Softball Bat Marketing

First off, this entry has nothing to do with digital marketing, just a note on marketing in general. About 20 years ago I had the opportunity to work for a company by the name of Hillerich & Bradsby (H&B) out of Louisville, Kentucky. H&B is a family owned business that has roots tracing back to the late 1800s. One the company's core product offerings is the baseball bat brand Louisville Slugger. In 1989 when I worked with H & B baseball products they were experiencing a real down turn in the bat business. Young players were realizing a number of other sporting opportunities and as a result registration growth in the sport had begun to stabilize and decline. As a leading supplier to this market, H&B was faced with the challenge of increasing their market share and growing their sales in a period of declining demand. Enter the marketing guys.

When people get tired of a product or a customer base declines a common strategy is to get the consumer to upgrade. Give them a reason to buy a new bat. The first place H & B turned was to their research and development team to give them a competitive edge. They had their engineers scope out a space age material used by NASA in space shuttle fuselage that would help them make high performance bats. Using CU31 alloy, a new bread of high-end bat was created and branded the Louisville Slugger Tournament Pro Series (TPS). The new bat was made from an ultralight weight alloy that supposedly gave the batter a new level of hitting power. No one else had this technology so H&B could charge a premium for their product. They introduce one of the first +$100.00 bat products supporting it with a massive marketing initiative targeted at building brand awareness for TPS.

Speed a head to 2008, the average softball bat is now selling for between $250 and $400 dollars. Those who can't afford the price tag are buying used bats on eBay. Twenty years ago retailers laughed when I told them they should be selling +$100 softball bats. The market didn't understand the value proposition. Today, thanks to a genius marketing strategy, players now feel they need them. What the hell happened?

As volume dropped H & B realized they had to bring the average cost per item up in order to grow bat sales. They saw an opportunity to bring the bat up market by introduce new technology and changing customer perception. They also knew how serious some of the recreational players were about their game and felt that these players would pay a lot more money for a product that would make the ball go further. How much more was the only unknown variable. Over the past twenty years H & B has continually innovated and marketed to this target audience while steadily edging the average cost of the product upwards constantly testing the consumer's price threshold.

Today most players expects to pay $300 for a bat in order to get the edge they need. But here's the interesting thing, the ball diamonds haven't gotten any bigger and the last time I attended a softball game(about 2 weeks ago) I don't remember seeing any home run records set by people using the +$300 bat. Just another proof point for the power of good marketing. If done with great insight marketing can completely change perception. Pretty demand amazing how H & B managed to convince their customers that an aluminum bat is actually worth 300% more in 2008 than it was in 1989.

Olympics go Social

Where better to use Social Media then as part of an Olympic Games marketing campaign. Lenovo, a Worldwide supplier of innovation, is sponsoring a site that allows followers to get an inside perspective on athletes from around the world. Voices of the Olympic Games is a aggregation of blogs with a sorting tool that allows you to quickly and easily sift through the thousands of blog entries be post by hundreds of athletes. Lenovo partnered with Google to create this incredibly real approach to covering the Olympics. The site adheres to the best practices outlined by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. None of the athletes are required to mention anything about Lenovo. There is no editorial management of the site's content. It's just real content from real athletes who share their thoughts with the rest of the world!

To compliment the blogging, Lenovo created Facebook applications for each country. Users can add the application to their profiles and view the blog posts through the Facebook interface. The application leverages the viral aptitude of Facebook by encourage participants to invite their friends to become fans of the user's country rewarding the user for the number of referrals they generate. It displays a summary view of how many fans there are for each country encouraging the user to invite more friends to elevate their favorite country's ranking . Over 100,000 Facebookites have downloaded the application.

So why do it? Why would Lenovo invest millions of dollars in this initiative? They see the value of connecting their brand to an incredibly powerful information source that will get worldwide exposure. They know that the site will have an extremely high rate of visitor recurrence. They know that it will get passed around to other enthusiasts. They're looking to create online brand awareness and its working because until now I had no idea who they were or what they did.

