How Nike Does Marketing: A Bold Strategy to Rank #1 on Google

Today we are going to talk about how Nike does marketing, but before we do, don't forget to subscribe whatever platform you're coming from if you want to grow faster personally and professionally. So let us begin. So the way this works is we score Nike on a scale of 1 through 20 on 5 different categories. So SEO, content, general, CRO, and paid ads. So we're really looking at how they handle digital marketing in general. So we're looking at my screen right now and we can see, oh look, there's these nice new Pink shoes from Nike. Does Nike need to have a really clear headline, clear call to action? Well, the thing for Nike is that their brand is very well known, right? So I'm going to come back to this in a second. I'm kind of coming back to the general kind of content, but I want to start with SEO. So I just want to show you the website real quick. This is the homepage, really well designed, and we're going to open up our tool over here, Ahrefs. So with Ahrefs, Ahrefs is our SEO tool of choice. And you can see the number of organic keywords that they rank for is 3.8 million. So 3.8 million keywords and they have about 129,000 referring domains and the domain rating is scored on a scale of 1 to 100. They're at 90. So it's very, very, very strong and their traffic value is $7.6 million, meaning that if they paid Google for that traffic each month, if they were buying ads, they would be paying $7.6 million on that traffic. All right. If we want to look at the types of keywords that they rank for, you're going to bet that a lot of them are branded because Nike is a very well-known brand, right? So you can see here, yeah, their top keywords are Nike, Nike, Nike, Nike Air Force 1, Jordan. These are all brands, um, at the end of the day. So what I want to see is if they're ranking for so many keywords, what types of organic keywords are they ranking for that do not include Nike? And those of you that can't see the screen right now, I'm basically looking at keywords that they're ranking for that don't, do not include the brand Nike. Um, so look, they rank for sneakers, VaporMax, um, Air Max, Kyrie. These are all brands, custom shoes. They actually rank number 1 for, but if you're Nike, you don't really care about ranking for all these, uh, different individual keywords because your domain rating is so strong. Whatever content that you publish, you're going to tend to rank for. If you publish a product page for a new shoe, you're going to rank for it because your domain rating is so strong. Um, so from an SEO perspective, because they have so many links coming in because their brand is so strong, they are— I'm going to give them an 18 out of 20. So next thing is we are going to take a look at their content. For Nike, we don't look at this from a traditional content marketing lens where it's like, oh, you should publish a bunch of blog posts and you should really educate the market. People know what shoes are. People know what Nike is. So for them, again, like if you look at the very top left corner, they have Nike Plus, they have Jordan, that's their brand. They have Hurley, they have Converse. Their play, if you were them, it's just you're, you're buying a lot of advertising around brand. And then what you're going to do also is you're going to acquire other shoe companies or up-and-coming shoe companies that make sense. That's kind of their play when it comes to content, right? It's really centering around brands. And if we come down here, um, taking a look at, I want to see in the, in their footer, like they have icons, right? So VaporMax, Jordan, like those are icons. Um, and then they have, you know, regular running shoes, basketball shoes, custom shoes. I'm just looking at the very bottom over here and I'm seeing what they're doing from a content perspective. So, you know, are they blogging? Again, for them, like it has to make sense. We can't just say everyone should have a blog, right? For them it's like, let's have a bunch of product pages, people know who we are and let's create lifestyle content, right? Let's have a YouTube channel, let's have an Instagram, let's have a Facebook, you know, let's see how things go from there. So if we look at their Instagram, 94 million followers, It just makes sense. They want to be top of mind for people. So Instagram is great. Okay. And if we look at their YouTube, we see for Nike, they have 1.16 million subscribers on YouTube. And it's not like tutorial videos. Again, it's, it's very lifestyle. You see a guy over here working on a wheelchair and you know, there's celebrities in here. There's a Nike 2K gamer or NBA 2K, like a collaboration. So it's collaborations. It's very influencer stuff. It's very social media. They just want to stay kind of top of mind for people. Oh, look at this collaboration over here. You have LeBron and Mbappé, the soccer player from France. So they're doing a collaboration over here. Like, that's really cool, right? So from a content perspective, look, even though they don't have a blog, right, they do really well because they get so many links already. Whatever product page they publish will do well. So they're covered on that side. They do, they crush it on the social media side. So from a content perspective, I'm going to give them a 19 out of 20 on that one. Okay. So if we come back here and we look at general marketing, we look at their site and it's very clean, right? Clean, easy for conversions. I'm just going to try to click through to this product page over here and, um, and look at this. So let's see. Okay, let's click through this product page. So far it