How Killer Websites & Great Digital Marketing for Start Up Companies is Like March Madness

I love sports. And I love to draw business ideas about creating teams and starting a business from my sports experience. The competition and people trying their hardest for perfection and to win both as individuals and teams has always been something dear to my heart. This is especially true during March Madness. I'm an Advertising major alum of Brigham Young University (BYU). Long before I was a student, I loved watching BYU sports.

In the 2016/17 season BYU had more ESPN top 100 recruits on the team then ever before. Season ending injuries to their only two seniors meant that the starting lineups consisted of all freshman and sophmores and gave them a depleted bench. I believe at the time of the injuries all of the starters at that point were the ESPN 100 recruits. Some of the best young talent in the nation, but they were young and "inexperienced" players who didn't have the calming leadership of a Senior on the floor who knows what to do in specific situations to stay out of trouble. Because of this wild shots were sometimes taken and there was often a lack of effort on defense that hurt the team.

The BYU team lost (and somewhat badly) to inferior teams that they never should have lost to this last season. They were also the only team to beat Gonzoga in the regular season when they were the #1 ranked team in the nation, messing up their undefeated season the last game of the year on their own floor. Talent wise BYU could keep up with any team in the nation I believe. The problem is that they didn't always want to play defense and too many guys on the team wanted to be "the" guy. There was a lacked leadership and experience, because of the youth and it showed in more than one game. There is something to be learned from that.

In business, I'll often meet with new start up companies. Some of the minds in these companies have been brilliant, but I've seen digital marketing plans that were ill conceived or poorly implemented. Recently I started working with one startup that already had a website. On the surface the website was very nicely designed from an aesthetic standpoint but it wasn't converting I was told. I spent some time taking a look at analytics and ran some reports and found that the bounce rate for the website was nearly 80%. That meant 80% of the site traffic was hitting one page of the website and then leaving. I then discovered that a very poorly designed Google Adwords campaign was sending traffic to the wrong pages of the website that was contributing to the bounce rate, but even after fixing that that bounce rate was 15% higher than ideal. The problem was that the design of the site and more importantly the messaging was completely wrong on the site. Users were coming with a set of expectations and needs and the site wasn't fullfilling those needs.

In some ways this website and many start up companies are just like the basketball team. The pieces are there, but often times the management is so focused on just taking care of what they have to in order to run their business that critical pieces are getting missed. The "Seniors" didn't have time or weren't there to guide the "young" talent and ultimately it hurts the business.

One of the things I'm proud of that we've done at Pixo is where we have completely evolved companies through the online work that we've done I think of one recent example where the company actually changed their name and their marketing strategy because of the digital plan we put in place when we started building their online presence. In this case, their new website has a 22% bounce rate, because we helped them take the time to know their audience, find their marketplace niche and execute on a website design that frankley is killer. These guys are going up against some giant companies in their industry and if they keep on the path that they are currently on, they will soon be known as giants themselves within the next few years because they are disrupting the marketplace through their innovation.

Need help with your digital marketing and online presence? Call us at 720-334.7496 to get a free consulation. We would love to put a killer digital marketing strategy in place for you.