Let’s take a look at six ways in which many companies’ digital marketing campaigns have found success.

Keep it simple

When creating a campaign, keep in mind that, if you want your target audience to remember your company’s intended message, keep it simple. People are generally not going to remember more than one or two messages at once. Condense your campaigns to communicate one common message or pair the varying messaging with one central theme. It’s important that your campaigns are still a solid representation of what your brand stands for—this means that your campaigns should be recognizable in style, feel and messaging. After all, the most successful of companies have clear, simple messages associated with their brands.

Example: Reese’s “Dark Remote” Campaign

Be unexpected

Who doesn’t enjoy a nice surprise every once and a while? If you take a look at the successful brands out there, you’ll notice that many of them incorporate a sense of surprise within their digital campaigns. The key to a clever and successful viral campaign is to deliver a message that is not only unexpected, but makes sense for your brand. It’s always great to see ads which are thought provoking and communicate a message which, although conventional, may not be something generally associated with products or services in a specific industry.

Example: Dove’s “Evolution” Campaign

Stay concrete

Making empty promises in the business world is never a good thing; this holds true to a company’s campaign messaging. People take comfort in knowing that a company will go above and beyond to make their customer experience the best it can possibly be. Communicating the “hassle-free” aspect of doing business with your company can reassure current and potential customers of the risk-free investment involved with purchasing your products or services. Sticking to your company’s word will increase the amount of repeat customers and positively influence word-of-mouth recommendations from current customers.

Example: Orbitz’s “Price Assurance” Campaign

Embody credibility

A company’s credibility is a vital part of its success. Having a powerful voice in your industry can tremendously affect the size of your market share. The challenge is, however, that your company will almost always have some form of competition in its industry. In order to break away from your competitors, your brands must embody a sense of confidence and credibility to appear superior to those of your competition’s. Leveraging distinguishing factors, awards and third-party findings when creating your campaigns can help your company establish that credibility.

Example: Hyundai Veloster’s “Best in Class”  Campaign

Connect emotionally

A smart goal to aim for when creating marketing campaigns is to connect emotionally with your current and potential customers. Identify your company’s ideal target market and focus on what resonates with this group of individuals.  Connecting emotionally with your target market can mean anything from making a reference to a person’s childhood to highlighting a certain safety feature to keep protective parents at ease. Establishing this connection through your ad campaigns can not only make your message more memorable, it can also lead to an increase in conversions and ultimately, higher ROI.

Example: Oreo’s “Perfect Mother’s Day Gift” Campaign

Tell a story

Finally, incorporating a story into your marketing campaign can be a distinguishing factor in engaging your target audience to buy into your brand. Using stories can strengthen your brand’s impact by providing something for your audience to connect with on a more personal level. An easy way to incorporate stories into your campaign is to provide real-life testimonials of people using your products/services. This is one of the most personal ways your company can gain exposure aside from word-of-mouth referrals. By communicating the positive results your customers achieved from using your products or services, the credibility of your campaign (as addressed in my fourth point) dramatically increases.

Example: Weight Watcher’s “Jennifer Hudson” Campaign

Try incorporating one, or even a few, of these best practices into your digital marketing campaigns for 2012. Keeping your target audience at the forefront will strengthen your brand message, distinguish you from your competition and help your campaign drive conversions for your company.

What makes these campaigns so compelling is that they are passed around organically and get millions upon millions of views. There’s something that sparks interest in the viewer—some aspect of the image, video or ad which connects with this person on a deeper level—whether it may be a reminder of an aspect of the viewer’s childhood or simply portraying a strong emotion. Viral campaigns seem to capture viewers’ eyes and ears with full-fledged engagement.

What if I were to mention the phrases “Volkswagen Passat and baby Darth Vader,” “Honda and Patrick Warburton,” “Kenny Powers, CEO of K-Swiss,” or “Jennifer Aniston and Smartwater.” I bet that you’ve seen or at least heard of these videos—in their original form, they’ve been collectively been viewed by over 60 million people just on YouTube alone—and that’s not counting all the edited videos that fans have created.

