Digital Marketing

Comparison between
DCComics.com VS Marvel.com

Submitted By:
Rishi Rajeev Jain
Rupam Bose
Saikat Roy
Satyajit Dev Sarma
Seemab Ahmed
 DIGITAL MARKETING
Digital Marketing involves promoting products and services using various digital channels
to reach consumers at the right time through their preferred channel.
Digital channels are rendered and accessed via desktops, tablets, mobile, smartphones
and can effectively deliver personalized content and promotions.

Why Digital Marketing?

People spend twice as much time online as they used to 12 years ago. And while we say
it a lot, the way people shop and buy really has changed, meaning offline marketing isn’t
as effective as it used to be.
Marketing has always been about connecting with your audience in the right place and at
the right time. Today, that means that you need to meet them where they are already
spending time: on the internet.

Penetration of Internet in India: The number of Internet users in India are 462 million by
July 2017. This is the 35% share of the total population.

What does digital marketing consist of?

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The process of optimizing your website to ‘rank’ higher in search engine results pages,
therefore increasing the amount of organic (or free) traffic that your website receives.
2. Content Marketing
The creation and promotion of content assets for the purpose of generating brand
awareness, traffic growth, lead generation, or customers.
3. Social Media Marketing
The practice of promoting your brand and your content on social media channels to
increase brand awareness, drive traffic, and generate leads for your business.
4. Affiliate Marketing
A type of performance-based advertising where you receive commission for promoting
someone else’s products or services on your website.
5. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine marketing is the practice of marketing a business using paid
advertisements that appear on search engine results pages (or SERPs).
Search engine marketing’s greatest strength is that it offers advertisers the opportunity to
put their ads in front of motivated customers who are ready to buy at the precise moment
they’re ready to make a purchase.
Advantages of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing benefits businesses of all sizes by giving access to the mass market at
an affordable price. Unlike TV or print advertising, it allows truly personalised marketing.

The main advantage of digital marketing is that a targeted audience can be reached in
a cost-effective and measurable way.

The benefits of digital marketing include:

1. Global reach
2. A properly planned and effectively targeted digital marketing campaign can reach
the right customers at a much lower cost than traditional marketing methods.
3. Personalisation
4. Measuring your online marketing with web analytics and other online metric tools
makes it easier to establish how effective your campaign has been. You can obtain
detailed information about how customers use your website or respond to your
advertising. Web analytics can be set up to show you exactly how much money
you make from each digital tactic.
5. Engagement
6. Brand Development
7. Fare Greater Exposure
8. Level Playing Field

Organizations chosen for the comparison between the Digital Marketing strategies
are:

The Comic Book Giants:

1. Marvel
2. DC

DC and Marvel are "The Big Two" in comic books. Now that geek is chic and comic book
movies and TV shows are popular, the rivalry between these companies intrigues a large
audience – and marketers should pay attention. From exclusive cover releases to live
tweeting TV shows and making announcements at fan conventions, these giants know
what they're doing when it comes to marketing.
We took a closer look at the statistics behind the success, analysing SEO, social media
marketing, SEM for these two companies.

In reality, most comic book, TV and movie fans may favour one company over the other,
but generally consume content created by both companies and appreciate the ongoing
rivalry.
DCcomics.com vs Marvel.com

SEO Optimization

1. Title Tag

Ideally, your title tag should contain between 10 and 70 characters (spaces
included). Make sure your title is explicit and contains your most important keywords. Be
sure that each page has a unique title.

2. Meta Description

Meta descriptions contains between 70 and 160 characters (spaces included). It allows
you to influence how your web pages are described and displayed in search results.
Ensure that all of your web pages have a unique meta description that is explicit and
contains your most important keywords (these appear in bold when they match part or all
of the user's search query).

A good meta description acts as an organic advertisement, so use enticing messaging

with a clear call to action to maximize click-through rate.

3. Headings

Use your keywords in the headings and make sure the first level (H1) includes your most
important keywords. Never duplicate your title tag content in your header tag. While it is
important to ensure every page has an H1 tag, never include more than one per page.
Instead, use multiple H2 - H6 tags.

DC Comics

Marvel
 4. Alt Attribute
Alternative text is used to describe images to give the search engine crawlers (and the
visually impaired). Also, more information to help them understand images, which can
help them to appear in Google Images search results.
DC Comics

Marvel

5. Keyword Consistency
This table highlights the importance of being consistent with your use of keywords. To
improve the chance of ranking well in search results for a specific keyword, make sure
you include it in some or all of the following: page URL, page content, title tag, meta
description, header tags, image alt attributes, internal link anchor text and backlink anchor
text.

DC Comics
Marvel

6. IP Canonicalization

To check this for your website, enter your IP address in the browser and see if your site
loads with the IP address. Ideally, the IP should redirect to your website's URL or to a
page from your website hosting provider. If it does not redirect, you should do an htaccess
301 redirect to make sure the IP does not get indexed.

7. Robots.txt

A robots.txt file allows you to restrict the access of search engine robots that crawl the
web and it can prevent these robots from accessing specific directories and pages. It also
specifies where the XML sitemap file is located. You can check for errors in your robots.txt
file using Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) by selecting 'Robots.txt
Tester' under 'Crawl'. This also allows you to test individual pages to make sure that
Google bot has the appropriate access.
 8. XML Sitemap

A sitemap lists URLs that are available for crawling and can include additional information
like your site's latest updates, frequency of changes and importance of the URLs. This
allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. We recommend that you
generate an XML sitemap for your website and submit it to both Google Search Console
and Bing Webmaster Tools. It is also good practice to specify your sitemap's location in
your robots.txt file.

