JJ Abrams’ Impact on SEO Strategy
This is going to come as a shock to you, so brace yourself.
Sometimes, no matter what strategy you are employing, you are not going to see that giant spike in traffic or revenue to your site that you can point to as the breakthrough moment for your site.
I know, you can go out and do a search on your own and find dozens, if not hundreds, of insanely smart and well-established experts in this very field who will show you statistical proof of campaigns they ran where they saw increases of a million visits a month or revenue of six figures in eight months.
I am in no way disputing any of these articles or saying that the following points I am going to raise in this article should be perceived as better or more advantageous. I am rather saying that it is about time that we got to read a real life example of a long-term campaign where we implemented changes over the course of about two years to see sustained growth and a new level of competition.
Now, at this point in the article, you might be wondering why the title of this post refers to how JJ Abrams influenced our approach to SEO for this client. Solid question.
Quick answer, he didn’t.
It is my intention with this article to prove that there is value in performing a sustained campaign for a client in which you deliver strong month over month results that signify stronger trust with your client’s audience and creates a bond with you and your client that is unparalleled. I will then compare this process with a real-world example of Hollywood movie marketing to try and make a relatively boring topic a bit more interesting to digest.
Make sense? No? Too bad, because I already did the research.
The Back Story
Our client, which we will refer to as Examples, is a regionally based e-commerce apparel company that got in touch with us back in early 2014. We officially signed them as a client in March of 2014, and we were tasked with increasing their traffic and revenue.
Over the course of our almost three years with this client, we have been tasked with:
- Magento Development
- Information Architecture Design
- Conversion Optimization
- SEO Traffic Strategy
- Link-Building
- Keyword Research
- Content Production and Marketing
The above list, while not completely comprehensive of all of our work over a three year time period (since I want to finish this article sometime this week as opposed to listing out every project we have done in a three year window), does provide a good overview of our relationship with our client. We were authorized to make any and all suggestions that we had in order to help improve the site’s organic traffic and revenue.
Note that I said suggestions. We did not have access to their back-end.
Now, for the fun part.
This case study differs from many of the examples that I referenced earlier in this article due to the fact that our client did not, and still does not, want to turn control of their site’s code to us. Therefore, any changes we have made over the course of this engagement needed to be approved by our client contact and implemented by their team, on their own timeline.
Now, Examples is a fantastic client in that their team consists of several very smart people who understand SEO to varying degrees and can implement our recommendations. The only downside is with regards to timing, which can be a pretty big downside.
As our internal team doesn’t have control over the back-end, we need to ensure that all of our recommendations are built out as straightforward as possible and are ready to be implemented by their team at their earliest convenience.
This makes campaigns that require precision with regards to timing and responsiveness tough to enact.
The Results
As I said before, we were hired to drive up Examples’ traffic and revenue. And, as you may have guessed by now since I am writing a post about this client, we did just that over the past three years.
Here are the total sessions to the site, by month, from March 1, 2014 through December 31, 2016. As you can see, apart from a very strong November and December in 2015 and again in 2016 (attributable to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas shopping), there aren’t the usual giant leaps in traffic month over month that we have come to expect from articles like this.
Instead what you see is continued and sustained growth. When we had a down month in May of 2016, traffic would stabilize back to our new norm. Alternatively, when we would have strong months, specifically around the holiday season, our peaks have escalated year over year.
Revenue and total transactions followed suit as well.
Over the same time period, you can see that revenue consistently increased month over month and year over year, with even fewer fluctuations than traffic saw.
It is important to note, Examples’ conversion rate is pretty abysmal.
This has been a point of contention for us since the beginning of our engagement, but as I said, we do not have final say over implementing changes to the site to help improve the conversion rate. You will see that we were able to push Examples’ rate over 1% consistently now in 2016, which is in large part to us finally convincing our client to implement a guest checkout option to their site after over a year of pushing for it.
Finally, I also wanted to show the percentage of new users to the site over the length of our engagement.
What we are seeing here is that our percentage of new users compared to total users has remained pretty consistent over the three years, at right around 50% every month. What this implies is that we are retaining our core customers while we have been growing the overall brand.
When you have a client that is afraid of losing its core base of customers with any changes you propose, it is always nice to be able to show that the changes you are recommending are creating new lifetime customers without deserting any of the current revenue base for your client.
But TR, is that it? You just rant for 300 words, give a brief backstory, and then shove some charts in our face and move on?
