Marucci Baseball Bats

Name a company these days that doesn’t have to market?  There aren’t many.  Even the toll road system in the State of Texas is advertising and marketing.  One that isn’t and has seen a 45% increase in sales this past year is Marucci, a baseball bat company out of Baton Rouge.

I learned about this story through an episode on NPR’s Marketplace called “High Def A Home Run Bat Maker“.   The angle on the story was that Marucci doesn’t advertise.  However, they are used by a long list of major league players and with the onset of High Definition Television, views can now see the logo and names on a baseball bat.  Yes, viewers are that in tune.  In an industry that is now selling advertising space on practice jerseys, free advertising real estate such as this is an exception to the norm.  On television that is!

Google’s unified search provides natural search engine results that includes both video and images.  This advertising is free!  Here are my recommendations for taking advantage of this:

• Have your web developer use ALT tags on all of your images with a one, two, or three keyword pair. (e.g. Marucci Baseball Bats)
• Name the actual file after your keyword with images (e.g. marucci-baseball-bats.jpg)
• Create a hologram version of your images that includes something such as a phone number or web address.
• Try placing your images on your website as well as others (E.g. vendors, article directories, flickr, press releases, etc)

Images do catch the human eye and they do sell.  Not all of us can be as lucky as Jack Marucci; yet, most of us can still take advantage of Google images today!  For more information, see Matt Cutts official post and video on the topic of images and search.

Small Businesses have always struggled with online marketing as they require attractive, SEO compatible websites with content management functionality on a shoe string budget.  On one side of the spectrum you have template driven websites from all of the usual “one to the masses” suspects (e.g. GoDaddy, Yahoo, Office Live, etc).  On the other side of the spectrum you have tool and wizard based approaches from software companies that put a small business owner in “do-it-yourself” mode.  Generally these approaches are affordable and have content management components but they either look horrible or create a complete disaster from an SEO perspective.  This leaves the typical small business owner with only one option which is to step into the world of a custom developed website.  Unfortunately, just because a small business owner pays a lot of money for a website DOES NOT mean that they will get an SEO compatible website or that it will even look good.  It does almost guarantee that their website will take twice as long to develop. Enter WordPress. . . .

WordPress is a blogging platform that has slowly evolved into a light content management system that is idea for small business owners.  It is easy to install and end user manageable.  Best of all, search engines love it and it is very extensible. The extensibility piece is very important as it can save a small business owner hundreds to thousands of dollars in custom development fees to add business critical functionality to their website.  It is important to keep in mind that WordPress has two flavors.  The WordPress.Com flavor is a free online blog service.   The WordPress.Org flavor is where you can download the free website software that drives the discussion in this article.  Both are owned and maintained by Automattic out of San Francisco, CA.

What do I mean by extensibility?  WordPress’s core platform is designed to support “plugins”. The WordPress open source community has literally written thousands of plugins for WordPress. In our office we always say, “If you think you need to hire a developer for something fancy on your site, there is probably a plugin for it!” Need your site to look good on an iPhone? There is a WordPress plugin for that. How about incorporate lead generation forms? There are several WordPress plugins for that. Embed audio, video, RSS feeds, moving pictures? There are a bunch of plugins for that. The beauty for a small business owner is that installing and configuring plugins is generally point and click.  That is what I mean by extensibility.

So why don’t you see more small business sites built on WordPress? The answer is that WordPress sites tend to look “WordPressy”. A typical WordPress site looks like a blog. It is square and lacks those things that just jump off the page. That is until a couple of really good theme designers came on the scene. These are StudioPress and Press75.  Both StudioPress and Press75 have a collection of themes that include a theme that is customizable for small business websites.

Studio Press’s Corporate Theme for Small Business Websites

Studio Press Corporate Theme

StudioPress’s small business website theme is called StudioPress Corporate Child Theme .  This business website theme contains graphical elements and menu details that are what you would expect from a higher end site. The theme comes in two different graphic color packages and includes original PSDs so that a designer can very easily customize the look and feel of the site.  Depending on the customizations needed, a small business website with StudioPress’s Corporate Theme could run hundreds of dollars to a thousand or more.  If a small business owner installs WordPress from their hosting and installs The Corporate Theme as is, they’ll be out $70 plus hosting which is very affordable.

Press 75′s Cafe Press for Small Business Websites

Press75 Cafe Press

The Press75 small business website theme is called Cafe Press.  Out of the box, Cafe Press is a restaurant style website theme.  However, it is very customizable to fit a variety of small business genres.  It also has theme functionality built in so that customizations to key text such as address and contact information is done right through the WordPress user administration versus having to pay someone to get into the PHP.  Like all Press75 themes, Cafe Press has great looking graphics and overall site functions.  This theme uses the Simple Thumbnail plugin to easily add images to the various pages on the site.  Unlike normal images, these are designed in a way to encourage click throughs.  The cost of customization and installation should be considered comparable with the numbers I reference for StudioPress above.

