The future of SEO. Moving to a holistic inbound marketing strategy with an earned media casestudy

Locally informed, globally inspired

The future of "SEO“. Moving to a holistic Inbound Marketing Strategy

with a case study Adrian Land | @adrianland

June 2013 Head of Inbound Marketing at MyDestination.com

In this talk….

I would like to..give some background & context

share a model on how to organise the different components for a robust inbound marketing strategyplus, insights into a global campaign My Destination are running called the “Biggest Baddest Bucket List”

First of all, who am I?

Some of the brands I have worked for:

@adrianland | adrianland.co.uk

But the mission of the engines is still to give the best, most relevant results to their usersAnd, our objectives are still the same

Search and the SERPs are evolving all the time

What are SERPs today? It’s evolving…to gain maximum visibility of our brands and productsIt used to be called SEO

Now it is more like“Search Engine Visibility Strategies”

As the engines change, we need to evolve too

What could a plan look like?

@adrianland | adrianland.co.uk

I prefer just Marketing, or “Inbound Marketing”

SEO has evolved and has many names

Outbound InboundComms Is broadcasting Is bi-directionalCustomers Research and push your

way in front of themUnderstand them and they will come to you

Approach Sells at customers Can educate, entertain and build personality with loyalty

Cost Classically high.Low response rates

Free, through to expensive

Speed Planned and executed Can we refined based on real-time learning's

A.K.A “Old Marketing” Inbound MarketingEarned mediaContent based marketing

@adrianland | adrianland.co.uk

…just re-org your brains!

LEFT brainsAnalytical & Logical

RIGHT brainsCreative & innovative

Creative teams

Social Mediainc. community management

Content teams

PR team

Analysts & Statos

Tech & Devs

SEOInc. outreach

Other performance channel marketers

@adrianland | adrianland.co.uk

Reporting, data & insight

Overall Inbound StrategySocial Media

& Author Rank

Content & onsite

optimisation

Tech & Dev teams

User Experience

IA and user engagement

Reputation building

Link building, PR, citations

Teams to be united with single focus

An example earned media campaign

The whys, what’s and how’s…• My Destination wanted to break through to a

larger audience, build traffic and support it’s media sales

• The Biggest Baddest Bucket List was conceived with the biggest prize ever in travel

• An entry consisted of a blog post, photographs and an original 3 minute video by the entrant in which they share their local insights and tips for their destination

Why?

What?

How?

@adrianland | adrianland.co.uk

The site is locatedhttp://www.mydestination.com/bbb

Used Social media, social media marketing, meet-ups, community groups, outreach, influencer finding, blogging outreach, posters, PR and spoke to everyone we met!

On a dedicated competition microsite

• @adrianland | adrianland.co.uk

Phase 1 summary• My D received 1,251 valid entries•

• Submissions were from over 640 destinations and more than 110 different countries were represented

• Entry videos received >650,000 unique views, racking up 32,500 hours of video that has captivated people across the entire planet

Entries

Coverage

Videos

@adrianland | adrianland.co.uk

Phase 1 summary• The competition site received >1.28m visits• Over 3 million page views, from >200

countries. Main site and blog have had significant increases too

• Travel Portals, blogs, communities, TV and in the press from around the world

Stats

Media Coverage

@adrianland | adrianland.co.uk

Phase 1 summary

Growth in social-channels

Talking about us

@adrianland | adrianland.co.uk

Inbound Links

New inbound links. From hundreds to thousands a weekThrough people talking about us, entrants, press and outreach efforts

Subscriptions to our channels, in addition to the mentions and shares increasedn.b. Entry videos were on the entrants own channels

The two peaks show our reach hitting many millionsPeaks show- Launch, entry close- The 10 finalists announcement

>1million YT channel views and growing

Video has been very effective for gaining people’s attention

Some of the BBB video assets

We even made a spoof BBB entryThis video was used to promote the competition to encourage entries, aiming to be shared in its own right too!

@adrianland | adrianland.co.uk You can see it here http://bit.ly/royalsBBB

Winners’ Week, May ‘1310 finalists came to the UK and took part in any challenges & activities. Producing content and conversations all the wayMeet our winners, Alex and Marko Ayling

What did we learn?

It was hard work! And is still going to be hard work…Every team was involved You need budget, admin, logistics, legal, sense of humour! a dev team, SEOs, social media, creatives, content people, comms internal and external, tools and a drive to succeed with a lot of staminaCo-ordination and project management was challenging, and had to be agileBut the results can be big and pleasantly surprising!

But that is what you have to do to earn attention

“be remarkable”

Alongside BBB - Zeitgeist chasing

@adrianland | adrianland.co.uk

You can see it here http://bit.ly/MyD-HarlemShake

So, to some takeaways….

@adrianland | adrianland.co.uk

@adrianland | adrianland.co.uk

You need to work hard to earn your customers attentionYou may need to change your corporate culture & de-silo teams and their objectivesIt is a multi team game, with many [new] skills needed. They might come from unlikely placesDon’t forget, everything should be underpinned by data, and measured against objectivesRunning a global competition is very hard work!

Final thoughts

Follow the trip at www.mydestination.com/bbb

Locally informed, globally inspired

The future of "SEO“. Moving to a holistic Inbound Marketing Strategy

with a case study Adrian Land | @adrianland

June 2013 Head of Inbound Marketing at MyDestination.com