Monday, December 14, 2015

Live Video Services |Outdoor Content to the Next Level

Live Video Services |Outdoor Content to the Next Level

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Hunters often sit in their office staring out the window and day dreaming about deer walking around in their food plots? Are the deer moving today? Has the Rut started? Stone Road Media is  bringing you a new window to stare at…the first ever 24/7 LIVE HD VIDEO STREAMS over Food Plots, scrapes, feeders, trails and more. Located at our remote Field Labs across the USA, The Buck Advisors’ Live HD streams lets hunters trapped at their computer watch live streaming, free-range activity in Big Deer Country.
http://www.livefromtheoutdoors.com for more information and demo sites.
We specialize in remote HD streaming camera feeds for fun or business. Please contact us with your goals and we will customize a plan that best fits your needs.

Outdoors, Hunting, and Fishing Industry | Web Development

Outdoors, Hunting, and Fishing Industry | Web Development 

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Our website development team has programming experience that includes database driven websites, e-commerce business websites, client-side or server side scripting, and of course security for website content.
Having years of experience designing, building, developing and optimizing websites sets us apart from the competition. Our principle backbone comes from the many years of infusing technology into the outdoor way of life.
From concept to ongoing maintenance, we have web designers, programmers, even web marketers to help you achieve your goals.
With every website you MUST utilize and learn the power of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). We can guide you in the right direction of getting your website closer to the first page of the search engines.
If you want creativity and innovation at an affordable price, contact us today!

Hunting and Fishing Industry |Product Design and Development

Hunting and Fishing Industry | Product Design and Development

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Stone Road Media will help your product or idea appeal to its market. No successful product exists without attention given to aesthetic appeal, features and user-friendliness. Our team at Focus is a passionate crew of creative professionals who are trained to bring together disparate elements of your product and weave them into a tangible product that can change how we think.
Make sure it works first. Stone Road Technologies has mastered the Concept adhesion process, guiding clients’ initial ideas and progressing these ideas into a high-quality product that can be manufactured at a low cost.
We excel in weaving the simplistic outdoor way of life with the complex world of technology.
If you have an idea and want to determine feasibility, please contact us today!
We start all conversations with a Non-Disclosure agreement to protect both parties!

Outdoors, Hunting, and Fishing Industry | Web Development

Outdoors, Hunting, and Fishing Industry | Web Development

 Our website development team has programming experience that includes database driven websites, e-commerce business websites, client-side or server side scripting, and of course security for website content.

Having years of experience designing, building, developing and optimizing websites sets us apart from the competition. Our principle backbone comes from the many years of infusing technology into the outdoor way of life.
From concept to ongoing maintenance, we have web designers, programmers, even web marketers to help you achieve your goals.
With every website you MUST utilize and learn the power of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). We can guide you in the right direction of getting your website closer to the first page of the search engines.
If you want creativity and innovation at an affordable price, contact us today!

Hunting and Fishing Industry |Product Design and Development

Stone Road Media will help your product or idea appeal to its market. No successful product exists without attention given to aesthetic appeal, features and user-friendliness. Our team at Focus is a passionate crew of creative professionals who are trained to bring together disparate elements of your product and weave them into a tangible product that can change how we think.
Make sure it works first. Stone Road Technologies has mastered the Concept adhesion process, guiding clients’ initial ideas and progressing these ideas into a high-quality product that can be manufactured at a low cost.
We excel in weaving the simplistic outdoor way of life with the complex world of technology.
If you have an idea and want to determine feasibility, please contact us today!
We start all conversations with a Non-Disclosure agreement to protect both parties!

Search Engine Optimization | SEO for the Outdoors Industry

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The #1 reason a great product or small business fails is lack of quality exposure. In today’s eBusiness world search for basic business descriptions like restaurant, sporting goods, or electronics and come of with MILLIONS of competitors, and even HUNDREDS within 25 miles! If you are trying to break the ‘Online Business” world, it is immensely frustrating to see your quality business, products, and website BURIED among millions of search results. Even if you know without a doubt you have the skills and assets to become successful, if you cannot navigate through the muddy waters of online Search Engine Optimization, odds are your business will fail.  Break away from the pack and stand out with SEO “Search Engine Optimization” based around the Outdoors Industry.
SEO Max was developed specifically by small business owners for small business owners. Our goal is to make your business known throughout the world of Google, Yahoo, Bing and many more. Not only that but we want to reveal the traits of your biggest competitors! Where are they succeeding in SEO, where are the failing, and most importantly where is the space you can grab and rise to the top of the Results List.
Our internet technology team members will guide you to make your business seen.

