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:

http://www.basehockey.ca/

The presentation was conducted on Nov. 30^th 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 1^st 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.

Article review: 4 Internet Marketing Trends For 2011
Article URL: http://www.designdamage.com/4-internet-marketing-trends-for-2011/

This is an article written in 2010. Although we are approaching the end of 2011, I find this article still contains useful information for internet marketers.

The author mentioned 4 trends.
1. The Return of Direct Marketing
Now everyone has got a blog, web site, and social media presence (Facebook, Twitter or/and LinkedIn) and YouTube video channel. How to be different? The author says it turns out to be direct response marketing. This is an intriguing and I believe the author is very right. Direct marketing is to solicit direct responses from consumers for a specific product and service. Usually, there is an offer or a call to action in the message.

To make a direct response marketing campaign successful, marketers need to segment target audience. All the above mentioned blog, web site, social media and video channel provide comprehensive information about the online visitors. By analyzing where visitor were from, what pages they visited, how long they stayed in which pages and what comment they made, marketers can make more informed segmentation. Also, with all the internet marketing analysis tools, marketers can better analyze the result of a direct response marketing campaign.

2. The Raise of Social Metrics
This is true. Web and social analytics tools are very popular. Nowadays, it is hard to find a site without Google Analytics. Email marketing tool offers lists of information about if an email was opened, when and if a link in an email was clicked and when, and by whom. Other social media and inbound marketing analytics tools, such as HootSuite and Hubspot, offer report and data more than an average marketer can consume.

In our Internet Market course, HootSuite is mentioned several times by our professor and guest speakers. I think I will let our marketing team look into it seriously.

3. Focus Shifts from Tactical to Strategic
After several years of rapid development in social media, the trend is clear that social media is more and more popular. Facebook has more than 800 million active users and Twitter has more than 100 active users.

Many companies have passed the experiments and wait-and-see phase and are actively engaging in social media marketing. To execute consistent and predictable campaigns instead of one-shot-style ones, companies are moving from tactical to strategic way. Social media strategy and budget are increasingly included in high level marketing plans.

4. Video Marketing Becomes Mainstream
To emphasize the importance of video marketing, the author mentioned a finding from a YouTube marketing company saying that “Americans watch more videos a month on YouTube than they conduct searches on Google”. I believe since this statement is made by the president of a YouTube marketing company, the statement is very much biased. From my personal experience, my search in Google is the number one activity I do online.

The statement of “A video is 50 times more likely to get a first-page Google ranking than a text page” is very powerful. Again, I think the statement is biased and inaccurate. I was personally involved in several SEO projects and recently we hired a professional SEO company in US to help us with our search engine ranking, but I cannot remember any of the SEO consultants or previous SEO articles I read said that a video has such a huge advantage over a text page.

But although there is no reference or survey to back this statement up, I have sent an email to our market team and let them look into this article and see if we can do more about our YouTube channel.

Last week I our team project meeting, I made a recommendation of having more keywords in Base Hockey’s social media presence. Some of my team members did not agree with me.

I agree that we should not include too many keywords in postings to make the posts more human readable and engaging. Still, I insist that companies should include more keywords in their social media profile. From my experience, people may use keyword to search in social media to find things. With keyword in your social presence, it will be easier for people to find your content. Also, confirmed by Google search quality team leader, Matt Cutts (blog: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/) that Google does collect content in Facebook and Twitter account profile to judge what keywords are related to a business’s offerings. So, by including keywords in your social media content, your web site can rank higher for specific keywords.

I did a Facebook iPad giveaway contest several months ago. The campaign was quite successful. After that campaign, our Facebook page is more active.

This is our Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/comm100

Here is the screenshot of our contest page:

The url of the content landing page is:
http://www.comm100.com/landing/winipad2.aspx

The ways we let people know about the contest are:
1. Web site
2. Our own blog
3. Our social channels, like Facebook, Twitter
4. Newsletter to our subscribers

Lesson learned: If we integrated Twitter together with the Facebook campaign, the result could be better.

Just a quick share. Thanks.

According to a survey of MarketingSherpa, email marketing, search engine optimization and social media are the 3 main areas that markets plan to invest more in their marketing campaigns. In Comm100, besides customer service software applications, we also provide email marketing software, Comm100 Email Marketing.

To integrate social media and email marketing:

1. Promote your social presence, like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, in email so people can find your social presence easily.

2. Provide a web edition of your email content and enable social sharing in your email.

3. Provide an email content level sharing method, so people can post your pre-set content to their social media.

4. Grow your email list in your social media.

Usually, social media is viewed as a conversation channel and email is viewed as a promotional channel. When you integrate these 2 parts together, you can get the most out from our campaigns.

Comm100 provides free customer communication and customer service software for businesses. To encourage our user base to talk more about Comm100 to engage people and improve our search ranking, we launched our Help Us Help You program on Oct. 24th, 2011.

Basically, we make some our new features not free and people must write articles about their true experience with Comm100 in online communities. Each activity (such as blog entry, Facebook like) has different points. People need to earn their points first and then use their points to “pay” for the not free features.

This program is really powerful. Just in the first week of launch we received more than 700 social mentioning and discuss in Facebook, Twitter, forum and blogs.

Social media is now really important for businesses to connect with their customers. At Comm100, we use Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to engage with customers. Comm100 provides live chat, ticket, email marketing, forum, knowledge base and help desk software for small and medium businesses.

In an effort to create more professional and engaging content for our social media marketing program, we did some research and tried to find a social media consulting company for us.

I had a chance to speak with Debbie at SOYA Marketing, a Vancouver based social media and PR company. Debbie believes store is the cornerstone of all social media marketing campaigns. “Story are what connect people. Social media is about storytelling”. Besides the regular consulting work, they also integrate training session into their program.

I think what they do is the right way to do social media marketing. But due to the limit of budget and other priorities. I hope we can work with SOYA sometime early next year.

Here is the screenshot of Soya’s web page:

Facebook Like Button is a simple yet powerful way to let your web site visitors to share your content with their friend or like your Facebook page without leaving your site.

The details info of Facebook Like Button can be found at:
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/

Adding a Facebook Like Button using Facebook plug-ins is very easy. However, there are many web sites that are not utilizing the plug-in. They usually put a Facebook icon on their pages and like that icon to their Facebook page. This way cannot provide a streamlined experience for web site visitors.

For example, in our team project, on http://www.basehockey.ca/, we have:

As we can see that buy using the Facebook plug-in, the user experience is greatly improved:

As we can see from the screenshot, visitors can like Comm100’s Facebook page directly and go to Comm100’s Facebook page by clicking “COmm100 on Facebook”.

There are several other formats for Facebook Like Button. You even show how many fans you have, who the latest fan is, or what people are talking.

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