Three Takeaways to Master The Art of Digital Visibility

A quick glimpse at the latest global Social, Digital & Mobile Statistics alone is enough to shatter any doubt about the importance of digital visibility. The days when marketers could afford to have a passive online presence without any effect on their company revenues are long gone. Today, not establishing a good digital visibility means you are increasing the risk of being swept away by your competition. Who would take that risk? Of course, assuring your company’s name is found among the top players in the digital space can be as tough as truly mastering an art.

I have outlined the two commandments of digital visibility, inspired by a player who really seems to have figured out the formula for success. The player is called Jabra – a global producer of innovative headset and speakerphone solutions, proudly describing itself as “always connected, always on and always ahead of the game“.

A Little Background Information

A few weeks ago, our attention was drawn to Jabra, after having stumbled upon an article, called “Jabra outplays Danish competitors in digital visibility”. Long story short, an analysis of three Danish manufacturers of Bluetooth speakers and headphones, conducted by an external consultancy company, concluded that Jabra was the best brand at reaching its target group through social media. Additionally, the consultancy company also described Jabra as “superior at online marketing”, reaching almost 8 million people.

A look back at Jabra’s history shows that things were not always running as smoothly for the company’s digital visibility, though. In fact, up until May 2012, only 0.6 percent of all referrals from Google did not search for the branded keyword Jabra. Not to mention that more than 50% of all visitors left the site after seeing just 1 page. Speaking about a company whose roots stem from innovation and ingenuity, those analytics certainly seemed disturbing. As Michael Harboe, Head of Online Marketing explains, “We understood that we needed to begin a complete Digital Transformation of Jabra – all platforms included!”

So what happened?

In 2012, the project JUICE (Jabra Unified Integrated Customer Experience) was launched, initiating the process of Jabra’s full digital transformation. As the title of the project implies, it was about “assigning the customer as a guiding star towards the fulfilment of digital business ambitions”, or building on customer centricity:

Screenshot taken 20.03.2014 of https://www.slideshare.net/MichaelHarboe/michael-harboe-keynote-speaker-sitecore-digital-trendspot-2013

After conducting thousands of surveys and interviews to understand customer expectations, behavior, and pain-points, and partnering up with Sitecore, Jabra focused on building a “new online universe that spans across all previous market segments and customer profiles”. As a result, the new Jabra.com was released in May 2012, built around the concept of the “warm website”:

The goal is to offer the best possible experience when interacting with Jabra, and be able to profile any visitor from any location on any device with any goal from any referral with any insight at any time, and be able to react on it immediately offering relevant and valued sticky content.

The result?

Undertaking the path towards full digital transformation, while building on customer centricity certainly had a tremendous impact on Jabra’s digital visibility. As mentioned before, the brand was awarded for being the best at reaching its target group through social media. Moreover, taking a look at the increase in traffic from search, I believe the curves speak for themselves:

Screenshot taken 20.03.2014 at https://www.slideshare.net/MichaelHarboe/michael-harboe-keynote-speaker-sitecore-digital-trendspot-2013

Was it easy?

Certainly not. I turned for a comment to Steen Schnack Grønfeldt, Jabra’s Search Marketing Specialist, who adds that “Working with search marketing for a website in more than 16 languages is really challenging, but a great opportunity to use one’s skills. It’s really rewarding to see the progress we’ve made – and we still have a lot of ideas to improve our website even more.”

Lead by my curious nature, I decided to explore the brand’s visibility performance in search even further, expanding my analysis with both the Danish and the US markets. Not surprisingly, Jabra turned out to be ahead of the competition there, too in the core business areas – Business Headsets and Speakerphones, which finally inspired me to illustrate the two major guidelines for truly mastering the art of digital visibility:

Image credit: www.hoosh.com

Let’s take a further look at each of the two commandments:

1.     Outplay the Competition in Social

Without going in too much detail, considering Jabra’s outstanding performance in social media, I can summarize that:

• The company has established a presence in the most popular social media channels, with the highest activity on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.
• Overall, Jabra followed the three simple golden rules of:  listening to their fans, providing adequate customer service (engaging), and sharing diversified content.

Although the majority of posts are product (brand) related, it is interesting to observe that they are always twisted with an element of creativity, inserted within a relevant context, or are based on user-generated content. For example, the brand took advantage of the Olympics, being the event of the season, to illustrate a relation between an Olympics athlete and one of their products. What is more, they actually linked to the athlete’s (Mikaela Shiffrin) personal Instagram profile. What better way to share intelligent content with contextual relevance, while pleasing the user at the same time?

Screenshot taken 20.03.2014 of https://www.facebook.com/Jabra.US

Referring back to Jabra’s focus on customer-centricity, it’s worth mentioning that the brand also included an automated feed with user-generated content from Instagram (discovered by hashtags) on their US website:

Screenshot taken 20.03.2014 at www.jabra.com

2.     Shoot Your Search Visibility Through the Roof

Making a slight turn from the world of social media, it’s time to explore the next highly important component for digital visibility, namely search visibility. Have Jabra’s digital marketers mastered the art of search? Diving into the Business Headsets category for both the Danish and the US markets, it seems the answer is yes. In the graph with the aggregated share of search, including both organic and paid visibility, Jabra leaves the competition behind — they are more than 16% ahead of the next top player in Denmark (as shown in the graph below), and 5% in US, respectively. Note that the aggregated visibility is based on the top 25 most searched and competitive generic keywords for the Business Headsets category in Denmark.

Screenshot take 20.03.2014 of http://ii.hoosh.com

Not only does Jabra outplay its competition in search, but the domain’s impressive ranking in Denmark’s Business Headsets category initially comes from organic results:

Screenshot taken 20.03.2014 of http://ii.hoosh.com

Of course, it’s fair to mention that Business Headsets is Jabra’s core business area and US and Denmark are among the most mature markets. If we consider a highly competitive business area, like Headphones (B2C), the company still has a lot of challenges and opportunities ahead of them. As of 27^th of March, Jabra.com ranks #12 in the Headphones category in US, having improved its rank from #35 since February 10^th 2014.

In conclusion, by exploring a player’s success in digital visibility, I could outline the following key takeaways that can help you get closer to mastering the art:

• Digital visibility goes way beyond brand awareness. Today, it’s also an essential component of competitive intelligence.
• Mastering the art of digital visibility requires companies to have a broader overview, dedicating equally successful strategies to both social and search marketing.
• A website, truly built around customer-centricity, always gets rewarded by search engines.

Last but not least, as reminded by Michael Habroe, the journey towards successful digital visibility requires high goals, ongoing efforts and persistence:

“We are pleased with our progress and we monitor our digital visibility closely. Honestly, we feel like we’ve just started this journey and expect to gain a lot more from our digital marketing efforts. Most importantly, our team of online specialists in Jabra enjoys the challenge, and we will persistently continue our effort. You may claim we are doing great, but if so, we will start aiming for epic.” enthusiastically smiles Michael, as he knows they are on to something…

Featured image credit: Sudhee on Flickr, used under CC license.

Editor note: neither SEJ or the author have any affiliation with the companies listed.