Social Media | Hunting and Fishing Industry Targeted Marketing

Don’t always judge the Face”BOOK” by the cover!

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You either love or hate Facebook, but it is the most powerful marketing tool in the world.  Our mission is to educate our clients before we work on a project.  We see so many times the “Numbers” “Stats” ” “Impressions” look great on the outside, but when you look inside…..they are non-marketable, non-targeted numbers. Here is an example of a campaign, and its weekly numbers on Facebook.  We had one goal, gain TARGETED, USA LIKES that can be used to bring traffic back to a BLOG and or LANDING PAGE.
It worked perfectly!  Here are some stats from this week long campaign.  Our customer acquisition cost was under .10 cents per person.  We can do this for you!

Inbound Marketing for the Outdoor Industry | Stone Road Media

Inbound Marketing for the Outdoor Industry

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It’s no secret. No matter how great your product or service is, if you don’t have quality marketing then you won’t have a successful business. For years this meant having a hefty budget. However, with nearly everyone having the internet at the tip of their fingers with smartphones and tablets, the times are changing.

Engage With More Outdoorsman on Social Media | Social Trotlining

Engage With More Outdoorsman on Social Media | The Art of Social Trotlining™

By Jeremy Flinn, COO, Stone Road Media Group
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It’s rare to find a person, let alone a business without at least one social media account. Social media platforms have allowed business owners, both large corporations and small start-ups, to engage with potential customers in nearly real time. Whether you are simply trying to increase the amount of traffic to your website, or operate an eCommerce site in which every engaged lead could become your next paying customer social media is a critical tool in today’s internet marketing. Many outdoor industry companies have caught onto the Facebook and Twitter fad, which is about as far as their inbound marketing strategy, in particular Social Media Optimization (SMO), extends. Though these tend to be the easiest places to engage with outdoorsman, any company only engaging on these two platforms is dramatically cutting their consumer reach. The challenge for our industry is to understand the need for multiple social media platformaccounts, and even more important to paint a strategy that we can easily understand. It was for these two reasons that drove our inbound marketing company, focusing on outdoor-oriented businesses, to create the concept of Social Trotlining™.

The Social Trotline™ | Creating an Engaging Social Media Pipeline

For most of you from the South and Midwest, “trotline” is likely a familiar term. A form of fishing, a trotline is a set in slow-moving rivers or streams typically targeting species like catfish. The set is made when a main line, which could be anything from rope or twine to heavy-duty, monofilament fishing line, is attached to a permanent or weighted structure like a tree, pier, or cinder block on both ends. Then several individual, hook sets, or leaders, are attached to the main line and baited often with different baits providing target fish a variety of choices.  The goal is to provide the targeted fish species with multiple options in a specified range which in theory increases the odds of not only a catch but multiple catches. The best part is it can be left relatively unattended once set, only checking periodically for catches.
Social Trotlining™ utilizes the exact same principles of the fishing technique. A brand (Main Line) determines its target consumer and then sets up a myriad of social media accounts (Leaders) including FacebookTwitterLinkedInYouTubeGoogle+Pinterest, andInstagram. These accounts lay out a variety of digital content (Bait) that a potential lead can come through or “be caught.”
When an outdoor industry company makes a social media post on Facebook or Twitter, it’s like casting out a single rod. Although multiple outdoorsmen can be caught over time with the digital content it is very one-dimensional, and often limiting in impressions. Think of Facebook’s “News Feed” for a minute. Say your company posts a piece of digital content announcing that one of your pro staffers just harvested a Boone & Crockett whitetail. You make the post at noon during a weekday. For most people’s Facebook News Feeds the post will be buried within a couple hours unless it is “Liked” and “Commented On” a lot.

