Now that we have Halloween just behind us, the shopping season is just around the next corner. eBay has just launched their new branding campaign, which includes TV-commercials. This is the first brand campaign since 2-3 years, which is showing the team feels confident they are ready for a big shopping season this year. And I hope so, full disclosure: I’m still long in eBay stock!
Here is one of the TV-spots airing at the moment:
Buy It New Buy It Now!
The tagline of the new campaign is: Buy it new, Buy it Now!
The new eBay brand campaign was highlighted 3 times in the last earnings call, and several questions from analysts were geared towards the brand campaign: Buy it New, Buy it Now.
Tagline Hijacking
For a couple of years I’ve been testing out a technique to gain extra traffic to my Dutch blog: Thenextcorner.com. When I spotted a flashy brand campaign on Dutch websites, where the banner was linking to a website in all flash, I would try to hijack the brand traffic. Most of these flash sites would not have decent ability to rank, where SEO and flash don’t go well together. By writing a simple post with the tagline in the title, I would be able to rank my page and hijack the traffic for all the brand searches.
Doing a simple search on Buy it New, Buy it Now, you can see potential here as well… But I’m not the only one who thought of that!
The marketing team of Aliexpress, a site run by Alibaba.com is marketing with the very same tagline as the large brand ad campaign of eBay. And as you can see in the above screenshot, only a couple of eBay help pages are ranking for it. I feel all my work in training teams on integrated marketing campaigns with SEO from the last couple of years have not fully paid off
In the mean time, AliExpress is making sure the message is clear; you can Buy it New, Buy it Now on AliExpress.
To Be Copied a True Form of Flattery?
A pretty low way of marketing your own brand if you ask me, but it seems to be working for AliExpress. At least eBay is able to take down the Halloween decorations on the site in time, where AliExpress is still showing ghosts and Jack O’Lanterns. For me, AliExpress will always be remembered as the brand that could not do it on their own, but needed to lean on the marketing campaign and hijack the traffic.
In China they say that getting copied is the truest form of flattery.
Lesson learned:
Always make sure you own the search results for your own branding message.Use the tagline as the page title for your homepage, Set up a mini-site, where you feature the video’s, claim the twitter account, or build a Facebook page. There are multiple cheap ways to dominate the first page for your message.
Although the eBay branding for this year is pretty generic, the least thing you should make sure of is rank for your own marketing tagline. That whenever people type in the message into a search engine you put into your TV commercials, you get the traffic, not your competitor.
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