The pop culture and social media crazed around Pokémon Go, Nintendo’s wildly successful augmented reality (AR) game, has everyone glued to their phones. And, as a digital business owner, you may learn something from Pokémon Go’s techniques for capturing the attention of its target audience.
The simplest approach to achieve this is to examine the search engine optimization (SEO) lessons that contributed to the success of this AR game.
Look no further if you’re having trouble growing your online business. Here’s a list of the top 7 SEO lessons we can learn from Pokemon Go and apply to our business marketing tactics.
Excellent Branding Is Vital
One factor that’s been integral to the success of Pokémon Go is its superb branding. While you’re familiar with this game, you’ll be shocked to learn that Pokémon Go is based on a location-based smartphone game called Ingress. However, Ingress isn’t quite as popular as Pokémon Go, and this is because Pokémon Go is a well-established brand, unlike the latter. Luckily, you can also learn how to spoof Pokémon Go if you can’t access all the features offered by this game.
The superior branding of Pokémon Go is because this game is well-recognized and has existed for 20 years. Therefore, its name alone brings a sense of nostalgia and further boosts its market presence. The consistency and familiarity of the Pokémon Go brand over the years have been known for superb game quality, tone, and design. Without this brand identity, Pokémon Go most likely wouldn’t have reached the level of success.
With this in mind, your goal as a digital marker or online business owner is to learn from Pokémon Go that you must take your time to build your company’s brand through SEO practices. In today’s digital environment, your brand’s popularity will be boosted even more by existing users spreading the news to their friends, colleagues, and family members. As a result, your brand will be able to simply transcend between generations.
Related: 8 SEO Tips For Law Firms
Make Sure To Take Advantage Of Social Media
Nintendo didn’t follow the traditional approach when marketing Pokemon Go and instead opted to use social media platforms such as Twitter. Nintendo only released a few tweets after the game’s launch in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. These tweets ended up getting mentioned in more than 6.6 million tweets. This shows that the use of the Twitter social media platform was key to the success of this AR game.
If you have any concerns about the effects of incorporating social media into your marketing strategy, the success of Pokemon Go will no doubt change the mindset you have. Using social media platforms can help turbocharge your brand’s popularity as it harnesses the power of viral marketing. When a buzz about your business starts spreading by word of mouth across social media platforms, this boosts your relationship with your existing clients and further strengthens your brand exposure.
But before you develop your social media marketing strategy, the first thing to do is identify where you can find your target audience and establish your buyer personas. This will help you know the types of content and topics they’ll enjoy to boost engagement effectively. You can best realize this objective by creating informative, relevant, and interactive content. Doing this will help you win over the attention of your target audience rather than simply focusing on marketing your brand.
Related: Top Benefits of Social Media Marketing For Your Business
Offer Your Clients An Awesome Experience
Another SEO lesson you can learn from Pokemon Go is always to provide your customers with an awesome experience. This AR game excellently achieved this goal by ensuring to engage of all the five senses of its users. As a result, this boosted their overall user experience, and this excellent experience, in turn, made them loyal to the brand.
Therefore, your focus should be on ensuring that your target clients get the best possible experience. You can do this by ensuring your website has a fast-loading speed, guarantees your content is detailed, and directly answers your target audience’s query immediately. In addition, make sure to include any noteworthy citations or links that might add value to your readers. Always remember that a great customer experience will boost your client’s loyalty to your brand.
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You Don’t Necessarily Need A Big Budget To Succeed
After the launch of Pokémon Go, Nintendo didn’t spend a substantial sum of money marketing this AR game. Instead, they only shared a few tweets on their social media handle and didn’t even bother spending money on visual advertisements for this game on TV. But despite this, Pokémon Go still became famous, proving you don’t need to spend a lot on marketing to reach your target audience.
Knowing this, you shouldn’t spend a lot of money on your SEO marketing plan because it doesn’t always mean the best return on investment. Your SEO marketing plan should be limited to what you can afford. This is critical because SEO can quickly become costly due to a variety of reasons, including the following:
- You’ll need to engage an SEO professional, but their services aren’t cheap because SEO is a complex technique. As a result, these experts anticipate that you will pay a high price for their services.
- You must choose the appropriate keywords for each page of your website and understand how to utilize them effectively. This frequently necessitates hiring an SEO expert to sort through the different keywords and determine which ones best suit your website.
- To examine data and better understand your website’s current status, you should conduct an audit. Only when you understand this can you discover how to improve the ranking of your website.
- The backend of your website must be improved, as it is crucial for SEO ranking. Improving page load speed, adopting a responsive design, and cleaning up code are just a few of the things that contribute to optimizing your website’s technical SEO.
There are various SEO experts to choose from, but you should opt for one that charges a reasonable fee for their services. This helps to limit spending a fortune on digital marketing.
Related: SEO Keyword Research Guide
Simplicity Is Crucial
Leonardo da Vinci is often remembered for saying simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. This is one thing that the developers of Pokémon Go understood very well. As a result, rather than developing a game with high visual design and graphics, they opted for creating a game that’s simple to play for the average user. Because of this mental shift, it was able to stand out among the millions of games on the market, drawing the attention of many smartphone users.
When creating an SEO plan, you should adopt this method. You’d be better off mastering the foundations of SEO rather than attempting to use complex SEO strategies, as this will only lead to failure. This will prevent you from coming across as indecisive about what you’re trying to achieve with your target audience, which may consequently impact your brand’s image.
Take Time To Better Understand Your Target Audience
The success of Pokémon Go was due to Nintendo’s understanding of their target audience’s desire for a sense of heroism. As a result, they built the Pokémon Go game to give its users this sensation, and this is what has fueled the AR game’s success. Nintendo would not have been able to accomplish this if it did not have a thorough understanding of its target audience’s needs.
Before you establish an SEO marketing strategy, you need to spend some time getting to know your target demographic. While this is difficult, it is necessary for SEO marketing success. The best place to start is to create a persona for your target audience and assess it regularly to keep up with current developments.
Related: The Ultimate Guide to On-Page Local SEO
Old Ideas Can Still Propel You To New Success
The Pokémon franchise has been around for 20 years, so it isn’t exactly new. However, in the past years, this brand was recognized for its card game, which was also highly popular. In comparison, Pokémon Go is a very new concept that Nintendo has only recently introduced. They have utilized their previous experience to help propel the success of Pokémon Go.
To improve the success of your SEO marketing strategies, you should use a similar strategy. This entails going back through the material you created a few years ago and determining whether it still has value for your target audience. If so, update this content to reflect the current situation by adding new information, altering the design, or explaining the context. This strategy will be far more straightforward than starting from scratch.
Takeaway
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of or played Pokemon Go, which has amassed millions of downloads and has become one of the most popular smartphone games. As a marketer or a business owner, you should attempt to learn from this game’s online success. This blog post has done just that by laying out the SEO lessons learned from Pokemon Go that you can apply to your brand. As a consequence, you’ll be able to build a buzz around your brand and establish yourself as a market leader in your field.