Keeping the Social Trotline™ Productive | Recurring Website Leads and Traffic

Whether you are operating a simple traffic- based or eCommerce website, the only way to continually drive targeted visitors and leads to the website is through compelling, original contentSocial Trotlining™ not only increases the effectiveness of a company engaging with targeted consumers, but it also builds the companies standing as a whole in the internet universe. When you post engaging and compelling digital content on social media platforms, and people engage, Google and other search engines recognize this, particularly if it is coupled with traffic coming back to your websiteGoogle is obviously the top-dog in the search engine realm. Whether you know it or not, Google and Facebook do not play nice together. For instance, Google weighs more page ranking results when they see you engaging with audiences in Google+ and YouTube, two companies in which they own. So by engaging in those platforms more, you will slowly see your digital content and website creep up the page ranking on Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). In the same scenario, if you upload a video from YouTube into Facebook, you may only reach about 1/10th of the impressions you would have if you uploaded it directly into Facebook. Covering all your social media platforms and engaging with audiences uniquely in each will maximize the effectiveness of your Social Trotline™.
The best part of Social Trotlining™ is that it is no more work than posting to Facebook or tweeting to Twitter! With specialized Apps likeHootSuite and EveryPost, you can create a single post and “Push” it to all of your social media accounts. So like running an actualtrotline, there is minimal work once the initial accounts are established other than monitoring the analytics of leads coming through and refreshing the platforms with new “bait,” or compelling digital content.

Monitoring Your Social Trotline™ | A Good Visitor Is One That You Know Well

Just because someone comes to your website from Social Trotlining™ does not mean that they are a viable lead or consumer. Before you even begin to engage with audiences on social media, you should identify your “premier lead/consumer”. If you’re a B2B (Business to Business) based company, what are the characteristics of a company that would be considered a premier lead? It becomes much harder for B2C (Business to Consumer) based companies, that may have a wide range of personas that are all considered consumers.
Monitoring the number of visitors and types of visitors based on your Social Trotlining™ and digital content is critical to progress as a business. What worked? What seemed to draw the “wrong crowd”? This tends to be the most missed opportunity for businesses, particularly in the outdoor industry. Fortunately, inbound marketing agencies, like Stone Road Media, have been created to develop, execute, and monitor the social media efforts of companies. It requires a lot of time, trained professionals who understand social mediaand internet behaviors, and usually specialized tracking and engaging marketing software, like HubSpot.
Whatever you choose to do with your social media strategy, remember this is an immense source for generating online leads and sales. Engage users on all social media platforms, and create compelling, original digital content. Copying content from other sites is a Google“death sentence,” so do not even think of taking a shortcut. Inbound marketing is the “Now,” the return on investment is off the charts and is accurately measurable unlike many traditional marketing strategies.

Fishing With A Different Rod | Using Inbound Marketing for LOYAL Followers

Part 1 of 2: Attracting NEW Followers

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In business, your brand lives or dies by the support of your follower. From “don’t miss” viewers of your show, to those who eat, sleep, and breathe your products, creating an army of loyal followers pump energy into your thriving business. As important as it will be to keep your current loyal followers engaged (Part 2 of this Series), it to create incredible compelling content that is supremely optimized for prospective brand followers.
The fact is that for many well-established outdoor brands, appealing to and obtaining new loyal followers requires being different. If you haven’t got someone to become part of your brand family in the last 5 years using traditional outbound marketing methods, then odds are it isn’t going to work over the next 5 years. Whether it’s because they just don’t feel like you offer what they want, or most likely they don’t know what you actually offer, they need to be tended to in a different manner.
This is why inbound marketing has been shown to have a huge return on investment (ROI) for business choosing to think outside the traditional marketing box. Whether increasing viewers of a show or eCommerce purchases, inbound marketing uses the approach of giving the consumer what they want and engaging them with your brand simultaneously. For instance, let’s say you own and operatewww.largemouthlunkers.com (it’s a fictitious site), a premier bass fishing website for tips, tactics, and top bass lures. A particular bass fisherman may have no desire come to your site because they think it focuses too much on the size of the bass rather than the experience, even though your site is much more than that. Typical outbound marketing has built a loyal following, but there are millions of bass fishermen that are not following your brand. Using inbound marketing, you create a series of videos teaching kids how to use lures for catching largemouth bass. Using video transcribing, strategic keywords, and social media optimization, the fisherman above stumbles onto one of your videos when searching in Google “teaching grandkids to fish.” After viewing your videos, the fisherman is intrigued with what else you have to offer and begin to cruise the website finding much more relevant content than they thought. You have now created a NEW loyal follower.
Inbound marketing uses existing and new compelling content and puts it in places that NEW followers are coming too. It then strategically guides the visitor through your website, using techniques like funnels and squeeze pages, to get them to the “destination” you desire such as a subscribe list or eCommerce store. Think of it as a very effective and targeted soft sell. You already are giving them what they want (remember they found you!) and now you are giving them more, without irrelevant content or marketing schemes getting in the way.
Not only is it very effective because the content supplied is usually what they were looking for in the first place, because of excellent inbound marketing implementation you sat atop Google for that keyword phrase, but you are also able to measure the effectiveness of the content through analytics. This insight will help guide you as you develop more content for visitors in the same target niche.
Cost –effective, inbound marketing is changing the way businesses operate. The outdoor industry is no different. Ask yourself, are you giving the consumer what they are looking for?

