Author: Emily

Everyone is familiar with the Nike brand, the world’s leading sports apparel companies and one of the biggest corporations nationwide. The company not only makes clothing and shoes for working out, they also design different sports equipment, jerseys for thousands of professional and amateur teams, casual attire, and are the owners of quite a few smaller companies who produce similar types of items and apparel. The company is not just active in the United States either, the Nike brand is present in 120 countries around the globe. With so many different products, areas, and operations to keep track of, one would think that the company may have trouble managing their brand online. However, Nike has done an amazing job of hitting every mark needed to maintain top quality online brand management.

Positive Responses to Negative Comments

One of the most important aspects of online brand management involves how a company responds to complaints, negative comments, and concerns voiced by customers on the internet. As large and popular of a company as Nike is, they still receive an enormous amount of negative comments from customers online. In order to handle this, the company has taken several steps to ensure that all of these complaints are handled in a efficient, personal, and professional manner. Nike created a Twitter account that is solely dedicated to handling customers issues and concerns, @TeamNike. This account was created to ensure that no customer complaints are missed or ignored, and to make customers feel as though Nike is taking a personal interest in their problems and has a desire to fix the issue as quickly and directly as possible.

Good Vibes (and SERPs) Only

Another thing Nike has done extremely well is ensure that, when the company is searched online, the results that appear and positive and link directly to Nike sites or partner sites. As you can see in the picture below, when the company’s name is searched on Google, the results that appear are for the company’s website and for different products they sell. It is important that company’s ensure that the top results for their company are positive, including the advertisements that pop up at the very top of the page.

Five Star Content = Five Star Reviews

Lastly, Nike does everything possible to give their customers only good things to say about their company. Nike is active on every social media platform you can think of, as well as their Wikipedia page, blogs, etc. Nike puts a lot of time and effort into their digital marketing to ensure that they have a positive online presence and are connecting with as many customers as possible in any way they are able. The more companies are active online and take the necessary steps to interact with their customers, the less opportunity there is for negative comments and opinions to start widely circulating. And, when these negative reviews do begin to arise, Nike reacts quickly and professionally, ensuring that any damage done to the brand’s strong image is minimal. Nike releases well thought-out content with a clear plan of action in mind, and does a great job of monitoring how their audience responds to their online marketing.

All of these strategies combine to make Nike a great example of online brand management done the right way, and they are a great example for companies who are newer to online brand management to look up to.

Sources

Chaffey, Dave. “5 Examples of Online Reputation Management Done Right.” Smart Insights, 4 Nov. 2019, www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/online-reputation-management-done-right/.

“What You Can Learn from Nike Branding Strategy.” Rival IQ, 27 Mar. 2019, www.rivaliq.com/blog/nike-branding-strategy/.

Larson, Jeff, and Stuart Draper. Digital Marketing Essentials. Edify, 2014, Edify, edify.stukent.com/app/publication/d801ea3f-55b7-4374-ac5a-03d0e2cff93f/cb47ca6c-e25b-460e-a11e-acb31043218b/9360d5e9-ea3c-4674-83a9-306ae005add1/25fcd625-0453-4844-8075-d4799d62f0a4/view.

Picture this: you just created the world’s best compilation of recipes, but not just any recipes, Christmas cookie recipes. That’s right, you’ve crafted a list of everything from the classic snickerdoodles to the ones that turn your mouth (and entire kitchen) green to the delicacies they only have on the finest dessert menus. Your page looks great too; lots of red accents, the perfect font, and a heading and title image that would catch anyone’s eye. Now your only issue is, how do you get people’s eyes to your page? As much as we would all love to think we are diggers and will search through Google results endlessly to find the best of the best of what we are looking for, most of us have found “the one” by the bottom of the first page of results. Which makes sense; Google’s job is to try to show us what we are looking for as quickly as possible. But once you have what the reader is looking for, how do you make sure your site will have an optimal ranking? Below I’ve listed four great ways to increase your website’s ranking, and ensure your Christmas cookie brilliance is being seen by the largest possible audience.

