ChasNote

Last fall JCPenney worked with FM on the creation of a Fall Shopping Guide site — an aggregate website of ten leading online voices and publications that cater to upscale women. Instead of ad banners driving traffic to a standard marketing site, JCPenney sponsored editorial content, promoted it with banners featuring content headlines, and invited visitors to join the conversation by submitting comments.

The approach delivered strong results. Not just better click-through rates. The sponsorship sparked customer engagement that positively affected JCPenney’s “organic search equity,” the status of the brand among the natural, unpaid results on search engines. As Abbey Klaassen describes it in her Ad Age article on the JCPenney campaign:

“Yes, search equity is all about link love. Creating — or aggregating — compelling content online and letting readers use social-media tools to share the content can goose Google results for brand or related terms. It’s something bloggers have known for years, but marketers are really just beginning to employ.”

Here’s my original write-up at ChasNote.