Serch Engine Optimization Tips

Search engine optimization is becoming very important as more and more people load terabytes of data online. Massive amounts of text, video and photos are being uploaded everyday. I new culture of information sharing is evolving and with it comes a massive spike in the amount of data loaded on the web. As the amount grows it becomes exceedingly important to optimize content for search engines. Unfortunately, the big search engines don’t make this easy with their secret search algorithms. Optimization becomes more of a guessing game with perpetual iterations of change. That said, there are numerous books and opinions on how to generate high rankings, but they're all based on opinion so here's mine.

First off and probably foremost, don’t try to be a hacker. Creating ghost pages on your site packed with keywords or posting hundreds of external links won’t help your cause. Today’s search engine crawlers are very intelligent and have a memory for methods targeted at circumventing the system. They will often demoted or delist a site if there is malicious activity so keep it real.

Focus on the content and how it is laid out. When you create your online presence define a group of descriptors that you feel represent what a searcher would enter if they were looking for your site. Remember that the more generic you are the more challenging it will be to differentiate yourself from the competition. There are many tools available to help you determine what people most often search. A great example of this is Google’s Keyword Tool. It allows the potential Adwords advertiser to get a snapshot of the competitive landscape for keywords. Users can look at individual words or phrases and determine how popular they are in search queries. Close review of these results can help to identify words that you could use in your content to help elevate search results.

When you write the content for your site make sure you pay close attention to the words used. Crawlers look for references that continually occur throughout a site. Make sure your keywords appear as often as possible. When possible use them in page titles. Make sure your page titles are not images, use header tags to ensure the search engine crawler can read the content.

Anchor tag or link text is also very important. The text inside of these tags should contain keywords as well. Avoid the generic “Click Here” line.

Keywords can also be placed in page URLs. With all the dynamic content on the web, URLs have become increasingly complex and quite often completely unrepresentative of their content. They often contain numbers and obscure character strings that mean nothing to a search engine. Where possible use clean URLs that contain keyword descriptions. For example, if you have page containing XYZ widgets the URL to the page should be www.example.com/XYZwidget/ as opposed to www.example.com/?id=41&content/43/32/67 .

Crawlers do just that, they crawl the web looking for content building huge indexes to help people find information. Links to and from your site form the roadway for Crawlers. Much like a spider web, the closer you are to the center the more pathways there are to your location. Since we want the Crawler to visit our site as frequently as possible it makes sense that there be as many pathways as possible. Internal and external linking is a very important part of SEO. Getting other sites to link to your site will help to increase Crawler traffic making it more visibility and elevating its ranking.

But visibility means nothing if a Crawler reaches your site and there isn’t anything new to index. Continually adding and updating your site forces Crawlers to constantly re-index its contents. Continue activity on a site helps to makes it look more popular in the eyes of the search engine. Blogs and other social media devices are great tools for organically growing a site’s content. The UGC created by these tools will also increases the number of internal and external links on the site.

Once you have optimized your site monitor its ranking and make adjustments. The job of optimizing a website for search engines is a perpetual effort. Use tools like Google’s Webmaster Package to see how people are finding your site. Webmaster provides a ranking review and will show you historical information for the past 6 months. When you look at the results watch closely for keywords that you haven’t considered in the past. If applicable incorporate them into the content.

Use analytics to review user patterns on the site. Note how your visitor’s use the site and see if there usage is related to the keywords you have selected. Are they finding the information you want them to find? If not try moving it around or re-writing it. Sometimes what you think is perfectly clear may mean something completely different to the visitor.

Finally, have a look at what your content looks like to a search engine to make sure it can see everything you want it to see. Turn off Javascript and style sheet functionality in your browser window and look at the content. Mozilla’s Firefox has a handy like tool set called Firebug that will allow you to turn off this functionality and see what a search engine sees when it visits your site. A well-built site should show a page of content nicely laid out much like a well-written book. Titles highlighted and content aligned in paragraph form.

So in my opinion organic search engine optimization is all about content. Using the right words in the right places and making sure they are visible to Crawlers is a must. Creating pathways to your site by using external links will help increase Crawler awareness while continually updating content will elevate popularity.