How to apply buzz marketing to SEO?

Buzz marketing done well in SEO may be considerably beneficial for certain products and services. Misuse it though and you’ll flood your users with annoying ads on untrustworthy online forums. This may further result in negative perception of your products, services or brands. Is buzz marketing actually profitable? And how to use it to generate traffic on your website and simultaneously improve your PR?

What’s buzz marketing about?

The idea behind buzz marketing is to reach selected target audiences with promoted content, using a wide spectrum of online communication forums and discussions. The goal of buzz marketing is to make possible buyers have positive feelings about a brand or a product as well as to encourage them to act on what you promote.

Core objectives of buzz marketing

Buzz marketing is supposed to:

• invoke positive feelings about a product, service or brand in consumers
• spark discussions about a product, service or brand
• encourage consumers to take part in discussions aimed at generating positive opinions on a brand or product
• promote a product, service or brand
• generate organic traffic on the website
• induce positive PR and emotions about a product, service or brand
• post URLs for SEO purposes.

Buzz marketing is sometimes oversimplified and considered to be nothing more than spam. It’s worth remembering that far-fetched and unnatural posts and articles may be detrimental to your business, since they would invoke negative feelings among existing and future customers. In addition, such an activity can make you a target for Google which penalizes for URL sourcing in an artificial, and especially automatic manner.

Buzz marketing and website positioning

Buzz marketing has an actual and direct impact on SEO. Buzz marketing efforts, including certain promotion of useful content, may have a very positive effect on website visibility as well as on the generation of additional visits from external sites.

An important aspect of buzz marketing is the fact that many links generated within this area are nofollow URLs, meaning that Google crawlers don’t follow the indicated path. In practice, this means that their value for the website rank is insignificant, neither do they help index new websites. Does sourcing such URLs, leaving aside possible visits through them, produce any benefits? It does, since the flow of nofollow URLs allows to keep a natural linking profile of the website, thus influencing its safety and protection against a positioning filter.

Presently, only the foregoing makes sense and any automated content, for example generated by SEO submitters or mixers – as I’ve already mentioned – may prove counterproductive. Then, an impact of such efforts on the website linking profile recedes into the background.

When is buzz marketing pointless?

To make sure that buzz marketing efforts are efficient, you need to have a proper list of forums with activity histories so that no one suspects you of being a spammer. If you don’t have a transparent list of hand-picked forums, buzz marketing won’t do the trick. However, if you have a list of verified websites, social media platforms, and said online forums, you can successfully proceed with buzz marketing and reap the benefits over a relatively short period of time, i.e. a few weeks.

How to create a list of platforms for buzz marketing?

When you start creating a list, a database of sort, your actions need to be large-scale. Identify appropriate spots where specific articles can be posted. The more thematic categories you’ll find, the better. If you work with numerous entities, it’s good to be prepared for marketing efforts in various areas in order to be ready to cater to the needs of diverse clients.

How to tap the potential of buzz marketing?

Any buzz marketing campaign needs to be run comprehensively. This process has to be preceded with a thorough analysis of client’s industry. Having collected all the information, you ought to identify the right spots for articles about a given topic. First of all, focus on specialist online forums, network business databases, and industry-related portals. Next, select only those that are trustworthy and very popular, where lively discussions take place.

Is it worth hiring a special buzz marketer?

It is, providing that costs of external orders are similar to remuneration payable to an in-house employee. Don’t turn a blind eye on the fact that when you collaborate with a third-party provider, any lists, databases, access permits, and profiles remain with such a provider, and your agency don’t generate any resources usable in the future. In other words, it all depends on how important buzz marketing is in your operations:

• Do you receive similar orders on a regular basis?
• Does your agency have resources to promote via this channel?
• Would it be an essential part of the SEO strategy and promotional campaign of your agency?

What to remember when running a buzz marketing campaign for SEO?

Buzz marketing is a supplementary tool that not only accelerates article (page) indexing, but also gives clients more traffic on their websites. While preparing a campaign, bear in mind that articles you post should be tailored to the themes of individual forums and put in their right sections.

It’s much better to continue existing threads than to create new ones, where you want not only to promote certain content but also to actually help users. One of the most important principles to follow is that users should not be lied to or misled. Articles ought to be as honest and non-annoying as possible.

How to measure buzz marketing efficiency?

When it comes to buzz marketing, it’s best to turn to analytic tools. Google Analytics helps you pinpoint from where the user got to your website. That’s how you know how many visits resulted from the buzz marketing campaign. In addition, Google Analytics allows to determine how many users went to the client’s website from a given forum, blog or portal. You can also check how much time the user spent on the website and whether or not they purchased anything.

Monitoring of the status of URLs to your website is yet another area where it’s advisable to track the impact of buzz marketing efforts. It’s particularly worth monitoring the proportion of nofollow URLs (primarily from discussion forums) to dofollow URLs. Try out for example Majestic or ahrefs.