Although Hollywood is known for taking huge liberties with the stories it puts on the silver screen, nearly every biographical film you see has certain elements of truth in it. This is certainly the case with Moneyball, where Brad Pitt and some dramatic screenwriting have helped to share an interesting sports idea (based on a book with the same name) with the public in general.
If you aren’t a baseball fan, or haven’t seen one of the hundreds of previews that seemed to accompany the movie’s release, then we can sum up the premise of Moneyball easily: Rather than sitting on established traditions, the general manager of a small-market team decided to evaluate players solely on statistics. The result was that the team won more games despite one of the lowest payrolls in Major League Baseball.
Doesn’t that sound a little familiar?
It should; small business owners, marketing managers, and e-commerce experts are fascinated with the idea of trying to get more out of less. Whether it’s working with niche retailing outlets or trying to squeeze high-impact marketing out of low-cost avenues like social networking, we are always looking for a better return on investment than what we’re getting right now. And yet, there’s always room for improvement, and there are always old patterns and ideas that seem to persist, even when they aren’t backed up by the numbers.
And so, the question is: Are you taking a Moneyball approach to your website?
Here are a handful of tips to help you get started on trying to get more for less:
Remember that you can’t use the numbers until you have them. Even though Google analytics, one of the most powerful pieces of metrics software out there, is freely available, a lot of companies don’t use it… or don’t use it to its full advantage. Get up close with the numbers behind your business website, because they’ll put you in a position to make better decisions.
Always build on what works first. Wherever you have found success in the past should be your starting point for future online marketing campaigns. Rather than throwing a big piece of your budget in something that might not work, put the biggest piece of it into what you know will be successful, and then experiment with the rest.
Set a time limit for any new idea to show a profit. Sometimes, you have ideas that you just know will be profitable in your business someday, but it’s getting hard to figure out when that day is ever going to arrive. Even slower-moving marketing tools like search engine optimization and social media marketing should be evaluated on a given timeline, even if it’s six months or a year down the road. Otherwise, you could keep pouring money into something that’s never going to show a profit.
Question anything that you don’t know to be true for your business or industry. Believe it or not, there are businesses that survive, and thrive, without things like SEO or an online newsletter, and others that couldn’t survive without them. Because every business and industry is different, make a point of questioning anything you don’t absolutely know can be successful and keep a close eye on the metrics.
Life isn’t often like the movies, but when you’re looking to get the most out of your business website, following the Moneyball strategy isn’t a bad way to go.
Backlinks, directory sites, onsite links, page titles, meta-tags – If you are actively involved with search engine optimization (SEO), then you’re probably familiar with these terms. They are all necessary to elevate your website on search engine rankings–but there’s something missing from this list.
CONTENT–the most important piece of the pie. What good is having great code and a bunch of links if you end up on a website with poorly written content or no content at all?
Okay, let’s dig a little deeper. So everyone knows you need content that relates to your business, products and services. And most people even know that you should have keywords in the content so search engines can find you. Well, yes, but there’s a bit more to it than dumping keywords on your site. They need to be strategically placed.
For example, which one of these sentences read better:
Brew City Marketing is a Web Design company in Milwaukee.
Brew City Marketing Web Design Milwaukee.
The one that is grammatically correct, obviously. If your content can maintain a solid and easy-to-read flow, it is more likely to create a better response from the end user.
So, how does this translate into better rankings? Well, most search engines rank content on how users react to it. If users find your website often, but don’t spend a lot of time clicking around, you will not rank as highly. Google uses its own analytics report to identify these trends and a website with good conversions and low page turnover will get a boost in rankings over a website with good conversions and high page turnover.
So it makes sense to focus on good, well written content so that the search engines find you, and the end users identify with you!
Brew City Marketing focuses on onsite SEO strategies and developing good content focused on users and how they will interact on your website.
Text marketing is permission based, relatively inexpensive, and immediate. It is a excellent way to get extremely targeted impressions because even if consumers don’t redeem the offer, 95% of them saw your business name.
Unlike other marketing methods, text messages are:
o Typically read within 15 minutes of receipt
o Redemption rates are 12-30% compared to only 1-1.5% for direct mail!
o Measurable
o Targeted
o Permission Based
o Immediate
It takes some creativity and hard work to build your list but the ROI is worth it. If you’d like to learn how to integrate text messaging into your marketing strategy, contact Brew City Marketing today! 414-208-0700
In an ideal world, there would be no need for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You would develop your website, write good content and receive a preferred ranking. Unfortunately, the world isn’t ideal and some websites must prove themselves in order to obtain better positioning.
A good way for a website to overcome this obstacle is to increase its number of backlinks. Backlinks are links on other websites that point to your website. Search engines often count a website’s backlinks to help determine its search engine ranking, popularity and importance.
Brew City Marketing employs a variety of SEO techniques to increase the number of backlinks to your site. However, the challenge lies in identifying
where and how to obtain these backlinks. Simply building a backlink isn’t enough–it needs to have a high page ranking (PR) while relating to your niche market.
Sometimes, the best backlinks are free to build (time consuming, but free), while other backlinks are bought. Brew City Marketing obtains backlinks in both manners. There are certain local websites that search engines recognize as “authority websites”–sites that hold more sway when identifying backlinks. This is a great example of how we intend to develop our clients.
Each month, as part of our SEO strategy, Brew City Marketing will create more backlinks for your website throughout the internet, making your site more relevant on Google, Yahoo, Bing and other major search engines.
If you would like to discuss our strategies call Brew City Marketing 414-208-0700
On-Site Search Engine Optimization is the foundation for future success in your search engine rankings.
Brew City Marketing uses both On-Site and Off-Site SEO strategies to help your website rank higher in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s). On-site SEO is any work that we do to your physical website. Off-site SEO is work that we do on other websites that will increase your ranking.
From time to time, the search engines change their algorithms and assign different criteria factors with the goal of making their search results more relevant to your query. When this happens, Brew City Marketing updates your code to be in compliance.
To ensure that your website is up to date with all current “best practices,” our On-Site SEO includes enhancing the following items on your website:
Alt tags
Assign keywords for all images on each page of the website
Image titles
Reverse redirect images to Google-Image search
Abstract meta tags
Add a generalization of your webpage into your page header
Classification keywords
Assign primary and secondary classification to your keywords
Robots.Google
Allows Google to crawl the webpage every 3 days
Pagerank tag
Increases overall pagerank
Serp tag
Combines meta tag and title tag for search engine results page
Subject tag
Declares the subject title of each page
Meta Keywords
Keywords related to business and services
If you need help optimizing your website for the search engines so that you can be found on Google, Yahoo, and Bing, CALL US TODAY! 414-208-0700
