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Club Med's Online Marketing Trident

By Guillaume Bouchard |

Editior's Note: We asked NVI to share the story of how they successfuly used social media marketing to promote Club Med in the Canadian market in 2010. We hope their story helps you gain insights into how you could implement a social media campaign in your business.

Club Med is an established, trusted brand whose trident logo is synonymous with surf, sun, and sand. Well, when the company decided to engage the Canadian online marketplace, it employed a strategy that also had a three-pronged approach.

Specifically, Club Med leveraged search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), and Social Media to reach its online goals. And it pursued each of these channels with different goals in mind.

SEO and Club Med's Long-Tail

With 66% of users researching vacations online, and organic search generating 7 times more traffic than paid search, Club Med knew that SEO would be integral to their online success. So the company deployed a three-pronged SEO strategy that would increase its organic traffic 37% in just one year.

First, Club Med made sure that their site was completely indexable - e.g. in HTML rather than Flash. Secondly, they ensured that each country-specific site had content that was (1) unique, and (2) targeted for the relevant country. For example, the French version of ClubMed.ca was made distinct from ClubMed.fr.

Then, to establish relevance with the search engines, Club Med undertook three steps. First, they conducted keyword research to identify keywords that (1) had the highest search volumes, and (2) represented a potential sale. Then, they used that intelligence to develop content themes on their site that reflected the most opportune keywords. Finally, interlinking was done on each of the Club Med sites to ensure that PageRank and linkjuice were distributed towards content that was optimized for the most valuable keywords.

Finally, Club Med demonstrated their popularity to search engines through strategic linkbuilding. This entailed getting a sufficient quantity of quality links on an ongoing basis - i.e. new links from trusted sites with related content had to appear regularly. And these links would feature targeted anchor text that would increase Club Med's rankings on those keywords.

PPC and Immediate Returns

While SEO built Club Med's long-term equity, paid search offered Club Med two kinds of immediate returns. First, Club Med could appear at the top of (sponsored) search results right away. Second, Club Med could capitalize on market and seasonal trends without having had to prepare months in advance.

With the keyword intelligence that Club Med gained from their research, they were able to create PPC campaigns tailored for the North American market. Then, by monitoring daily performance and optimizing campaigns on an ongoing basis, Club Med was able to:

  • Double their click-through-rate (CTR) from 3% to 6%
  • Reduce their cost-per-click (CPC) by 50% on French campaigns and 30% on English campaigns
  • Generate 10 times more transactions and 12 times more revenue with only 4 times more investment

Social Media: SEO & Brand Awareness

When it came to engaging the social sphere, Club Med pursued a strategy that would engage users and support its SEO initiatives. First, Club Med launched a family vacation blog. This would provide them with (1) frequently updated and keyword rich content for search engines to index, and (2) a portal through which users could learn more about family travel destinations.

Second, Club Med developed an embeddable widget to syndicate their blog content. The widget's embed code included an HTML link with targeted anchor text pointing back to Club Med. This meant that anyone who embedded the widget on their site would be linking back to Club Med.

Finally, to ensure the widget's success, Club Med reached out to travel bloggers and offered them a chance to win a vacation if they placed the widget on their site. As a result, (1) Club Med's content was being syndicated to a targeted audience, and (2) a contextually relevant site would be linking back to Club Med.

In the end, over 50 travel bloggers participated in the contest, resulting in 50+ quality links from relevant and trusted sites. Indeed, the traffic spoke for itself:

  • Traffic increased 65% over 8 months
  • 45% of traffic was social - coming from Facebook, the blog, and widget bloggers
  • 15% of direct visits went to the blog - showing it had created repeat users

The Three Online Dimensions

When Club Med set out to tackle the Canadian online marketplace, they had three goals: get immediate results, build long-term equity, and foster community around their brand and content.

Through an optimized PPC campaign, Club Med was able to generate immediate results and improve their ROI. To build long-term equity, Club Med used SEO to optimize their site for the most valuable keywords. Finally, social media helped them create keyword rich content that attracted backlinks and community of users who regularly shared and interacted with their brand.

Overall, the Club Med case represents an excellent example of how different channels can be used toward different goals. More importably, it demonstrates how those channels can be made to work together to complement one another.

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