed by what you like to do.  Whether I have the order correct or not, I firmly believe that if you're not good at something you probably won't enjoy it.  

After thinking about my marketing and online marketing career, I naturally migrated towards my experience with Search Engine Optimization.  Ever since I published SEO Made Simple (now in its 3rd edition), I've had a natural curiosity with regard to Google, organic rankings, and doing business online.  Some may even say that I've had an unhealthy obsession!

But the problem is that SEO has become somewhat commoditized.  Although coming out of this industry I can honestly say that the number of SEO's who really know what they are talking about gets smaller and smaller each year and with each change to the Google algorithm.  In the past this wasn't an issue but now that Google has begun penalizing sites for seemingly innocuous link building tactics, doing SEO on the cheap can have negative, long-term implications for you and your website.

So this is where online reputation management comes in.  With a little introspection, I decided that I still wanted SEO in my life and career, but not exclusively.  As I thought about all of the different ways I could apply search engine optimization and help those in need, the idea of helping people, companies and brands improve their online calling card got me excited.  I had thought about this path at some point a couple of years ago, but something clicked.

If I could bring my level of knowledge and understanding to a tangential field (online reputation management), that would give me the diversification I was looking for and at the same time help me build a business I would be passionate about - so that's what I did.  I launched a company called Upward SEO consulting and have started to grow both locally and nationally.  It's a welcome change and an exciting time to be helping others with their online reputation.

I think this is a great lesson for anyone who may be unhappy with their current marketing career - you don't have to start from scratch.  In fact, there's a good chance that happiness is just a short trip down the roach or around the next corner. Start thinking of new ways to apply your existing skills.  It's a great strategy and one I had to unfortunately discover on my own.

Are you taking stock?

Has your marketing career taken shape the way you had anticipated or are you now focusing on some other aspect of marketing that you never anticipated?  Now that Q1 has ended, it's probably a good time to take stock in your career and think about next steps.

It took me a very long time to decide what it was I truly wanted to do.  And I'd argue that many people probably never find something that genuinely interests them or becomes a passion. For me it was probably 15 years in the making.  But I always say, better late than never.

Share your story with us here on the Marketing Blog.  I know that I'm not the only one who's been searching for marketing fulfillment. Now that I've had an epiphany, there's a lot of work to do, but I'm going to enjoy every minute of it!