If companies are able to harness the viral-factor and create campaigns with this intention in mind, the potential gains from doing so could be tremendous. Keeping in mind your company’s end goal for these campaigns is important when attempting to create a “viral campaign.” The goal for these campaigns should be focused around having your company’s content spread rapidly by consumers to eventually reach the eyes and ears of your target market. In order to effectively reach your target market, focus on streamlining the message your audience wants to hear and share with others along with your campaign’s goals. Viral campaign success should be defined by receiving targeted, qualified traffic from a targeted message, to ultimately deliver positive ROI.

Now that we understand what viral is and how to define viral success, let’s take a look at some initiatives that can be achieved through viral campaigns.

Branding

What better way to make an impression for your brand, new products or services than with a campaign that could be organically spread to millions of people in a short amount of time? In order to achieve the highest amount of ROI, specifically tailor your brand message to entice your target audience. Crafting a simple, clear message prior to campaign creation will help to ensure that your brand is understood by your audience. With this message in place, you will be able to more effectively communicate your brand through the emotion, images, words and feel of the campaign.

Credibility

People tend to harbor some distrust for ads, having the preconceived notion that products/services are not as great as they are portrayed on television, in magazines, online, etc. People place trust with their friends, family and the online community for which they have a presence in. Connections are a powerful thing; understanding this, through leveraging these connections and personal relationships, could mean the difference between a successful brand and flop. Viral campaigns are the opportunity to push a genuine message to a vast amount of people.

Cost Savings

The beauty of creating a campaign geared towards “going viral” is the tremendous cost savings, as compared to traditional forms of launching online campaigns. Again, harnessing the power of people’s personal connections and online following can work to your brand’s best interest. By creating an engaging campaign, all the work of portraying it to your target market is done organically through sharing, along with Word-of-Mouth (WOM) advertising and online conversations via social media.

Standing Out from the Crowd

Consider the relatively small number of companies who actively pursue creating “viral” campaigns vs those who have been adopting more traditional forms of advertising for their brand for decades. This could be your brand’s opportunity to break away from the clutter and stand out in your target market’s mind. Along with being a fairly new and exciting form of marketing, “viral” campaigns allow for a unique viewer experience which can be interactive (when creating videos or embedding Adobe Flash within company websites). Delivering the “unexpected” to your audience is one way in which your company can stand out from your competition. Try adding an element of surprise to your campaigns; with viewers feeling emotionally connected and engaged with the campaign, the message will be more likely to stay with them longer.

Creating & Empowering Brand Evangelists

The great thing about effective viral campaigns is the massive “fan-base” which is established. Through your campaign messaging, your company can both create brand “evangelists” and empower them to not only “buy into” your brand, but to spread the word to others. Again, this goes back to the point about people trusting their friends and family with opinions and advice. Merely ‘liking’ a campaign does not translate to a person believing in your brand; if your brand is something that a person identifies with personally, he/she is more than likely to tell someone else about it and be a personal ambassador for your brand.

Make sure to check back soon on the Rise Interactive blog for more tips on Viral Campaigns.

Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conferences are the largest global conferences focusing around Search and Social Marketing, touching on topics ranging from SEO to Video Optimization to PPC Management. The conference, since its start in 1999, has been held in major cities across the world and brings together professionals from a variety of different industries. The extensive, three-day event encompasses over 70 sessions, within tracks such as SEO, Paid Search and Social Media, along with interactive workshops led by Marketers and SEO professionals from major companies.