You didn’t tell us what specific strategies you employed in order to see such sustained growth! Haven’t you read any of your own example links? They all provide very detailed guidelines as to how to follow their steps towards success! Where is our how to guide?!
You are correct, I didn’t include specific examples of deliverables or a step by step walkthrough of any of our most successful campaigns (although, given the above graphs, I am sure you can figure out when those campaigns took place).
That is intentional.
The intent of this article is not to provide you with a detailed path forward for completing an uber-successful campaign. As I said, there are tons of articles out there to help you scale traffic with step by step instructions.
This is a call to reason.
Sometimes, we need to understand that our clients have certain responsibilities and obligations that limit the amount of cooperation they can have with a consultant or consulting agency. It is time that the people who make up this industry recognize this and start adjusting our own expectations to better accommodate our clients.
My background is in the business world, I did not grow up in this industry but instead transplanted myself into this field. So I am often confused by the level of bravado many people in this industry have when discussing concepts that they believe in.
On the one hand, I am jealous and impressed by their confidence and knowledge, but on the other hand, I look at them as any business would. Where is your proof? I refuse to turn over what I have worked so hard to build to someone just because they sound confident or have one example they can point to. I need to see sustained results.
This leads to a lot of conversations that end the same way.
‘What we wanted to do was this and that, but the client wouldn’t give us control, so they didn’t get the results we talked about. It is their fault for not trusting us more implicitly seeing as we are the industry experts that they were paying.’
I have had that conversation before, and I can tell you, it is tough to operate with limited freedom from your client.
However, it is very easy to say that we failed because a client didn’t implement our changes fast enough or in the proper way.
It is far more difficult to say that our client took our recommendations and used them to the best of their abilities and then we made the most of their efforts. Clients expect us to succeed under their conditions.
That is what we get paid to do.
Sometimes, no matter how much educating you do for a client, they still won’t agree with you that the time and effort to stand up a blog and produce good content on said blog that we can then promote is worthwhile.
They might think the design changes you proposed won’t resonate with their audience no matter what your facts and figures indicate.
When this happens, it is time to make the most of the resources you have at your disposal.
The design changes you proposed don’t get approved? Scale down your proposed changes. Instead of redesigning the whole site or an entire page, itemize your list into what singular change will be the most impactful for the client and propose that individual alteration.
Then set up an A/B testing campaign and run some numbers to hand off to the client to show that your change provided them with a net positive result. Then propose another individual change.
Piecemeal that bitch!
The results may not be as dramatic as you would hope for, and it might not result in you being able to showcase a beautiful spiking graph to promote your efforts, but you will garner more trust with your client as they see incremental increases over time.
If the client doesn’t believe in dedicating time to build up their blog, create a simple content calendar for them, draft up outlines of content that they can use to meet the deadlines in the content calendar, and provide them with additional content that you created to help support their team.
Once they start seeing some success with the blog, things will snowball and they will be more receptive.
Just like you don’t necessarily trust an article on an SEO practice to employ unless you see the specific results of said campaign, a client can’t implicitly trust your recommendations when their jobs are on the line if the campaigns fall short of the goal. Prove your work before asking a client to hand over the reigns to you.
Outside the Industry Perspective
Now for the fun part.
I wanted to find an example outside of our industry that I can use to highlight how successful this methodical and tedious process of promotion can be. Turns out, it was pretty easy to find.
There is this guy named JJ Abrams who is a pretty big deal in the movie industry. He has a certain magic touch that enables him to make amazing movies and television shows. Don’t believe me? Take a look at projects that he has had a hand in (either as a producer or director) and try to not find something that you love.
He’s pretty awesome.
The movie I am going to focus our attention to is Cloverfield.
JJ Abrams’ Take on Marketing
Cloverfield was released on January 18, 2008 to an audience that was hungry with anticipation for the movie. Not many people knew what the movie was supposed to be about, given that the trailers released in 2007 were very vague and did not have many clues as to the direction of the movie.
Notice that the trailer doesn’t even include the movie’s name. This is pretty unique, especially given the way in which most movies handle promotion by blasting the movie’s title and lead actors through every channel they can until everyone in the world is sick and tired of hearing about it by the release date.
Cloverfield took a different path, and it was received incredibly well by fans and critics alike, earning $170.8 million at the box office while it only had a $25 million dollar budget.
This is where you start to see the connection to what I was talking about above.
Cloverfield did not have the budget of say The Hobbit trilogy, so JJ Abrams needed to get creative with how he allocated funds. He knew he couldn’t afford to pay premium actors to fill out his cast, nor could he skimp on CGI for a film centered around a larger than life monster.
