Using viral to turbo boost your SEO

Threshers has been big news over the last few weeks, making the mainstream media as well as copious amounts of blogger and community sites, with its intriguing discount voucher offer.  The Nationwide off-license retailer sent a voucher that entitled the bearer to 40% off up to £500 worth of wine and champagne, as a thank you to a group of selected suppliers, encouraging them to send the offer on to ‘friends and family’.

However, the voucher inevitably found its way onto the internet, and the retailer has been swamped by members of the public bargain hunting for their pre-Christmas booze.  The voucher is rumoured to have been downloaded by millions of internet users.

There is some debate as to whether Threshers created a very well executed viral campaign, or a limited offer that that has gone out of control.  Either way, from a search engine optimisation (SEO) point of view, there was so much more that could have been done to realise the full online marketing potential of the voucher offer.

Before I go on any further I will give you a quick introduction to the meaning of viral.  Don’t worry, we’re not talking flu’s or nasty bugs.  ‘Viral marketing’ sometimes refers to Internet-based ‘undercover’ marketing campaigns (the consumer does not realise they are being marketed to), including the use of blogs, web sites, and other forms of spontaneous PR, designed to create word of mouth for a new product or service. The term ‘viral advertising’ refers to the idea that people will pass on and share interesting and entertaining content.

Viral marketing is popular because of the ease to execute and relative low-cost compared to other marketing methods.  The hardest task for any company is to acquire and retain a large customer base. Viral marketing is a technique that avoids the annoyance of spam mail, encouraging users of a specific product or service to tell a friend, and therefore, creating a positive word-of-mouth recommendation.

Threshers’ objective for this campaign was to drive people into their stores, not to their website, and so in this respect, the viral marketing has been highly successful.  If the promotion was designed with search marketing in mind, it could have had huge benefits for Threshers’ SEO. Even though it was an offline activity, all elements should have been joined up, and effective planning and integration would have achieved maximum SEO benefits.

Even if Threshers didn’t plan the offer as a viral campaign, they could still have reacted to capitalise on the opportunity. Targeted Pay Per Click (PPC) activity alongside splash pages could have capitalised on the media coverage and enhanced the PR, created additional data capture or provided additional value to customers with such things as a store map or wine reviews.

Any business with a serious online presence should be thinking about what they can do to generate this level of awareness and harness the benefit for their natural search campaign.   For more information, contact the Propellernet Team on …(telephone or email?)