Nike strategizes an optimal plan to achieve its sustainable development goals in the coming future. The eminent sports brand classifies sustainability as one of its fundamental components for maintaining the credibility of its business.

The company asserts its firm belief in minimizing the ecological footprint through product innovation techniques. This motivates its manufacturing unit to redefine its strategic vision towards sustainable fabrication and supply chain management.

In other words, the company transcends the boundaries of excellence in business leadership. It strives to achieve the escalating dynamics of corporate social responsibility via green-collar branding and forward-thinking delivery.

The Company’s Sustainable Conceptualization

Nike has repositioned its corporate vision pertaining to eco-friendly branding and supply. The company’s recent annual sustainability report furnishes a profound analysis of its innovative production strategy.

The key parameters of the report constitute:

• A sustainable employment of water, energy and material resources.
• Partnering with contract manufacturers and market dealers to curtail the impact of hazardous pollutants in the environment.
• Nullifying the discharge of harmful and toxic chemicals into the ambient air by the end of 2020.
• Establishing a coherent manufacturing index to examine the sustainability adoption techniques of potential manufacturing companies.
• Disenfranchising the vendors from future collaborations who do not adhere to their sustainable development standards.

The Company’s Marketing Strategy

Nike’s intensifying environmental consciousness has attracted equally apprehensive customers. This entails interrogating the retailing units which still not confirm to sustainable marketing practices.

In addition, Nike conducts a rigorous endorsement of its regulating principles while laying out its marketing strategies in public.

For instance, the company stormed the markets with its Nike Moon shoes. It attempted so at the moment when the customers started realizing the benefits of jogging to maintain good health.

This marketing endeavour has accelerated Nike’s popularity among the customers, especially those who join hands with the company to reduce the ejection of detrimental substances.

Besides, Bill Bowerman, one of Nike’s co-founder believed in the company’s idea of promoting jogging as a health thriving sport. This belief incepted the preliminary milestone for Nike’s effective marketing strategy.

In short, the company is all set to attract compliant vendors and manufacturers to their farsighted sustainability program. With this, the company anticipates standing at par with its competitors and amplify its brand value.

This will eventually dismantle all marketing hindrances and pave the way for sustainable business practices in the forecast period.

And overcoming these limitations will gear up the consumer’s willingness to shell out more while procuring a lightweight pair of Nike’s shoes. This will gradually heighten their preference for health and optimize their living standard in the long run.

Bottom Line

Summing up, Nike’s leaves no stone unturned when it comes to maintaining its social responsibility towards environmental replenishment.

The brand credibility of the company addresses pertinent factors to continuously improve its production, management and performance portfolios. For this, it is on the journey to discover new locations and collaborating with potential manufacturing partners.

This magnificent appeal acts as a social influencer to millions of others while promoting safe and sound production of manufactured goods and services.

The Playbook to Successfully Manage a Company Brand through a Corona Crisis

• In a difficult time as present, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of potential pitfalls is exponentially bigger.
• To avoid those potential pitfalls, one must know the special risk factors that can harm your business’ reputation. Furthermore, applying certain strategies properly can help you stay on the safe side and improve your company’s reputation.

Be considerate of your customers.

• During challenging times, such as the current pandemic, people change their behaviour and actions. So everything you know about your customers can change.
• Their perception of your advertising efforts, mobility, buying power, needs, and expectations won’t be the same as before the crisis.
• They might feel preoccupied, uncertain, frightened, frustrated. As a result, some of your tried out methods won’t be able to reach them.
• They can even have a counter effect and alienate them from your brand, which can be quite devastating for your business. You risk being seen as opportunistic, unconcerned, or salesy.
• Before you commit to any marketing effort, you need to ask yourself questions such as:
• How has their decision process changed because of the current crisis?
• What are their biggest concerns during the current crisis?
• How and from where do they get new information?
• How do they buy stuff during a crisis such as this?
• Almost by default, an empathetic approach works best. Make it clear that you feel their pain, concerns, and situation. Tread lightly and choose the empathetic approach that shows the caring side of your business.
• Please explain how you have made changes in your business model to meet their needs in this challenging situation for everyone.

