What Super Mario Kart teaches us about Digital Marketing
Anyone who has ever picked up a controller and played Super Mario Kart has been there, the third and final lap, coming round the last corner, the finish in sight, and then it happens.
At the bottom of your screen, the dreaded blue shell icon appears, the warning siren is getting faster as it closes in on you, the minimap showing you that Peach and Waluigi are right behind you. Inches away from the finishing line it hits, boom, you are left to recover and drag yourself over the finish line in third place, the golden first place trophy ripped from your hands at the very last moment.
In the Wallis-Leggett household, this is usually followed by swearing on my part then my wife reminding me that it’s just a game. Yes, she is technically right but it is a particularly cruel game at times.
For those who are not familiar with this series, each racer has the opportunity to obtain weapons to either help them or hinder other racers, the further behind you are, the better the weapons you will pick up. The most powerful weapon, often reserved for those in the last few positions, is known as the blue shell, essential a homing missile that automatically targets the racer in first place and, for the most part, is impossible to stop. In most situations, all you can do is sit there and wait for the shell to hit you and shake your head as 4 or 5 racers inevitably speed past you.
This means that even those struggling at the back of the pack always have an opportunity for redemption and those out in front are always under threat of being hit and losing their lead.
And whilst this is just a game, this teaches a very important life lesson about not taking a strong position for granted and not becoming complacent. This lesson can be relevant to almost any walk of life but I want to examine what it means for my profession, digital marketing.
My previous article looked at the importance of picking your battles when it came to content marketing and being careful to not target too many topics at once and stretch yourself too thin as a result. Here I want to build on that and talk about what happens when you are dominating the search rankings around a particular topic.
Improving your search engine ranking for a specific search term or topic can be a long, difficult process that requires a high quality, consistent content strategy. A strategy like this doesn’t happen easily, it requires both a high level of organisation and time to execute correctly and many other elements will effect your success such as your sites architecture, backlink profile, mobile friendliness and much more.
For any company, developing content strategies that target multiple search terms or topics can be a challenge due to the amount of time and focus it takes to successfully run even just one optimisation campaign. This means that upon achieving the desired results of a top spot there can be a temptation to take a step back from creating content around that specific area and move onto another.
This does make sense and it is always important to juggle the limited resources you have available, if you have an opportunity to refocus on a topic that has a high level of potential but is yet to be developed, this can be a smart choice.
Just as many of us have learnt in the cruel and competitive world of Mario Kart though, one should never take a number one spot for granted. Even if you decide to dial back resources for a particular content campaign due to its success, always remember that there is a whole pack of competitors behind you attempting to overtake and you never know when one of them is going to get that blue shell.
Make sure that as you jump from having a focus on one content campaign to another, an adequate level of resource has been put aside to maintain your existing content campaign sufficiently. This campaign may not need as much attention as it once did, but a little time and energy dedicated to it consistently can ensure that you keep the spot you worked so hard to get in the first place.
