2016 Year in Search

Like any other year, 2016 has seen some social media and search trends that we may not have expected. From the deaths of well-known and liked celebrities such as David Bowie, Carrie Fisher, and Prince to the riveting chaos surrounding olympian Ryan Lochte, 2016 has kept us on our toes here at Oozle Media. As a marketing company we’ve experimented with how we can ride these trends to boost our online reputation, traffic, and solid leads. The end goal is to turn all of this into revenue for us and a knowledge base for our clients. We believe that data, especially our own data, gives us better understanding on how to reap the benefits of trending topics. Here we present some of our findings and we’re looking forward to 2017.

Over the last half of the year, we’ve decided to pay even closer attention to the details of trends in search and on social media. Below is a snapshot of our session metrics for part of the year. Armed with data, here is what we’ve done to take advantage of internet crazes.

Pokémon Go

The latest and greatest innovation in phone app gaming launched in July of 2016. You may remember public areas in July and August being particularly busy. You can thank Pokémon Go for that! Game creators Niantic Labs launched this game at the best time possible for both users and business owners. The summer sun brought gamers of all ages out and about their local communities. We found that the obsession was so strong that any information on how businesses could tap into did well. In July we launched two blogs:

Pokemon Go for Business

Utah Businesses Killing it at Pokemon Go

The Outcome

Our traffic increased by 150% over the month.

Both blogs combined represent 4.6% of our total landing page traffic for the 2016 year. They are our 4th and 7th most visited pages on our site still. We’re talking late December. Meanwhile, on the social scene called Facebook:

This post has the most reach and most post clicks in the year. We did little outreach, but we did boost it.

Does that tell you something? As a business, we stayed on the cutting edge of national online trends, and it started to pay off. We took this tactic even further into the year.

The 2016 Summer Olympics

If you like gifs and satire then you’ll love this blog our COO put together talking about the infamous rule 40. The Olympics was a hard trend to capitalize on because the rule blocked companies from using Olympics lingo in their marketing. They did this to protect the sponsors that paid millions to advertise, but it did squeeze out the little guy. Our write up tells businesses the dos and don’ts of Olympic marketing.

The Outcome

Facebook:

While this didn’t get as much traction as we would have hoped (we said it was tough) this helped us build a better base of people for our future endeavors. We know that not every great idea is going to come through with great results. Marketing is just one grand experiment and this one did well, but not as well as we would have hoped.

BYU VS Utah

While this wasn’t a national trending event, if you live in Utah you probably bleed red or blue. Oozle decided to take advantage of a local trend. We published a blog and made a video of our coworkers thoughts on this the Holiest of Wars:
The Holy War

The Outcome

In September, that blog was the 6th most visited page on our site. Even into the end of October, it was still the 12th most visited page. Social wise, we used Facebook to amplify, but as you can see below that even organically this did really well. Video tends to do well on Facebook, and had we done it over again we would have included a Facebook live portion as well. Check out the results:

The Presidential Election

This year, the presidential race was a hot topic, almost too hot for businesses to touch, really. We decided to take an unbiased point of view and give our audience a resource instead of an opinion. Thus, the Autocomplete Tool was born! Using commonly searched terms, we gathered the data on the most Googled questions, facts, and myths about the two candidates. You can still use the tool to better understand our new president, Donald Trump.

The Outcome

On our site, the big leap in traffic in November was caused by this tool. This time, we used a few more outreach tactics, and our visitors increased by 362% in just a week. We didn’t reach as many people on social media because Facebook thought our image violated their 20% rule. We’ll let you be the judge of that, but we posted a lot of unique images on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as well as used our best know how on outreaching tactics. At the beginning of this blog you probably noticed a huge spike in traffic at the end of October. The vast majority of that comes from our combined outreaching, social boosting and wave riding of trending topics. We were lucky enough to get our local news station KSL to write up about it. You can see the full story here.

On Facebook:

The Mannequin Challenge

When there is a huge trend on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram (like the infamous Snapchat Dog Filter, finger-lipping selfie poses, and of course, the Mannequin Challenge) they not only show up on those platforms, but their popularity shows up in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). We thought the Mannequin Challenge was one of the funniest trends to date, so of course we had to join in.

The Outcome

Here is how it did on Facebook:

Cool, right? We took a bit of time out of our day and had fun making this video, and it garnered us over 200 shares and a reach of over 18,000 people.

In Conclusion

Is this a tiny bit of humble bragging? Yes. Yes it is. We know this effort not only keeps Oozle Media relevant, but it helps our clients stay relevant, too. Since we’ve started getting on trends and producing content that relates to that trend, we’ve seen a 30% increase in our weekly traffic.

We’re constantly on the lookout for the next big thing and would love to see that your company rises to the top. We can’t wait to see what trends 2017 brings! Did you take part in any of these online trends this year? Which of these fads did you use in your marketing campaign? Let us know!