1. Find your best key phrase and stick with it. It’s really hard for a webpage to rank highly for more than more key word phrase, unless they are extremely similar. (For example, your webpage may be able to rank well for “Christmas cookie recipes” and “Christmas cookie ideas” but not for “holiday baking recipes” as well.) Once you have your key phrase, try and incorporate it in multiple areas on your page, including your title, heading, main body, and the URL if possible. However, be careful not to overdue it. Make sure the phrase flows naturally with the rest of the webpage; don’t create clutter or make your page appear unprofessional.
2. Make it your own, literally! The more unique and original content you can include on your page, the better. If all of the recipes you included in your list can be found on five other websites as well, it is going to be a lot more difficult for your page to rank well against these others. So, maybe try creating some of your own recipes! It’s okay provide links to other webpages here and there (as long as they are quality sites as well) but try and showcase as much original, high quality content of your own as possible.
3. Find some friends (or fans)! The more external webpages you can get to provide links to your webpage, the more legitimate your website will appear. Having other credible websites providing links to your page increases the perceived quality of your website, which in turn increases your ranking. So get some of your friends (who enjoy baking and blogging as much as you do) to try out your recipes and provide the links to them on their websites. Not only is this on its own giving your webpages more exposure, but it is increasing your chances of making it to that first page of search results.
4. Be patient, higher rankings don’t always happen overnight. Even if you redesign your entire webpage and become the golden child for that top search result spot, Google has made it clear that your ranking won’t change over night; these things take time. What is important is to keep making changes and never stop improving your webpages. And if one change doesn’t work, try try again!

I hope you found these tips helpful in improving your webpage. I’m a huge baker, especially around the holidays, so hopefully the next time I search for a great Christmas cookie recipe, your webpage will be at the top of my list!

References:

Price, Chuck. “5 Proven Ways to Increase Your Google Rankings.” Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Journal, 9 Oct. 2018, www.searchenginejournal.com/improve-google-rankings/246483/#close.

“Five Ways to Improve Your Site’s Ranking (SEO).” Michigan Technological University, www.mtu.edu/umc/services/digital/seo/.

Larson, Jeff, and Stuart Draper. Digital Marketing Essentials. Edify, 2014, Edify, edify.stukent.com/app/publication/d801ea3f-55b7-4374-ac5a-03d0e2cff93f/cb47ca6c-e25b-460e-a11e-acb31043218b/9360d5e9-ea3c-4674-83a9-306ae005add1/25fcd625-0453-4844-8075-d4799d62f0a4/view.

Digital marketing comes in many different forms, but anyone who has ever visited a sponsored website or even done a simple Google search has definitely entered pop-up ads on the screen, usually related to your current search or possibly something in your recent browsing history. Since these ads are related to a current or recent online agenda of yours, the ad itself has an advantage when it comes to getting your finger to slide your cursor over and click on that pair of shoes you keep coming back to or that set of wine glasses you know your mom would love. However, simply making sure that the ads are targeted at the right consumers is not enough to ensure a purchase. Once you’ve clicked on the ad, you’re typically redirected to something called a landing page. In theory, these pages are made to showcase the product/service you were originally attracted to in the pop-up ad, and strongly encourage a call to action for you, the consumer. However, a company’s success with these marketing campaigns can be strongly influenced by the elements of the landing page, including the design, color scheme, reliability, and the call to action. In this blog post, I’m going to suggest 5 ways to ensure that a landing page is doing the most for a company’s conversion rate.