Therefore, he needed to find ways to channel his funding properly to allow for maximum allotment to creating the movie itself.
This led to a reduced marketing budget, which meant that every trailer needed to create a sense of intrigue in the viewer and every promotional event needed to feed into the audience’s lack of information but desire to solve the mystery.
This led to the ARG (Alternate Reality Game) that was created specifically for the Cloverfield universe.
You will note that I said universe above. That is because JJ Abrams has been creating a universe for his films that include Cloverfield, 10 Cloverfield Lane, and The God Particle. These movies are all linked and tied together in a very complex manner that I will not get into now.
While waiting for the movie to be released, there were forums created on sites like argn.com and unfiction.com that were dedicated to looking into the background of the film and deciphering what the movie was all about prior to its release.
However, this research was just the beginning.
Fake Companies and People
In order to truly grab the attention of a worldwide audience in today’s technology driven world, you need to be able to see all points of view and have an answer to every question that an audience may have.
If you want to create a movie that is going to be driven off of the curiosity of a worldwide audience, you need to be prepared.
Abrams was overly prepared.
Villainous Company
Prior to releasing any trailers or information about the movie, Abrams and his team created a fake company called Tagruato. Here are some of the details about this company that Abrams crafted and put on their website, even going so far as to mapping all their drilling stations:
- Tagruato was founded in 1945 in Japan as a small mining company.
- It’s initial name was translated to ‘Hand of Power’
- In 1989, Hand of Power went bankrupt and was sold and converted into a deep sea oil drilling company.
- Since then, they grew to become one of the largest companies in the world, and have developed some of the most advanced technology the world has ever seen.
- They have 4 subsidiaries, a medical research company, a parafin wax company, an advanced technology company that specializes in things like creating and launching satellites, and Slusho, which is a popular frozen drink.
As you can see, Abrams not only just created a company to base his movie around, he created an entire history of a company, helped develop the growth of the company in a natural progression, and was meticulous with every detail of the company.
He didn’t stop there though.
He also created an environmental activist group that was dedicated to saving our planet from the world’s most nefarious corporations, with their mortal enemy being Tagruato. T.I.D.O. Wave has a forum website that allows readers to pour through testimonials, read over evidence of Tagruato’s illicit activity, and correspond with active members of the activist organization (there were active members back when the movie was being promoted).
If you read through the posts, you will see several references to a Tagruato scientist that discovered some amazing things, but then was found dead after retiring. The cause of death was a gas leak, but all of his research went missing.
In addition to Tagruato’s website and TIDO Wave’s discussion boards, Abrams also built out the subsidiary sites. (These sites have all been taken down since the movie’s promotion, with the exception of Slusho).
Slusho is the most noticeable, as this beverage was very popular in Japan due to its ingredient that makes you incredibly happy — no matter what — Seabed’s Nectar. The company was planning on expanding its distribution worldwide at the time of the movie. They had real TV ads and also were featured in some blockbuster films!
Additionally, Slusho’s website even had some t-shirts and apparel that it sold from it’s store (it was removed after the movie’s promotion ended). Anyone who bought something from Slusho in November of 2007 received a letter addressed to a staff manager at the Chuai Drilling Station with their purchase that read:
“Over the next few days, because of the incident that took place, starting now all letters to the outside will first pass through our Communication centre. Level 1 Personnel? They will remain where they are, making certain to read the message from start to finish…” (translated from Japanese)
On the back of the letter was a handwritten note in English that read:
“American, The Chuai station holds a dark secret. Good people are going missing. Expect further communication in the near future. — The Whistleblower”
Abrams realized though that by sending out letters to people addressed from a whistleblower in Tagruato’s company, some fans may try and contact Tagruato. Therefore, Abrams had someone respond to all emails sent to the address listed on the Contact Us page with a note from the whistleblower themself:
“American, no oil here! They must have known before they built! — The Whistle Blower”
Actors Playing Real People
Back to the previous point about not having the budget to hire A-List celebrities for this movie, Abrams decided to make the most of his unknown cast and crew.
He had each of them create their own MySpace accounts (wow this sounds old) and were interacting with each other on a regular basis for months before the movie was released. After the movie was released, any characters who died in the movie had their pages stay up but ceased all activity on their page.
In addition to MySpace, there was a website created for one couple to communicate back and forth on, http://jamieandteddy.com/. (It is password protected — jllovesth)
Jamie Lascano, who has a brief role in Cloverfield where she is apparently passed out on the couch at the going away party in the very beginning of the movie, set up a website where she could post videos to her boyfriend, Teddy Hanssen, while he was working on Chuai station.
