Digital Internet Marketing

Digital Marketing for Sport – 3 Reasons Why Sport Marketing Needs Social Media 

Sponsoring an athlete, sports team or an event is not just about signing a big cheque and getting your company name on the side of a car, a sign in the stadium, or even your logo on the shirt. For those of you that know me, you know that Sport is my passion and I’m also involved in business consultancy and digital marketing as well, so there is my connection!  I have a passion for rugby, cricket, football, windsurfing – well anything that moves actually! So here is my take on Digital Marketing for Sport:

Basically, if you want your investment in sponsorship to be an effective marketing tool, you need to increase your initial sponsorship just to promote the fact that you have a sponsorship deal. So, if you’re sponsoring a rugby team, you need to tell your customers about it, and get them to support and cheer for your team.  If you’re sponsoring a football team, you need to get your best customers into the corporate box to watch the game. Even if you’re sponsoring a small local village football team, you need to find a way to bring the parents into your pub or restaurant after the game.  So you need to spend a lot just to let everyone know that you are even sponsoring the team or event in the first place.

The Same Old Problem – You Can’t Effectively Measure Traditional Marketing

Sports marketing is no longer just about getting money from big companies.  For the campaign to be effecive, you have to be able to demonstrate the ROI of a sponsorship deal.  Measurement and analytics for off-line marketing are traditionally very difficult.  It is almost impossible to know which radio or tv ad actually increased sales, and which ones lost money. You don’t know which billboards brought visitors to your website. And you certainly don’t know which logo placement or “after match” interview  was responsible for any increase in sales.

But social media can do all of that, and much more . Here are three things social mediacan do for sports marketers:

1. Social Media Can Prove ROI in Sports Marketing

The great thing about social media is that it’s easy to demonstrate the ROI to your business. With tools like Google Analytics you can build an effective measurement system to see how many people found your website, requested additional information, downloaded a white paper or purchased something on-line.  You can measure the success of a campaign and figure out which variables, messages, day of the week and even time of day brought the best results. You can see if you your website gets spikes in traffic before, during, or after an event and whether the spikes are taking place in a particular location or city, or if they’re more regional and spread out. You can even set up different URLs, landing pages and do A/B split testing to see which variables brought the best results. With social media, you can see who’s talking about your brand, manage your reputation and interact with the ”fans” who are the most vocal, whether these are positive or negative. You just can’t do that with a billboard, radio commercial or a TV ad.

2. Social Media Can Help to Grow a Sports Marketing Audience

There are many social media tools out there that can help.  In fact, the list is almost endless and there are also lots of ways to connect with customers online.  Facebook and Twitter are obvious places to start.  Twitter is a great tool for interactive connections with your favourite team or sport.  You can use tools like Twitterment, NearbyTweets, and even Twitter’s own search function to find people who is interested in your team or sport. Use Twitterfall or TweetDeck’s search feature to watch for discussions about your team or the event that you are planning.  Make sure that you connect with these fans, and discuss the team, the players, the drivers, the horses, the weather and the event itself.  The main point is not try and sell them anything or talk about your company. However, you can hold a special contest or make a special offers  For example, if our team finishes in a certain place or higher, the first 10 people to tweet us gets a coupon for a free widget or a  discount on a particular widget.  But other than that, just talk about the things that interests the fans because this is not about YOU!

3. Social Media Can Deepen Relationships With Fans and Customers

So if you are sponsoring a horse racing event, enhance your customers’ experience on race day by live blogging, tweeting, and video streaming from the stands, the riders, the sponsor’s tent, or even the finishing line.

• Get some behind-the-scenes shots (assuming you get permission from the team) at what it looks like in changing room.
• Hold a special Twitter chat with a racing driver or one of the team members.
• Have a give a special video greeting or tour of the stadium for fans.
• Set up a blog and ask different team members to blog about their experiences over the season, complete with photos and videos.

Social Media should be an integral part of your Digital Markeing plan. The big advantage of Social media is that it  lets fans see the “behind the scenes” events they might be missing and that they are very interested in.  Help them feel like they’re part of the experience and get them involved. By doing this, you make them feel more like they are a part of the team. They’re insiders, they get special knowledge about the team, the athletes and the event. By feeling  connected, they’ll become more of a fan, not only of the team, but of the organization or brand that helped them get there.

At WSI we are experts in generating leads for your business, enhancing your credibility and helping you stay in touch with your customers or “fans”.  Social Media is one of our core competencies, so give us a call and we’ll help grow your business.  Use the contact form or just give us a call on 01580 819529.

Significance of Sitemaps

Today, there are numerous Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques that help you to optimise your website, but one technique whose importance is undervalued at times is aSitemap. A Sitemap is really a page on your website that indicates the complete structure of your site including various parts, links among them, and so forth. In short, it gives an in depth listing of your website layout. Sitemaps are extremely useful as they make site navigation easy for visitors plus help search engines index the site.

Sitemaps commonly fall into two categories. One is a HTML version which is for human website visitors and helps them navigate through the whole site and find the information they are searching for. The other Sitemap is an XML version that is intended for the search engine to know about all the pages on the website including all the URLs that may go unnoticed by the search engine spidering your website.

Sitemap advantages - There are several benefits of using sitemaps and these are listed below:

Quick Navigation - A sitemap helps a visitor know where to locate particular information he is seeking on the site. It acts as a guide to enable easy navigation through the site without wasting time to find information.

Search Engine Indexing - Sitemaps help search engines learn about any updates that you just make on your website. It is not guaranteed that the search engine bot will instantly index the updated webpages.  However, the modifications will certainly be indexed considerably faster when compared with when there isn’t any sitemap.Broken Links - If you have a site that contains a lot of content pages which are not properly linked to each other or have broken links then using sitemaps will help search engine bots to index your pages better.

