Our team project is to present an internet marketing plan and recommendation for Base Hockey, a local Burnaby based custom hockey stick company. The web site of Base Hockey is:
The presentation was conducted on Nov. 30th in Base Hockey’s facility. The whole presentation took about 1 hour and 4 Base team members, including Cliff Ronning, were in the presentation. Cliff Ronning is a professional NHL level hockey player.
In our team, except Jeff, no one has played hockey before. This enables us to view Base’s existing online presence from an outsider’s view. In Base Hockey’s home page, there is no mentioning of hockey stick. The marketing team in Base just assumes that the customers know Base Hockey provide hockey stick. This is a big problem. According to the web analytics of the company’s web site, www.basehockey.ca, about 95% percent of the traffic is from searching the keyword of “base hockey”. The traffic from the keywords of the product category, product benefit and competitor brand name is very limited. So basically the ones go to basehockey.ca are the ones that know Base Hockey already. The site is not attracting new potential customers.
The Base team was surprised to see that there is even no the word of “hockey stick” or “custom hockey stick” on their site.
Right after that, we held a small SEO workshop by asking what keywords should be used to attract potential customers. The Base team actively participated in the discussion. They talked about what teenage, parents and adult recreational player would search. I noticed that they were talking about not only hockey sticks, but also life around hockey, how to improve skills and connect with people. Our suggestion of targeting these keywords is to use blog with different articles for different keywords.
The main navigation menu of the site is also an issue. Currently there are 15 menu items. With these many menu items, visitors can get lost easily. Our suggestion is to rearrange the menu and only keep the most important ones at the 1st level and push the not-so-important menu items into second level. They total agree with our suggestions.
Base Hockey is doing well in social media and they said Facebook was the best thing they did in internet marketing. The official Facebook has more than 3,000 fans and seems many of them are engaged. Like the main web site, the description of the company in Facebook and Twitter account do not even have the word of Hockey Stick. Also, the brand images used in the web site, FackBook and Twitter are not consistent. The Base team agreed that the branding should be compelling and consistent across different communication channels.
From my point of view, the company is not doing a lot of inbound online marketing. They do a lot of offline marketing activities. They are very interested in combining the online and offline marketing activities together. One of our suggestions is to use Text Message to communicate with the audience, since the read rate of cell phone text message is close to 100%. They are very interested in this idea, they immediately talked about re-engineering their current CRM system so they could capture the phone number of the teenager besides their parents. They were also very interested in building online community for hockey players.
To sum up, the presentation was very successful and the Base team was actively engaged. The team said they had recorded all the points and would begin to implement some of them right away. It is so good to see that our suggestions can be implemented in the real world and we can help Base Hockey improve their internet marketing campaign.