Having a digital marketing strategy is quite important when it comes to running a business today. The targeted focus of digital marketing platforms helps to reach a larger audience at a lower cost than conventional means. One of the most popular strategies for digital marketing is social media marketing and yet another is search engine optimization. While these are the more popular choices for digital marketing for businesses, there is one more which often gets overlooked. The strategy that we are referring to is Wikipedia marketing.
Social media platforms are getting more and more crowded since all businesses are opting for social media marketing to gain an audience. However, the algorithms for social media platforms allow for only so many ads to appear between a certain number of posts. Marketers are always on the lookout for new marketing strategies that will help businesses increase the quality and quantity of the audience.
Wikipedia has been around since 2001 but not many businesses are using this marketing strategy to gain a quality audience. One of the issues that present itself when it comes to Wikipedia marketing is that the platform is quite exclusive and your brand should have a certain value before you can post an article on Wikipedia. Wikipedia page cannot be created by all, unlike other social media platforms. Wikipedia page creation takes multiple references from the internet with high authenticity and creates a wiki page for renowned individuals and organizations.
If you are among the businesses that are eligible for Wikipedia articles, you can reap quite a lot of benefits from this marketing strategy. In order to bring more traction to the marketing strategy, we have listed the benefits that the businesses can take advantage of with Wikipedia marketing.
1. Get Access to an International Audience
The latest statistics show that Wikipedia gets more than 16 billion page views per month. These page views come in from all over the world. The top countries that contribute to this number are the United States of America, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom. In February 2020, nearly 360,000 new users registered on the free encyclopedia.
All these statistics show that if you are a business with a published article on Wikipedia, you get access to all this audience. Acquiring even a small percentage of this audience for your business can generate a lot of leads that you can convert into sales. This potential audience comes at quite a low cost when compared to the number of leads that you can generate on a daily basis. On paper, the graphs suggest a high growth rate for the audience since new people are visiting the free encyclopedia on a daily basis.
2. Build A Brand Reputation
If your business is on Wikipedia, it goes on to show that your brand has quite a lot of value since the encyclopedia has quite an exclusive criterion to get published. Businesses have to be unique and deserving in their field to be featured on Wikipedia.
Being eligible for Wikipedia means that you already have a business with an established brand value. However, getting on the encyclopedia enhances that reputation and opens for reference to international audiences.
3. Creates Credibility
Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopedia and everyone around the world can edit the information on the encyclopedia. Knowing that anyone can edit the articles on Wikipedia ensures that you get the most updated information on Wikipedia that is curated by a lot of people.
People can edit the articles so that the information always remains updated. If someone is impressed with your business, they can leave a positive edit on your Wikipedia article and the same remains true for a bad experience as well.
4. Search Engine Optimization
Every digital marketing consultant knows that Search Engine Optimization is important for every business to generate leads organically. It is necessary to rank on the search engine result pages for the targeted keywords if you are planning to be successful in your endeavors.
Wikipedia may not be a direct SEO tool but it has a lot of benefits that help it to be important for Search Engine Optimization. Online marketers who are handling the digital marketing of brands with value are always trying to ensure that Wikipedia comes into play when they want to get the business ranked in the Search Engine Result Pages.
Wikipedia has more than 1.2 million backlinks and ranks 13 on global engagement on the internet. This ensures that the Wikipedia articles on the keywords that you are targeting always rank on the first page of the search engine result pages.
Many people just try to edit the articles on the encyclopedia to provide backlinks for their clients. However, this practice is often not recommended since Wikipedia editors verify the edits and it could lead to blacklisting of the client’s website or even blocking of the account that you used for the edits.
When you are referencing the other websites from where you generated the content for your Wikipedia article, they provide strong and credible backlinks to support your business. All these links may be no-follow links but they do have the power to generate some strong leads for your business.
5. Google Panel Appearance
You may have often searched for some business or person on Google. As a result and a panel appears on the right-hand side of the page. More often than not, this is by Wikipedia. While this may not work for general keywords such as “modeling agency” or “modeling agency in <city>”, it works wonders if your search query was the name of the business and your business has a Wikipedia page.
The algorithms of Google and Wikipedia have been adjusted to keep out spam posts and allow for only genuine queries. This huge chunk of the screen that is covered by the Google Panel increases the visibility of your business and goes a long way toward building credibility for your website.
6. Google Knowledge Panel
If you are appearing on the Google Knowledge Panel, it means that you are dominating the search results. Try searching for a celebrity using a vague reference like a movie in which he or she appeared. You will see that the search engine will give you the exact celebrity that you were searching for in the results and there will be a huge panel on the screen telling about the celebrity. This Knowledge Panel goes on to link to the Wikipedia article of the celebrity.
If you are planning to market a person’s brand, it would certainly mean that the person is quite reputable. He also must be holding some brand value himself. Writing a Wikipedia article about the owner of the business can also help in interlinking articles. The Knowledge Panel has quite a simple layout and it is easy to read and understand what is being said.