SES recently hosted one of their conferences here in Chicago. Rise Interactive’s CEO and Founder, Jon Morris, was featured on Day 1 during the SEO track. Morris participated on a panel focusing on Metrics for SEO. He later went into more detail on the topic with his presentation entitled “SEO: How Understanding Your Analytics Gives You the Edge,” which emphasized the importance of Web Analytics when looking to generate the highest return for your interactive investment. Following the event, Morris participated in an interview hosted by WebmasterRadio.FM where he further discussed the concept and practice of Interactive Investment Management.

SES Chicago presentation: http://www.riseinteractive.com/webinars/understanding-seo-analytics/get-the-analytics-edge.pdf

SES Chicago interview: http://www2.webmasterradio.fm/search-engine-strategies-conference/2011/interactive-investment-management

Three months later, Google+ is all-but-dead.  Yes, there is a small group of dedicated and devoted Plusers who would disagree with me, but those are the only people still using the network.  So how is it possible that a Google product with so much momentum and hype could collapse as quickly as it appeared?  Well, we’ve seen this movie before.

Google Wave was going to revolutionize email and collaboration.  Google Buzz was going to change the way we share information.  Both were launched to hype and excitement and ended with failure and disappointment.  Google+ is just a rose by any other name—and it still smells.

No, Google+ is not a bad product.  It’s not even an inferior product.  I actually really like it.  But the problem is this:  Google, the company that pioneered pay-per-click advertising and changed the way businesses market themselves online, was very late to the social “game.”  Here they had all the momentum in the world and millions of registered users who could see tons of potential for how g+ could be used, but they limited the functionality and made their product less useful.  Google+ could have taken down Facebook or Twitter, but brands and celebrities were not allowed to use it at first (in fact, they were kicked off if they even tried to use it).  They could have integrated Google+ in everything you do online, from search to email to your calendar to your documents and more, but they didn’t include that functionality.  They had the opportunity to dominate the social space and they chose not to take it.

Yes, we were all told those features would be coming soon.  We were asked to be patient so they could make the platform perfect before allowing us to do all the things we wanted to do.  But unless you had a critical mass of friends using g+, there just wasn’t much to do on it.  We couldn’t interact with our favorite brands or celebrities, we couldn’t integrate our whole lives with the platform yet, and we lost interest.

In the meantime, Facebook caught up.  Over the past few months, Facebook has unleashed a slew of new features that render Google+ essentially useless.  All the things that made g+ better than Facebook are pretty much gone now.  So even though Google+ is finally open to the public without requiring invites and even though they just released almost 100 new features and changes to the platform, their audience is anxiously watching f8, awaiting the latest Facebook features to be announced.  In other words, no one cares about the new Google+ features, Facebook won.

Google+ could have been huge.  It could have overtaken Facebook.  By not taking advantage of their momentum, they ended up second-in-line to Facebook. Instead of showcasing new, innovative features for Google+ , all Google did was give Facebook some great ideas for how to improve.  Facebook 1, Google+ 0.

Although search engines might not directly punish a site if the same exact content is published on multiple URLs, the value of the original content could be diluted. Google states that they do not have a duplicate content penalty; however, if the website with the copied content has a higher page ranking than the originating page, then that original site might not appear in a search because Google doesn’t want to have multiple search results with the exact same content.

Google says when it comes across duplicate content they group all the URLs together. They then select what they think is the “best URL” to represent the content in search queries. In our case it is unlikely that the translated blog post ranks above ours for this particular topic, but it is possible for search engines to choose a site with copied material.

Other factors that help search engines determine the originator of the content is by backlinks, post date and respect of the site. A more powerful, respected site is more likely get credit for the content because they are unlikely to copy others.

Here are some ways that you can protect and help prevent your content from getting duplicated.

1. Add a copyright notice at the bottom of all your content and warn that you check for duplicated content
2. Perform internal audits has many Web sites have duplicate content across various pages throughout the site
3. URL canonicalization- have clean URLs

Copyscape is a great tool to use in order find out if any of your content has been copied. It lets you identify sites that have duplicated your content without permission and even shows you who is quoting your site. All you have to do is type your domain into the search box and Copyscape will tell you how many pages have your content on their sites. It will tell you how many exact words are used and the percent of similarity throughout the entire page.

