The Barbie Phenomenon: What is the SEO Value of the Campaign?

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.