What is the SEO value of the Barbie campaign?
Semrush released the numbers of the “Barbie Phenomenon” on LinkedIn a few days ago.
Social Media
The marketing campaign for Barbie the Movie have generated a lot of social media buzz.
For Instagram:
- +119.9% engagement
- 661K more followers
For Facebook:
+182.6% engagement
+14.576 more followers
For Twitter:
+427,949 more engagements
SEO
The Barbie campaign also generated a lot of SEO value for Mattel / Barbie:
- 494K new backlinks for barbiethemovie.com
- 2.6M monthly searches for the keyword “barbie”
- 440K monthly searches for “barbie the movie”
Let’s break down the numbers:
🎬 The movie cost $145 million.
🎯 Assuming $100 million at least for the marketing campaigns as well.
The return was:
🔗 494K backlinks
📷 2.6M brand searches
🎬 440K barbie the movie searches
Now, assigning a monetary value for the SEO.
🔗 Backlinks: $24.7M
The average backlink for SEO would cost $300, high-value, targeted, medium+ quality sites. However, those are brand mentions.
A brand mention campaign would get a link with an average cost $20-$50.
Because Barbie the movie will get mentions from big publications as well, I will assign the highest value here $50.
📷 Brand searches: $1.3M
Semrush gives the keyword “Barbie” a CPC cost of $0.73, while Keyword Planner gives an estimation of $0.05 – $0.61.
Let’s go with an estimate of $0.50 of brand value here.
🎬 Barbie the movie searches: $880K
Semrush here gives the keyword “barbie the movie” a CPC cost of $2.68 while Keyword Planner a $0.13 – $1.35.
I will average these out to $2.
These are very high commercial terms from people looking to get a ticket, news, but also toys and memorabilia.
💰 Box Office: $150M
And, to be fair, Mattel, Inc. is eyeing a box office + toy sales and brand deals from this.
Conclusion
Would I spend $245M in a movie, brand & promo deals, and movie marketing campaigns for getting back $27M of SEO value in a month?
Possibly no.
BUT, SEO works by bringing recurring traffic, and the value of the organic searches will not subside, it’s going to grow.
Mattel is going to break-even of their investment pretty fast, and along with that they have generated a huge amount of public relations and brand awareness that will keep giving.
Nick Malekos is the Head of Growth & Demand Generation at Cyberbit, with a background in SEO, Content Marketing, and Performance. He is specializing in helping SaaS startups and scale-ups grow.