If you discover that your content has been copied you can do a couple of things to resolve the problem. You can contact the person who copied your content and ask them to take it down. If you do not get a response or the person refuses to take it down, you can file a complaint with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). They will assess the situation and send the duplicate site owner a takedown notice.

Has anyone else had issues with their content being duplicated before?

The answer to the first question is simple enough: Ads. Search engines make money by showing ads along side their search results. For instance, imagine that you did a search on Google for free cell phones. You would arrive at a page that looks like this:

On the left hand side of the screen there are what are known as the organic search results. These are the websites which Google thinks are the most relevant site for the term free cell phone (note: everything which we are about to say about Google also applies to the other major search engines: Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com). Furthermore, Google does not take money for showing these results. They are displayed based on Google’s algorithm (a mathematical formula which Google uses to determine how to rank sites for any given search term). On the right hand side of the page are different results which also appear for the term free cell phone. These are ads, or more exactly Google AdWords ads, and the owner of that ad pays Google every time someone clicks on their ad (the amount varies according to various factors).

What is worth noting is that the most significant factor driving Google’s business plan revolves around people clicking on these ads. As such, the more people who use Google’s search engine, the more money Google will make (as more people will see Google’s ads with a certain percentage of those people clicking on them). Thus Google has a vested interested in providing the highest quality search engine that they possibly can (as do the other major search engines), for that is what drives people to their site. And the key ingredient to a quality search engine is relevance! After all, people are only interested in a search engine insomuch as it helps them find the results that they are looking for. And since that is what Google’s customers want, that is what Google wants. And since that is what Google wants, that is also what we want.

Here comes the answer to our second question. When we say that Google ranks the search results according to relevancy what we really mean is that Google has developed various criteria and methods for determining what is the most relevant site for any given search. What this means for us is that if we can discern what those criteria and/or methods are (Google doesn’t reveal them) then we can build our site accordingly for the terms that we want to rank well for. Put simply, Google sets the ranking rules. If we want to rank well then we best learn what those rules are and follow them. This, in a nutshell, is all that search engine optimization is about.

As simple as that may sound it’s actually a bit harder to do in real life. Particularly since the search engines are constantly trying to improve the results that they return. What that means is that the criteria and methods that the search engines use to rank sites are constantly changing. So not only is it important to know how it is that the search engines rank sites today, but it is equally important to get as clear a sense as possible as to how they plan to rank sites tomorrow. That way you can always be prepared (or at least try to be prepared) for whatever changes come tomorrow. Thus ensuring that your high rankings are as stable as can be.

Our first order, therefore, when it comes to optimizing our sites for the search engines is to understand as best as possible the criteria and methods that the search engines use to determine their search results. As such, that is the topic of the next tutorial.

Geolocation/Web Address/Hosting

One of the most important technical decisions to be made at the outset of a global Internet marketing campaign when it comes to SEO is how to manage the various domains that go along with such a large-scale marketing effort.  This decision can affect not only your rankings, but it also has the potential to affect how you will be able to manage the site(s) and even how much you may end up investing in this marketing effort.

There are generally two commonly accepted options when it comes to launching a website/websites in different countries.  The first option is to host all of the various language variations on one site, separating the languages by subdomains or subdirectories.  The second option is to create a dedicated site for each language you are targeting.

Obviously, there are pros and cons on both sides.  By keeping all of the content on one site and delivering the content on subdirectories or subdomains, you generally will have greater centralized control when it comes to management of the site.  This method is also very advantageous from an SEO perspective because all of the links will be coming in to one singular domain, as opposed to separate domains for each different language.  This method can also be more effective when it comes to suppressing the possibility of duplicate content in the search engines.