In one of the videos, Teddy sends Jamie a package and instructions not to open the package until December 9th. In another video, Jamie opens the package to find inside:
- A Slusho hat
- A mysterious package with a label that reads “Primary evidence, Jamie, Don’t eat this”
- A Pre-recorded message of Teddy saying:
“Jamie, listen to me, alright this is not a joke. If you’re hearing this, before we’ve spoken, then it means I’ve been captured by a company called Tagruato. Ok, tag-ru-ato. Now listen, you, this is important, don’t call the authorities it’ll screw everything up. Just sit tight and wait to hear from Randy, he knows to call you. We’re at their station, ok, and it’s like they found something, or they’re making something. But the point is, I can’t, I’m not going to be calling you again, you’re not going to hear from me again, I just want you to wait for Randy, he will explain…”
Jamie, believing Teddy’s message to be a poor breakup excuse, eats the package she was sent and can be seen acting extremely happy right after consumption only to then appear to go insane. This led to most people claiming that the package was Seabead’s Nectar.
The Randy that Teddy referred to in his message can also be found on a post on T.I.D.O’s website which means that Randy and Teddy were members of T.I.D.O doing undercover research into Tagruato’s drilling station.
After Teddy’s message to his girlfriend, he went MIA from all sites, which led to his sister creating a website to help find her missing brother.
Fake News Brings Real Interest
JJ Abrams also wanted the investigation to feel like it was not only living on the internet. Therefore, he created fake news reports, in different languages, in which there is footage of the Chuai drilling station collapsing into the ocean.
Tagruato even had press releases on their site blaming the oil rig collapse on T.I.D.O. Wave.
There is plenty more to dissect, as Abrams also leaked footage from the Chuai station of pictures from below the water, there were satellite launches to scan the Atlantic Ocean, and characters from 10 Cloverfield Lane had jobs with Tagruato to name a few of the additional connections. Feel free to follow up on your own if you are interested.
Key Connections
Ok, so what can you take away from this way too in depth look into the marketing of Cloverfield? How in the hell did I connect my vague diatribe about our client to a cult investigation into an old movie? More importantly, why did I just waste your time reading through all of this?
Let’s take a step back and remember my main point regarding client work in this industry. Depending on your client, sometimes you need to adjust your strategy and put in additional time and effort to produce long-term gains.
While these gains may not produce those pretty spikes in traffic that you can then show other potential clients to highlight your successes, they do create a sense of trust and dependability that are very underrated in an industry that harbours a lot of, let’s call them sketchy professionals.
What JJ Abrams did for Cloverfield was take a less than ideal budget and put in time and energy into crafting a marketing strategy around his available resources.
Don’t have stars to promote the movie? Fine, get relatively unknown actors and capitalize on their lack of fame by having them create real personas leading up to the movie.
Don’t have a budget to run dozens of trailers? No problem, run only a few and provide only the most basic information that a movie-goer would need to create a sense of urgency in the audience to want to learn more.
In a year where Abrams had to compete with movies such as The Dark Knight, Wall-E, Slumdog Millionaire, Twilight, and James Bond Quantum of Solace to name a few, Abrams had an unknown cast acting in a similar movie to Godzilla and he needed to pitch that to an audience being satiated by incredibly noteworthy films with some massive budgets and some incredibly famous actors and actresses.
However, even facing these handicaps, Abrams was able to see the benefits of a slow building marketing campaign.
Through this promotional effort, Abrams built a foundation of fans who are invested in the Cloverfield universe, which allows him to manage the budget of the next two films, the budget for 10 Cloverfield Lane was only $15 million, since he already knows he has a consumer base deeply integrated in this world.
This creates less volatility with each promotional campaign, since the market is already primed for each campaign, as well as it allows your audience to become personally invested in every aspect of your project.
This is precisely what we have been able to do for Examples.
Traffic and revenue continue to perform well, with a clear trend up month over month and year over year, without major spikes or dips. This allows our client to better budget and forecast, which makes their lives easier (read: less volatile).
Would we have liked to have full control over Examples’ site and run our style of campaigns in order to generate those massive gains in traffic or revenue? Hell yes!
However, in a world where everyone wants everything to go viral, sometimes, you need to make the best use of your resources in order to compete. Grind away at the details, deliver outstanding work on even the small projects, and you will see the rewards come through month over month over month.