seems to make sense. So now we're on the shoe page. We're on the shoe page right here. The images are done really well. Again, the design's really good too. They have reviews. So if you want to write reviews for that page, you can go ahead and do it. So it's good for SEO purposes. And what else is going on over here? Do they have email collection? If they don't have email collection, well, I think a popup would be nice. Here's the thing. They have a signup for email in the bottom left corner. Nobody's going to see that. So it's up to them. Like how important are emails? Debatable, right? If you're really, you're a global brand like Nike, maybe you make the argument that you don't want to just make a lot more money. Maybe the user experience is more important than collecting emails. Like I would totally understand that, right? But if they want to add it, they certainly can. Um, from a general marketing perspective, I think they do great because they care so much about their brand, right? I think those companies that care more about their brand tend to do better because they're more longer-term focused because you invest that money because design, because brand, you aren't able to see the ROI immediately, but it does kind of translate long-term, right? From a general marketing perspective, it's not like anything that like sticks out to me that's world-class. I mean, it's, it's pretty solid across the board. So I'm gonna give them a 17 out of 20 on general marketing. From a conversion rate optimization standpoint, if they can contrast the color of this add to cart button, maybe they will get a lift in conversions. But again, maybe that's not what matters to them, right? What I would also say too is behaviorally, if I'm about to bounce, maybe there's an exit popup. If I'm about to bounce, maybe there's a chat, a little chat that pops up, right? So you have so much data on your website because you're Nike, so much data where you can see if people are kind of scrolling a certain way, maybe they're about to abandon, right? So maybe you can catch that behavior and then jump on it quickly because that's where things are going. This is how you weaponize the data that you have on your website. On the CRO side of things, they're doing a lot of things. Their team probably knows that they should— that they are doing things that their team knows that they probably should be doing or could be doing. We'll put it that way. They could be doing, but they're not doing it right. So CRO, I'm going to give them a 16 out of 20 on that one. All right. So the last thing we're going to take a look at here is their paid ads. And for Ahrefs, the cool thing is I can actually see for Nike what keywords they're spending money on from a PPC standpoint. PPC is pay per click. They're spending money on about 34,000 keywords in America. So they're spending money on Nike, Nike Outlet, Nike Jordan. They're just trying to optimize the, um, the brand, um, the real estate. So, you know, if you are bidding on your own brand, you have not one result, but you have 2 results. Sometimes you can have more than that. So the cool thing about the paid result is that you can actually control what actually comes out there, right? So you have Nike women's shoes. It's all branded here, right? And they're probably, they're defending their brand, which means the cost will not go up. I've seen people in the past where they, because they don't defend their brand, what happens is the cost starts to rise and because people are bidding on the brand, they can't take it over anymore and it's too expensive to bid on their own brand. So if you're Nike, you want to stay top of mind and get into branding play at the end of the day. And if I look at Adbeat over here, I look at this, they have spent about $14.5 million in the last 180 days. Again, I wouldn't pay too much attention to that. I pay attention to trends more. In September, you can see that they ramped up their spend quite a bit and it's been pretty consistent. They spent a lot on Google, they spent a lot on YouTube direct buys over here. Um, and you can see the types of videos that they're running. There's a lot of, they do a lot of video. It makes sense. Um, and they have a lot of display campaigns as well. All right. So if we take a look at their top ads over here, you can see a lot of it is, this is, you know, the top left, these are all Pac-12 schools, right? So they know how to get into the minds of their buyers. So if you're like, if you went to USC, you went to Oregon as a college, you're like, yeah, Pac-12, cool, I wanna rep my school. Or Ray Allen, you know, people that follow basketball. And then they're just kinda hitting across different sports interests, different sports categories, and I think that's great. You have to know who your customers are. There's a lot of Jordans over here. They're plastered well across the paid ads ecosystem. So, I am going to give them a 19 out of 20 from a paid ads standpoint, all right? So, the total is 89 out of 100. So, 89 out of 100 for Nike. They're pretty solid across the board. I mean, pretty solid is really good. I mean, they're really good at branding, they know what they're doing, they are a global brand. That's all I got to say about that. And let me know if you agree with me, disagree with me, if you think we should analyze another brand in the comments below. And if you're on YouTube, don't forget to check out the next video over there if you wanna get smarter. And don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe, whatever platform you're coming from, because it will help you grow and it'll help us grow too. All right, see you tomorrow.