Most Searched For Brands of 2011: What Does This Say about Digital Marketing?
Online data experts Experian Hitwise have revealed some interesting UK search figures for 2011. Within their data, they’ve established a list of the top ten most searched for brands, with the social media giant, ‘Facebook’ topping the list. Within the top ten there were also 4 retail brands and 2 news brands, which signifies a lot about the UK’s search intentions.
Amongst the retail brands ‘ebay’ were the most searched for, followed by ‘amazon’, ‘argos’ and ‘next’. This shows that within the UK, these are not only popular brands, but in fact well searched for websites as a result of a strong online brand identity. This goes some way to acknowledging that branding is crucial to anyone’s digital marketing efforts.
The world of digital marketing is awash with tips and advice on how to best market and advertise your site online. A major focus for any digital marketer this year should be concentrating on your branding. Whilst it will be incredibly difficult to compete with the brands within the aforementioned top ten list, it does help prove that Google and other search engines appreciate and favour those sites that have established themselves as a well liked brand online; and not those spammy sites that are entirely irrelevant and are just out to ‘game the system’.
What’s also interesting to see is that amongst the most searched for list, websites such as the BBC and Daily Mail are also well searched for and have built up incredibly strong popularity online. This is no coincidence, as both these websites have invested a lot of time and money improving their usability as well as the quantity (and arguably) the quality of the content that is produced. Digital marketing, especially social sharing has become a huge strategy for both these news sources, with the Daily Mail even gamifying their site somewhat to ensure that comments are left and ‘liked’ or ‘disliked’ accordingly. In some cases, the comments provide more entertainment and information than the articles themselves.
In fact a recent study has revealed just how popular searching for news is online. The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has recently revealed that 15.8% of Brits access news almost every day on their Smartphones alone. This just highlights the appetite for online news consumption in the UK alone, and backs up that two of the most searched for brands online in 2011 are in fact news and media sites.
In terms of your digital marketing efforts, simply creating content is not enough, there needs to be a strategy behind this, to ensure content gets shared and engaged with. This in turn will help boost a site’s popularity. Again, this isn’t to say that if you are producing content, and turn to these strategies that you’ll automatically start being searched for online. The BBC and Daily Mail are well established brands regardless. However it does highlight what they’re doing and why it’s so effective, especially online.
So, the most search for brands of 2011 has highlighted that amongst the huge digital brands such as Facebook, Google and Hotmail, there exists some equally big brands, but those within retail and news sectors. Their popularity is no coincidence. These are brands that have built up strong online identities over time thanks to the use of clever digital marketing strategies; which is a great tip for any small business or brand reading.