Assess the current situation

• During times of crisis, it is crucial to make quarterly audits of your marketing campaigns. You need to be able to run a fluid marketing campaign that can be adjusted on the go.
• Some of the most important aspects of the following include:
• Online mentions of your brand
• Accumulated website data
• Content strategy
• Search engine rankings
• Fans and social media
• Online reviews
• Brand sentiment
• Recognizing negative trends should be fairly easy, the same as catching the positive signals. All in all, you should be able to form a greater picture of your brand online.
• Negative issues need to be treated aggressively without wasting time, not waiting to undermine your brand further. On the other hand, positive signals need to be viewed as potential opportunities.

Keep the brand in front of its audience.

• Instead of fading quietly in the shadows, be present so that fans and customers know that you are still operational. Even if you don’t have anything to offer during that period, find a way to make everyone aware of your presence.
• For example, you or your employees can volunteer. You can promote that via social media. Additionally, donations are also popular and can increase your overall image as a socially responsible company.
• Offering better and secure information about the crisis is always appreciated, and it is something that you can actively promote on your social media channels.
• Just don’t add content for the sake of it. Fluff content won’t do any good for your brand.

Know where and when to cut back and push forward

• When challenged with a crisis, many businesses start postponing events, reduce their marketing efforts, and so on. Businesses with modest financial reserves are the ones first to cut their marketing spending first.
• Some businesses can afford to reposition themselves, and while everyone is taking a breather, they step up their game and increase their presence. Some increase their brand awareness, whereas others will also look for ways to grab a larger chunk of the market.

Give people what they need.

• Don’t just show empathy but prove it in practice; offer discounts, free deliveries for families with low incomes, and so on.
• You can even turn your focus on products and services that are essential during that period. People will recognize and cherish that. Actions like that can change their impression of your brand for the better.

All in All

• It’s all about opening your brand to people’s needs during a time of crisis. Let them know that you are not there to sell products and services, but to serve the community as well.
• There are several ways you can do so that are well elaborated above. Apply that in practice, and your brand can only gain more respect and a bigger fan base.

Google Will Have To Email GMB Account Owners Before Suspending Accounts

• A recent European law forced Google to change its practices regarding its policy on GMB suspensions. As a result of the new law, Google now is obligated to notify GMB account owners if their account has been suspended. 

• This is considered as a step in the right direction because until now, GMB account owners found out about their suspensions when they tried to sign into their GMC accounts. However, Google is still not obligated to explain the reasons behind the suspension which again doesn’t feel right to many businesses.  

Why doesn’t Google reveal the reasons behind the suspensions?

• Once a GMB account is suspended, they instruct the account owner whose account is suspended to carefully go through their guidelines. They believe that by doing so they can get to the bottom of things and figure out the reason for the suspension.

• When asked why they don’t reveal the exact reasons that lead to account suspension, they said that by doing so they will give a lot of ammo to potential spammers that will overflow Google Maps with fake listings. 

Types of suspension

• There are two types of GMB suspension: soft and hard suspension.
• If it is a soft suspension, the GMB account owner is blocked from updating the content, can’t create new posts, can’t respond to reviews, and so on.  
• If it is a hard suspension, the GMB account is completely removed from both Google Maps and search. 

Why is this so important?

• The pandemic drew many economies into one of the biggest recessions the world has seen. As a result, many businesses of almost all types are struggling to get by. A suspended GMB listing can result in additional losses that can potentially sink a business.   

• The new approach from Google might not be ideal, but it is a step in the right direction. If nothing else, business owners have at least some time to ask for reinstatement and resolve any potential issues before the account gets suspended.

Bing Reveals Ranking Signals for Content and Webpages

• In the past year, Bing has been quietly working on new webmaster guidelines that reflect its ranking system. They didn’t reveal “their magic sauce”, but they did describe the major areas for ranking: quality & credibility, relevance, freshness, page load time, user engagement, and location.