9. Iframe

Frames can cause problems on your web page because search engines will not crawl or
index the content within them. Avoid frames whenever possible and use a No-Frames
tag if you must use them.

DC Comics

Marvel
10. Backlinks Counter

Backlinks are links that point to your website from other websites. They are like letters of
recommendation for your site. Since this factor is crucial to SEO, you should have a
strategy to improve the quantity and quality of backlinks.

DC Comics

Marvel

11. Mobile Compatibility

Embedded Objects such as Flash, Silverlight or Java. It should only be used for specific
enhancements. But avoid using Embedded Objects, so your content can be accessed on
all devices.

DC Comics

Marvel
12. Broken Links
Broken links send users to non-existing web pages. They are bad for your site's usability,
reputation and SEO. If you find broken links in the future, take the time to replace or
remove each one.
DC Comics

Marvel

13. Mobile Friendliness

Mobile Friendliness refers to the usability aspects of your mobile website, which Google
uses as a ranking signal in mobile search results.

Marvel

DC Comics

14. Page Speed Score

The average Page Speed score is 70%

DC Comics: 47%
Marvel: 62%
15. Fully Loaded Time

The average Fully Loaded Time is 6.7s

DC Comics: 4.2s
Marvel: 4.0s

ANALYSIS:

Out of the 15 mentioned parameters under SEO optimization marvel.com has scored in
10 of those parameters wile dccomics.com has scored in only 6 parameters.
So,
Marvel.com-10/15
Dccomics.com-6/15

SEM

TRAFFIC ANALYSIS:

Overall, Marvel wins the website traffic game with a much higher SEMrush rank (although
DC's score of 1.6k is extremely respectable). With increases in organic search results,
both DC and Marvel are heading in the right direction. In terms of traffic, Marvel is doing
about thrice as well as DC, but DC is losing at a rate of 4% while Marvel is losing at a rate
of 21%.

DC Comics

Marvel
SOCIAL MEDIA
1. YOUTUBE

The number of Subscriber of the marvel YouTube page is 5.5M

The total views of the page are 1.5 Billion

The number of Subscriber of the DC YouTube page is 1.3M

The total views of the page are 0.63 Billion

2. FACEBOOK
Total No. of followers of DC on Facebook is 4.1M

Total No. of followers of Marvel on Facebook is 28M

3. TWITTER
 Marvel
Tweets: 44.1k
Followers: 5.66M

DC Comics
Tweets: 36K
Followers: 2.53M
4. Google+

Followers: 3,758,571
Followers: 5,867,740
 5. Instagram

The followers of dccomics on Instagram is 5.7m

The followers of marvel on Instagram is 15.3m

The social media presence of Marvel is very strong as compared to that of DC Comics.
Marvel has its strong presence across all platforms. This strong presence marvel is using
as a tool to promote its upcoming movies and TV shows. Though the DC Comics is much
older than that of the marvel but due to smart marketing and digital presence it has
established itself as a much stronger brand.

The upcoming movies of marvel for example Avengers: Infinity War is the most viewed
trailer on YouTube. Within a week the views are approx.98M. It is also the most liked
video worldwide.
The YouTube Analysis:
Comparison of the trailers:

Justice League:
Thor: Ragnarok
Trailer Comparison:

Marvel: Thor Ragnarok

DC Comics: Justice League

Marvel has a strong presence across the social media platform. It is using this presence
to its benefit in order to promote TV series and Movies. There are different social media
campaigns which are carried out to promote movies. The effective tools that marvel has
used is crowd sourcing. In order to increase belongingness among the followers’ various
kinds of interactive session was introduce on Twitter and Facebook.
Findings & Recommendations:

Marvel:

SEO

Page Title

 In case of page title 43.24% of the page titles are Duplicate.

 While out of 37 Pages in one of the page the title is missing.
(https://read.marvel.com/) which needs to correct as it’s a serious issue.
 4 Out of 37 pages have more than 65 Characters in the page title.

Note: These issues will hamper the ranking of the page. If there are duplicate pages
and meta description hen the crawler will come to the page for indexing it will not
index any of the page that are duplicate.

 Meta Description

 In case of meta description 27.03% of the meta description are Duplicate.

 17 out of 37 pages were missing meta description.
 48.56% i.e. 18 pages out 37 are having more than 156 Characters.

 In case of marvel the client and server error was none.

Dc Comics:

Page Title

 In case of page title none of the page titles are Duplicate.

 None of the page the title is missing.
 5 Out of 149 pages have more than 65 Characters in the page title.

Meta Description

 In case of meta description 100% of the meta description are Duplicate.

 None of the pages are missing meta description.
 100% of the pages are having more than 156 Characters.

 In case of DC Comics, the Client error is seen in 3 pages i.e.

(0.61%) and Server error was none.
SEM
With increases in organic search results, both DC and Marvel are heading in the right
direction. In terms of traffic, Marvel is doing about thrice as well as DC, but DC is losing
at a rate of 4% while Marvel is losing at a rate of 21%.

Social Media
Marvel is doing very thing right as far as its social media marketing goes. Dc Comics as
a competitor is way behind marvel. Dc Comics has a lot of scope to improve in social
media marketing by emphasizing on content and crowd sourcing.

Website
The website of Marvel is more interactive and unambiguous compared to the dc comics.
This has helped marvel with lower bounce rate which will help them in better ranking.