1. Use the images that make consumers think and feel. Earlier today as I was conducting research for this blog post, I decided to do an online search for Christmas pajamas (never too early to start looking!). I clicked on multiple different ads that came up on my Google search to compare the landing pages each company offered. In my opinion the most effective landing pages I visited had one thing in common: they all had images at the top of the page of happy families opening presents or drinking hot cocoa in matching, festive pajamas. Seeing these images immediately got me thinking about my own family in a similar setting, and inspired me to keep clicking deeper into these sites. Images that get consumers to feel something are much more likely to encourage them to think more seriously about purchasing something or responding to your call to action, which is the ultimate goal of a landing page.
2. Use call to actions that make consumers actually take action. Once the consumer clicks on your ad, they have already taken one call to action to direct them to your landing page. Once they are there, the next step is to get them to continue to the call of action that really matters, whether it be purchasing a product, signing up for an email list, or making a phone call. In order for this to happen, it is important that your call to action is clear, contrasting, and centric. Ensure that the color of the button or pop-up matches the page design up also contrasts enough to make it stand out. Consumers like easy and quick, so the more simple and painless your call to action can be, the better. Lastly, it is important that the call to action is BIG (literally). A tiny box in the top left corner of your page or a few words underlined next to a giant image will likely be ignored, so make sure your CTA is a central part of your landing page.
3. What you see should be what you get. When a customer clicks on your ad or pop-up in the first place, it is most likely because they are interested in whatever product or service was showcased in the original advertisement. If this product/service is not clearly displayed on the landing page when the customer clicks on the link, this may deter them from digging deeper into the website. On this note, I am going to emphasize the important of having a landing page in the first place. One of the biggest mistakes a company can make is simply directing the customer to the home page of their site. This will most definitely discourage consumers from looking further for the product or service that caught their eye. The more obviously you can display and highlight this initial commodity that inspired your customer to make the click in the first place, the better the chances are that they will take the hint and continue with your company’s call to action.
4. Don’t isolate your consumers, give them reasons and ways to dig deeper. It is definitely possible to overwhelm visitors to your landing page with too much information, but one mistake that many companies don’t think about it is not providing them with enough information and options. When a consumer arrives at a landing page, you not only want to display the original product that made them click on the pop-up in the first place, but you also want to provide them with other options and links that could inspire them to head farther into your website. Isolating your customers will likely leave many of them frustrated, and decrease traffic to other areas of your website.
5. Don’t make guesses or assumptions, test it out! Instead of just following your instincts, trusting your gut, or “hoping for the best,” test out your different landing page ideas and see what works the best. A/B testing (when you show some consumers one version of your page and the other half another version) is a great way of figuring out how you can most effectively increase your conversion rate. Test your ideas, run with the good ones, and never stop improving! These are five great ways to increase your company’s success with your landing pages, but there are so many more ways to increase your conversion that are not touched on in this post. As with most things in life, there’s always room for improvement, and as the market and customer insights and preferences continue to change, your landing pages will need to as well. So keep testing, keep updating, keep innovating, and keep your conversion high!

Hopefully you found these strategies helpful! For more information on landing page conversion and how to make sure your page is as effective as possible, feel free to visit any of the websites referenced below.

References

• Saleh, Khalid. “A 9-Step Guide to Increase Your Landing Page Conversion Rate.” Marketing Land, 5 July 2018, marketingland.com/9-step-guide-increase-landing-page-conversion-rate-202814.
• “12 Tests to Increase Your Landing Page Conversion Rate, Starting Today.” WordStream, www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2013/07/11/landing-page-conversion-rate-guide.
• Wilson, Lee. “10 Landing Page Tweaks That Will Increase Conversions.” Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Journal, 13 Nov. 2018, www.searchenginejournal.com/increase-landing-page-conversion-rate/274815/#close.
• Larson, Jeff, and Stuart Draper. Digital Marketing Essentials. Edify, 2014, Edify, edify.stukent.com/app/publication/d801ea3f-55b7-4374-ac5a-03d0e2cff93f/cb47ca6c-e25b-460e-a11e-acb31043218b/9360d5e9-ea3c-4674-83a9-306ae005add1/25fcd625-0453-4844-8075-d4799d62f0a4/view.

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