Making Waves, Digitally
Digital Marketing in a Physical World
As a newcomer to Nanaimo, it was important for me to find a way that I could integrate myself into the community, so I quickly found myself volunteering as a coach for a local youth sports team. This team was dealing with a recruitment problem, and I got to work looking for a fix for this problem. The way you market yourself, either as a person, business, or sports team in this instance, is always going to be the driving force behind getting the audience that’s right for you. Looking at the marketing strategy that the team was using to bring in recruits, something was not working. Something I found out right away, was that we lacked a PPC marketing strategy even though we had run Facebook ads for over a year.
Moving Forward with a Digital Marketing Strategy
I decided to champion this project, at least the digital marketing strategy part of it. The team had previously spent most of their marketing time and budget on physical, print media that was not yielding much results, and because of the limitations of print media we had no way to track how well this strategy was doing. We did not have much of a website presence and lacked the ability to make edits on the site, so developing an SEO strategy was out of the question. Instead I focused on social media marketing, with Facebook and Instagram being identified as our platforms with the most active user base. I spent some time creating new and interesting creatives to use, identified our target audience and started from there.
Gathering Results
After running our first week of ads, we had a better idea of what a successful PPC strategy would look like for us. We were able to interact with the parents of potential players, and find out what their questions were about signing up so that in our next round of ads, we could try to answer those questions beforehand. Then after another week, we started to see our ads performing better than those from other teams in the league, even though these teams had been around longer and developed more of a social media presence. Our new PPC marketing plan was working. Now we just had to convert this new awareness into conversions, which in this case was sign ups. We had beaten our competitors on the online rankings, but would that be enough?
A good PPC Strategy; is that all it takes?
Unfortunately, in the end things didn’t work out the way we had hoped. Sometimes having a well crafted and thought out SEO strategy and using crisp, fresh creatives with ads isn’t enough. Our problem ended up being that we were in an oversaturated market, with a dwindling number of prospective clients (players). Does that mean that it was an unsuccessful marketing strategy? Not necessarily, as there was valuable information gained that can potentially be used next year to try things again. Running a business(or a team) is not about crafting the perfect, foolproof plan and then relying on said plan to carry you forward. Instead it is about building a working plan, and then changing that plan as you find out more about how you can better impact your customers(players).