When it comes to using multiple sites, the costs to entry are generally lower.  You can launch one site, and then launch additional sites as they become needed.  Also, by having multiple sites, it opens up the opportunity to rank well in multiple country-specific search engines.  This method also enables you to set up country specific hosting, thereby adding that benefit to your SEO efforts to target a specific country.

How do you parse the language differences?  Subdomain, subdirectory, top-level-domain?  Pros and cons of each.

Benefits of using one site with subdomains/subdirectories:

• Centralized management of the site is easier
• All of the links and traffic come to one domain
• Can be easier to avoid duplicate content issues

Benefits of using multiple sites:

• Ability to add sites as they are ready to launch
• Rank well in multiple countries for each country specific site
• Country specific hosting for each site

Many times it makes sense to host your site in the country being targeted.

International Keyword Research

You can’t conduct keyword research in English and simply translate to your target market’s language.  One must do research based on idiomatic expressions and determining potential traffic for the words you will be targeting.

A classic example is the keyword phrase “laptop computer”. This is a very common term in English that receives over 1,000,000 queries per month in Google alone. Seemingly we could translate the keyword phrase to “computadora del regazo” or “computer of the lap” to target Spanish users. However, “computadora del regazo” is not a phrase that Spanish speakers use in conversation, much less to search for ‘portable’ computers in search engines.

The preferred expression to refer to laptop computers in Latin American Spanish is “computadora portatile”, which if one directly translate to English is “portable computer”. In English the keyword phrase “portable computer” gets 1/20th the search volume that “laptop computer” receives. However, in Latin American Spanish “computadora del regazo” generates too little traffic to generate monthly estimates while “computadora portatile” is estimated to have 700 queries per month. As an added twist, if we were to target Spanish speakers from Spain it would be preferable to use the keyword “ordenador portatil”.

The above example identifies the need to conduct extensive keyword research when ‘translating’ a campaign to a foreign language. The best case scenario is to have a native speaker oversee and/or conduct the keyword research. At a minimum, one should use a foreign language/English dictionary that includes idiomatic expressions and is as local to the target market as possible.

References:

http://mcanerin.blogspot.com/2008/09/3-factors-of-international-seo.html

http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/archives/2008/06/international_s.html

One of the great benefits of the Internet as a commercial platform is that it has worldwide reach.  Artisans in India can sell their goods in London.  Firms in Mumbai can create successful businesses selling services to customers in Chicago.  Resorts in Costa Rica can book reservations from travelers in Toronto.  The web has clearly become a democratizing economic medium for businesses the world over.

So what does a company with global reach need to consider when it comes to global digital marketing?

Language

Vacation or holiday?  Police or bobbies?  Simply translating your website from one language to another is not enough to effectively speak to regional audiences the world over.  When devising a global digital marketing plan, it is important to take into account the variances in language and the culturally acceptable norms for specific markets.  Messages that make sense in Miami may not make sense in Mumbai.  Make sure that your online marketing team is capable of adapting your messaging to the given locale.

Not Always Google

While Google is a hugely successful company and the dominant player when it comes to online search, it is not necessarily the highest trafficked search engine in every part of the world.  In China, for example, Baidu captures roughly 60% of the search market.  In Japan, Yahoo! leads the way in market share.  The point is that you need to know where your audience searches if you are to employ a successful global online marketing strategy.  You can’t just assume that Google is number one.

Web Address

Deciding on a web address is one of the most important architectural issues when it comes to global digital marketing.  Some companies use subdomains or subdirectories to distinguish their different language versions, while others use specific country domain extensions (such as .co.uk and .ca).  These decisions have important implications for both paid search and search engine optimization, as well as for international marketing as a whole.

In the next post, we will discuss more specific details on how to do global search engine optimization for sites that need to take international optimization into account for organic optimization.

Rise Interactive is a Chicago-based Internet marketing company providing insight into global Internet marketing for Fortune 1000 clients.