Meet Pin Chasers
Pin Chasers is a family-owned bowling business based in Tampa, Florida. They’ve been around for over 50 years. With three bowling centers in the Tampa Bay area, they’re a top destination for kids’ birthday parties, league bowling, family fun, and nights out with friends.
Bowling alleys are on the decline across the United States. The ones that survive (and grow!) have rebranded as full entertainment centers and embraced new marketing channels. Pin Chaser’s owner, Anthony Perrone, knew that he needed to embrace digital marketing to keep his business growing through tough times. So he turned to Big Sea to rebuild his website and incorporate HubSpot, as well as to manage his paid search and social campaigns.
The Goal: Increase Revenue
Sure, we have smaller bite-sized objectives that we target throughout the year, but our overall goal is — as it always is — to increase revenue to the bowling centers. We broke that down into specific goals for his major lines of business: casual bowling, birthday parties, and league bowling.
The Strategy: Inbound Marketing with Targeted Outbound
Pin Chasers was already doing some traditional marketing, like radio ads and billboards, but it needed another push. Inbound marketing was a good fit to aid Pin Chasers in gaining new contacts, leads, and therefore new customers and increased revenue.
We came up with an inbound marketing plan that would not only add new leads to the already robust contact lists, but also encourage leads to convert.
The Tactics:
Website Development
The first tackle was to build a website for Pin Chasers that served its needs. We wanted to make it really easy for visitors to find what they needed, to learn about daily specials and to ultimately reserve a lane for bowling. We built out pages for each location to help rank in local searches, and built out a contextually-relevant daily special feature on the homepage that highlights what’s happening each day.
Social Media
We amped up Pin Chasers social media presence, including growing their 4 Facebook pages (one for each location as well as their main page). Facebook provides a large portion of Pin Chasers new contacts from both organic and paid ads. We also trained the center managers to use Instagram, and continue to coach them on posting frequency and content. Twitter fans are delighted by the CEO’s own voice as he runs the company Twitter account — and does it well!
We embraced Pin Chasers huge lists of contacts to set up a variety of recurring and nurturing email campaigns that we continue to enhance and add to every year.
We target users by behavior (frequent bowlers get emails suggesting leagues; new bowlers get emails with helpful tips or invitations to the free “learn to bowl” program) and demographics (parents of kids with upcoming birthdays get discount coupons; older frequent bowlers get invitations to senior leagues and special discounted weekday play). We also created nurturing emails to help ensure that when people signed up for events in advance, they actually attended. These emails included bowling tips, reminders, and party planning help.
SEO
Our SEO attack involves a variety of content creation through blogging as well as link building. We write targeted blog articles to create keyword rich content that attract leads through organic search, and share out relevant content through syndication on local blogs and news sources.
Landing pages
Landing pages propelled visitors into contacts and customers. We created landing pages for each type of event, everything from nightly specials, party bookings, and seasonal deals. These pages were made specifically for the events, and we drive traffic to them through Facebook events (for seasonal events), through paid ads, and through social media.
The Results
The results have been incredible. We are now entering our fourth year of marketing for Pin Chasers, and are expanding our work with other bowling centers around the country to do the same.
While most bowling centers are seeing only very modest increases in revenue (from 2011-2016, the bowling industry achieved 0.6% annualized growth, Pin Chasers has enjoyed a 17.66% increase in revenue since we began our engagement.
But how much did they spend to get those numbers? Based on Pin Chasers investment in inbound marketing, paid search and social alone, we’ve delivered a 651% return on investment.