How does a newer brand engage consumers in an established market?

By using social media to engage their customers and become a part of their daily life.

Who: Phoenix Bat Company

Location: Columbus, Ohio

Industry: Baseball Product Manufacturing

Challenge

Phoenix Bats makes professional-quality wood baseball and softball bats for players at all levels of play including major league baseball. Over the past few years, they have struggled to find cost-effective marketing strategies they could employ to build brand awareness in a niche market and compete effectively with larger, more established brands.

Solution

Adept began with our proprietary social media research and analysis to identify areas of opportunity for effective engagement of consumers through social media. We identified the most appropriate technologies and developed an independent strategy for engaging consumers within each platform.

We identified Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as the best platforms for finding current and potential Phoenix Bats customers.

TWITTER

• Created a branded profile where Phoenix Bats provides interesting commentary on current events in baseball, highlights specific products and pushes out Twitter follower-only promotions on a semi-regular basis.

• To reach new customers who do not currently know about Phoenix Bats, created a strategy that would encourage followers to publicly post messages to Phoenix Bats displaying our profile address in their profiles for all their followers to see.

FACEBOOK

• Developed a business profile page where we post product videos and engage fans in conversations about current events in baseball.

• To engage new sports enthusiasts, we utilize Facebook ads, encouraging sports enthusiasts to fan Phoenix Bats for a chance to win free baseball gear.

YOUTUBE

Created a branded Phoenix Bats channel on YouTube where we host all of our videos and embed them throughout all other social media properties.

Results

The results have been truly amazing. The average dollar value of a visitor to the Phoenix Bats site from Facebook and Twitter is 110% greater than a natural search engine visitor. This means that our social media strategy is reaching the ideal target market, driving highly qualified traffic to Phoenix Bats and generating incremental sales for the company.

How does a local retail business attract new customers without spending thousands of dollars in traditional advertising?

By understanding how people search for the products they carry and ensuring that they have high visibility for important keywords in the search engines.

Who: Western Reserve Decorator Fabrics

Location: Akron, Ohio

Industry: Home Goods

Challenge

Western Reserve Decorator Fabrics is a beautiful retail store in northern Ohio offering a huge selection of beautiful fabrics. They created a new website to drive traffic to their store but did not have any search engine visibility so people searching for products in their area were not finding them.

Solution

While the Adept SEO program should  be a 12 month minimum commitment, Adept is usually able to make considerable improvements to a company’s search engine visibility by doing a one-time optimization of the site.

In this example, Adept began by doing in-depth keyword research to identify “efficient keywords.” This means that we found keywords that have a high volume of search traffic but aren’t incredibly competitive. Once we identified the ideal list of keywords, we ran a “ranking report” to inventory where the Western Reserve website currently ranked for every search term in all three search engines. This report assigns an over all “search engine visibility score” for the client’s site. The score is calculated by assigning points to each keyword based on how high it ranks in each search engine. A score of 100% would mean that the site ranks number one in all three search engines for every keyword.

With the keyword research and current ranking report complete, Adept began to optimize the website. This involved changing the URL strings, revising alt tags, revising navigation elements, updating image file names, updating content, rewriting title and description tags and creating links throughout the site to important pages on the site.

Result

In less than three weeks, the Visibility Score for Western Reserve jumped from 14% to 44% and achieved a first place ranking on over 56 keywords and are on the first results page 154 times.