• What’s interesting is that they seem to count on metrics such as user engagement and authorship, and pogo-sticking, unlike Google that claims that it doesn’t use those metrics as a ranking factor.

• Furthermore, Bing claims that it will demote websites that promote offensive content such as derogatory language, offensive statements, name-calling, and lack of authorship.

Bing’s Ranking Signals

Relevance

This is in relation to how accurately the content found on the landing web page complements the objective of the search query. To this end, Bing also considers matching terms found directly on the landing page, as well as matching terms found in links leading to that particular page. Synonyms and semantic equivalents that share the same meaning are also considered to evenly attribute to relevance.

Credibility and Quality

Credibility and quality are determined by factors such as the website’s reputation, the author’s reputation, the use of citations, the data sources, the references, and so on. For example, an article post with zero references to data sources, no citations, written by an unknown author, will be considered a low-quality article. Also, if the article features offensive content such as name-calling and derogatory language, will be almost certainly demoted by Bing.

Freshness

Whenever applicable Bing will always choose fresh and up-to-date content over content based on old data. However, in some instances a certain content produced years ago is still relevant even nowadays. As the content is relevant and users still find it useful, Bing won’t demote it on account on fresher content.

Loading Time

Slow loading time can easily lead to poor user experience and can deter visitors from your website. Bing doesn’t like that and sees it as a weakness. As a result, it is more likely to get your website demoted as opposed to ranking it high. On the other hand, fast loading pages send all the right signals to Bing.

User Engagement

Bing takes into account how your visitors interact with your website. For example, Bing considers how long visitors spend on your website, through which search query the users found your website, did they had to reformulate their original search query, and so on.

Location

Bing takes note and considers the locations of the user (city and country), the language of the landing page, where the website is hosted, where the internet traffic comes from to the webpage, and so on.

7 Reasons Why You Need to Pay Special Attention to Long-Tail Keywords for SEO

Long-tail keywords make for almost 2/3 of all web searches, which speaks volumes about the importance of long-tail keywords for every high aiming SEO strategy. Our purpose is to bring to light some of the essential reasons why long-tail keywords are essential to any SEO strategy.

People naturally search the internet using long-tail search keywords:

Typically, most people search the web for one of three reasons: to go somewhere, to learn something, or to do something. For example, how to go to point A to point B by car? If this is a popular long-tail keyword, and hypothetically speaking you own a popular travel spot, you should create a blog post around that particular long-rail keyword. Google will appreciate that and reward it righteously with traffic.

They give context to content:

Contextual search has always been famous for Google. This became especially important after 2007 when they introduced the Hummingbird update. As a result, Google’s algorithm is devoted to complementing the exact phrasing and meaningful understanding of context.

They can help you outrank your competitors:

According to research conducted by Conductor, a NewYork based SaaS Company, long-tail keywords had a more profound impact compared with single-word terms. That means by using long-tail keywords, you give rocket fuel to your SEO efforts.

They help you rank for single words:

Almost regularly, long-tail keywords contain single words relevant to your niche. This comes as an added value to your long-tail keyword SEO efforts.

They lead to better conversion rates:

WordStream conducted research that revealed that approximately 10% of all landing pages have a conversion rate of around 11%. On the other hand, long-tail keywords have a conversion rate set at around 36%.

Focus on answering voice assistant question:

There are already millions of voice assistants in homes worldwide, and that spells a big opportunity for marketers as people make numerous online queries. Most of the queries fall in the long-tail keyword category. Whether it is Amazon Alexa, Google Home, or some other voice assistant user, this segment of the market is only going to grow bigger.

Long-tail keywords can boost your blog strategy:

By now, it is common knowledge that a blog is how you rank high in SERPs. To make your blog posts even more effective, use the long-tail keywords in the right context, body text, title tag, URL, alt images, and headers.

Conclusion:

Keyword research can be quite dull but is the basis upon which you will build your content strategy. For best results, fill your content with popular long-tail keywords, get your copywriter to craft something interesting around them, and watch your traffic grow exponentially.