Case Study: Susan Hamilton, OffBeat Business Media
What were your biggest frustrations with your previous website? In what ways is your new website an improvement?
I went to Shari with a bunch of website alterations I had done myself moderately well to absolutely poor, to what I call ‘band-aid’ fixes. After a year of that I had ended up with a website flow that worked moderately at best for updates, but confused visitors, which in turn impacted conversions. As a new network working on vision and execution with a very different focus, I knew I would have to be crystal clear with our value proposition – and we weren’t.
Home page before restructuring the website
Issues I needed solved:
I had combined two websites into one to get the functionality I needed, and used navigation tabs to move visitors from one arena to the next. This divided my SEO focus and made the local family business media benefits we offer unclear to a market already resistant to creating their own media. Where question marks exist, people don’t purchase.
We don’t provide a ‘video marketing service’, instead, we sell online talk television, radio, podcast, magazine, and advertisement production for the preservation and enhancement of local small family business brands, specifically to build an alternative network focused on them. It’s a mouthful, so we had to be very clear breaking that down into business solutions for the potential host and advertiser, as well as reach the local family business market using the media we provide, that tend to trust internet business advice from other business owners.
New website home page with a focused message and streamlined navigation.
Our library had become full of testimonials that needed to be active on our website. In addition, we needed a video FAQs page to help answer common questions and keep viewers engaging longer.
We needed each program to be featured according to either audio or video, and each host to benefit from a media page that supported advertising.
Each program page features all media produced per show, along with advertiser banners.
We needed revised membership language and a clarified event calendar, and a social media approach that would accommodate us at this stage of business. At early adopter prices, our cost to outsource was a serious concern, but without management at this stage, we risked losing the market favor we had earned.
How Zero to Sixty Marketing, LLC Came to The Rescue:
First, Shari spent significant time with me talking through our network goals. In the beginning, we both saw the accomplishments I was trying to achieve as still requiring 2 websites, but after segmenting and mapping, and Shari’s continued research on available technologies, we realized we could quickly get to a point where one website would be more efficient.
Then we had to work through each of the opportunities we wanted our hosts to have to support their financial growth with our network. Shari coupled that with an SEO perspective so our efforts would be amplified.
Shari used her knowledge of tools and capabilities, resourcefulness and dedication, to focus in on the end game while narrowing in on each particular enhanced solution we wanted our network to solve for the local family business. Our unique understanding of this market, and Shari’s experience to validate not only the problems we needed to solve for them, but the additional SEO and social media advantages we needed to gain for them, made the OffBeat Business Media website a welcome challenge that will get us to the next level quickly. Our hosts are making money, our sponsors are happy, and we’re quickly gaining ground in an arena that has national implications! Thank you Shari Voigt and Zero To Sixty Marketing for seeing our vision and helping us conquer a major hurdle as we continue to build our network.