Next Steps

If WordPress and a small business website theme is for your business, you really only need to do a few more things.  If you haven’t done so, buy a domain name.  This can be accomplished at GoDaddy or a reputable registrar.  Don’t get sucked into private registrations or buying 10 domain names with the .ORG and .NET of each.  After you have a domain name, procure website hosting that has a one touch installation of WordPress.  A couple that we use are GoDaddy (call to have them walk you through the WordPress one touch installation) or Media Temple. After your WordPress is installed, use your hosting providers online tools to upload your theme.  You might want to add a couple of critical plugins.  The ones we deem essential are:

• Platinum SEO or All in One SEO Pack for manipulation of Title and Description tags with in a post.
• Google Analytics for WordPress to easily be able to add Google’s analytics and tracking.
• Google XML Sitemaps to automatically create and update an XML sitemap for the Google bot (and others).
• WordPress Database Backup to automatically email you a copy of your WordPress site for safe keeping.*

* WP DB Backup saves the content and configurations.  You will need to keep a copy of your theme somewhere safe by copying the WP-Content folder of your installation.  Do this especially if you have customized your theme.

The State of Small Business Websites

Though the evolution of WordPress themes does take a lot of the complication out of small business websites for small business owners, the business owner still has to get the marketing part right.  Still, I’d rather see them spend the hours on crafting actionable copy and assembling stunning photos than trying to decipher which road to go down in the word of website development.  Enjoy WordPress and the themes I reference above as both have come a long way!  As a matter of fact Orangecast and our Marketing blog is driven by two installations of WordPress with a customized theme built on Press75′s Urban theme.

Back when I worked for Microsoft, I asked Bill Gates a question related to Spanish language marketing. The immediate response was that this was an “international topic whose responsibilty belonged with one of our Latin American subs”. At the time, The United States was the 4th largest Spanish speaking country in the world and the largest subsiderary for Microsoft. My point here is that often times in marketing, the neatly organized lines drawn by senior management get blurred.

Social Media has been one of those topics in the marketing world that immediately gets pushed off to the interactive division of an agency or even worse IT!   After all, it is the new kid on the block and involves both technology and marketing expertise.  Ironically, it falls right in the center of mainstream marketing and can be the element that makes or breaks a corporate marketing strategy, campaign, or initiative.

In a classic sales funnel, traditional marketing had direct impact on awareness.  Efforts were then made to publish the right reviews and testimonials to impact consideration or evaluation phase. With the rise of social media, the control of the information critical to the evaluation phase; however, has been returned to the people.

Classic Sales Funnel

As a marketer, the last thing you want to do is try and force the issue on social media like you did with customer testimonials in traditional marketing.  The Thought Pick Blog punctuates this with a list of 10 examples of social media campaign failures.  Success is more likely found by encouraging consumers. For example, instead of trying to force yet another survey on a customer, make a Twitter hash tag readily available to them so they can tweet their feedback. I am actually waiting for the day when a marketer takes the customer warranty registration process to Twitter.   Why not replace that warranty registration card we find in every product box with a list of 10 places they can share their product experience with others and get help or ideas.  After all, the warrant registration card is nothing more than a survey and the warranty attaches to the product with or without the marketing survey in the box. Why not have your customers engage interactively?

My point here is that part of marketing’s role in social media is to promote a company or brand presence in social media and encourage customers to engage. This promotion includes classic point of sale signage, employee talking points, and even reciept printout messages. Advertise that Facebook fan page, Twitter account, and/or blog and let the natural process of social media take place. The organizations who have this down the best are local news stations. These are the same local news stations that are accused of being behind the times.

The downside to encouraging social media interaction is that a marketer has to be willing to take the good with the bad.  I will have an upcoming post entitled “When Marketing Meets Operations” where we’ll look at the reality of operations’ role in social media.

Until then, take responsibility as a marketer for not only your social media efforts but for integrating them into the right elements of your traditional marketing strategy.

Dr. Tedi Koehn is a Dallas psychotherapist specializing in teen-age and adult females.  In addition to individual counseling, she has pioneered a grief recovery workshops.  Dr. Koehn turned to the Internet after consistently meeting people who had struggled through attempts to self diagnose the symptoms of grief and depression.  One of the primary goals of Dr. Koehn’s website was to provide information on a variety of symptoms incurred by teenage and adult women related to depression so that it could be discovered by parents and adults alike who were researching problems.  The goal was to put them in touch with a psychotherapist sooner than later.

In a later post, we’ll look at some of the long tail examples that come from this site.