Dynamic Content on Site - Sitemaps are also very helpful if you have a site where your content is updated or changed frequently. The search engines can be immediately informed of this change through your sitemap. However, this will not assure you that your changed pages will be indexed right away.

New Site - If you have a new site with very few links in it, sitemaps can be very helpful. This is because the search engine spider crawls through documents by following links from one page to another and if your site does not contain proper links, it would be difficult for the bots to index them.

Sitemap Process - To create a Sitemap for your website there are a few simple steps that you need to follow. First, a Sitemap has to be generated after which it needs to be uploaded to the site and then finally Google needs to be notified about it.

Sitemap Generation - A sitemap can be generated in two ways. One is by using an online tool that can help you generate the sitemap and the other is by downloading and installing a sitemap generator.  The first option is much easier compared to the second one as there are several online sitemap generation tools available free of cost that make your work simpler. The second option of downloading and installing a sitemap generator is a little difficult but enables you to gain a better control of the output.

Uploading and Submitting Your Sitemap - Once your sitemap is created, it has to be uploaded to your website and Google needs to be notified about it. In order to notify Google you have to add your site to your Google Sitemap account. However, if you don’t already have a Google Sitemap account, this is the time for you to create one. Also, it is important to know that adding a sitemap to your account requires a verification indicating you are the legal owner of the website.

Additionally it is important to know that Google does not guarantee that all the URLs in your sitemap are going to be spidered and indexed. For instance, if there are any image URLs in your sitemap, these will not be crawled and indexed. However, your sitemap can help the search engine to know more about your site layout which will help it to crawl your site better and faster when compared to not having a sitemap. Webmasters usually benefit from submitting sitemaps and will not be punished for it. 

Learn more about a specialised digital marketing strategy for your firm at http://www.wsionlinebiz.co.uk or give us a call at 01580 819529.

Social Media is all pervasive and finding its way into many forms of personal and business life.  It can also work in the workplace as organisations can turn to social media platforms to improve communication with their staff, it has been suggested.

Martin Lyne, SME marketing director of Everything Everywhere, the communications company behind the Orange brand, said that positive communication benefits businesses. He recommended that business leaders take advantage of technologies offered by smartphones such as videoconferencing and emails on the go. They are predicting up to 15% improvements in productivity in one of their latest reports.  You can read the full report here.

‘Ensuring your company has a presence on social media networks including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are a great start for any small and medium-sized businesses wanting to increase their profile using social media,’ Mr Lyne added.

‘This will not only increase your company profile on search engines including Google, but it can also be used as a recruitment tool to grow your business.’  Last week, a report from Everything Everywhere/Orange suggested that good communication skills are crucial to creating a strong business. Being well connected and having a good online presence also boosts an organisation’s success. Here at WSI Digital Marketing in Sussex we work with client to help them design and implement great social media strategies to help clients make operational efficiencies and also increase revenues and save costs.

How do I get inspiration for my business blog so that I know what kind of articles, videos or podcasts to post is a question that at WSI Digital Marketing we are often asked. One of the great ways is to read other peoples’ business blogs – and not always blogs in your own business niche as you can be inspired to develop content learning from others.

Here is a video with 3 tips:

So here are another seven ideas that might help you develop a content strategy for your business blog:

1. Get ideas from your RSS feeds – remember to model not copy articles respecting the copyright of the original site where the content is posted and always give attribution and a link to the source article

2. Explore the blogs listed in the Technorati blog directory HERE or in other niche directories

3. Review the list of business blogs that are listed in other peoples blog rolls – the list that many bloggers have on the side bar of their business blog

4. Do a search within Google using the Google Blog search engine to find other business blogs for inspiration
5. Review your email, your Facebook Page or Tweets that you receive for questions that your people ask you and turn those answers into blog articles

6. Think about the questions your clients and customers have asked you over the last 3 months and turn those questions into articles – but make sure that you don’t disclose confidential information about your clients

7. Look at award winners of business blogging competitions – for example the short list of the Digital Marketing Awards which was announced recently and hosted by Ashville Media – you will find the shortlist HERE or the list of blogs nominated for a blogging award for Best Business Blog with the Irish Blog Awards

Note: If you already have a business blog and are in Ireland you might be interested in being nominated for the IIA Net Visionary Awards 2010 – nominations for best business blog and best business podcast are open alongside many other categories through 2010.

What other ways do you get inspiration for content for your business blog articles and content plan?

Social Media and social networking is big in the UK, but how big really is the social media phenomena?  As you know from a previous post there are still a huge number of people in the UK that are not online.  So there is two sides to this story and you can read my recent digital post on the 10 million people that have never used the internet in the UK and what WSI in Sussex and other companies are doing about that with the sponsorship of Martha Lane Fox, the UK digital champion.

However, on the positive side and for the majority in the UK, the social media and networking train is steaming ahead and in the UK alone, about 85% of the population is online and they spend over 6 hours every day on various social media sites.  Also nearly 60% read blogs and 64% have their own personal profiles on one of the popular social network sites.

It is these sort of numbers, this level of  activity and general popularity of social networking has created interest in the forthcoming film "The Social Network". The film  "The Social Network" will make its premiere at the New York Film Festival and then spread to cinemas nationwide in the US on October 1st.  The story is based on the founding of Facebook and you can catch a brief preview of "The Social Network" on our previous blog post.

The numbers from Simply Zesty who have put together a clever video with many interesting social media related facts and figures.  Whilst these numbers apply to the online UK population, I suppose the general theme can apply to other countries as use of the internet and social media continues to grow at a massive pace.  Check out the social media numbers here on this video and you can see the original posting.

Let us know at WSI Internet Marketing what you think, do these numbers resonate with you and or your business.