Outdoor Industry Marketing Secrets | Using Inbound Marketing

Outdoor Industry Marketing Secrets | Using Inbound Marketing Strategies to Exploit Small Business Growth Potential

By Jared Prusia, Sr. Manager of Business Development
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It’s no secret that the business world is always changing. What is often current or important one day may be completely irrelevant and outdated the next. In some ways, change sets us back; in our progress, our passions, and even our beliefs. In other ways however, change creates opportunity; the opportunity to try, to fail, and sometimes succeed. The outdoor industry has been seemingly-static for several years, but that is changing faster than you can read this blog. While some are able to sense the inevitable change, very few will be able to optimize it. Adaptive inbound marketing strategies that revolve around consumer demands, and create meaningful brand experiences are the secret to gaining a significant competitive advantage. Through search engine optimization, impactful social media presence and content marketing, your growing business can increase sales, improve customers’ experiences and pave the way for a new generation of outdoor enthusiasts in the midst of change. A key component in the current industry shift is the new generation of outdoorsmen and -women rising up to fill the place of those before them. This generational difference is more significant than ever before for one reason: technology. Understanding how consumers use new technologies everyday provides the roadmap to customer satisfaction. Studies show that about 27% of time spent online is on social networking sites; followed closely by entertainment and shopping. Even in the deer stand or turkey blind, almost every hunter has a cell phone in their pocket where social media, Google, and YouTube are just a click away. Effective inbound marketing strategies use technology to build a relationship with the customer via providing exactly what they are looking for, which is much more meaningful than a commercial on TV or an ad in a magazine. For this reason, it is becoming more critical daily to incorporate inbound marketing because it gets your company or brand in front of potential customers each time they use technology. Undoubtedly, as technology continues to progress and become more integrated into our everyday lives; inbound marketing will also progress and become the undisputed marketing technique in not only the outdoor industry, but every marketplace. It was because of these changes, that Stone Road Media was created. The company is the forefront of inbound marketing in the outdoor industry niche. Recognizing the amazing potential for sales increase, website traffic and overall online presence, our team of dedicated professionals is passionate about helping start-ups, small businesses, and growing companies looking to expand their online footprint. We do this by working closely with clients to create a thriving social media presence, optimize search engine results and produce captivating marketing content. As outdoors enthusiasts, our team understands the industry, and customer needs better than anyone else. So before you throw money away on expensive commercials and ineffective magazine ads, consider where inbound marketing can take you and how Stone Road Media can help you get there. It’s time to #BeDifferent!
Original Content: http://www.stoneroadmedia.com/outdoor-industry-marketing-secrets-using-inbound-marketing/

Outdoor Industry Marketing | How to Spend your Money Wisely

Outdoor Industry Marketing | All advertising is marketing, but not all marketing is advertising

By Jeremy Flinn, COO/CMO – Stone Road Media

“All advertising is marketing, but not all marketing is advertising.”

The statement is a type of logic called transposition. Simply it says if you have advertising then you are marketing, but if you are marketing that does not mean you are advertising. This is actually a good thing for your business!
Why?
Well, advertising traditionally cost money. Historically, the large, dominating forces in the outdoor industry were typically the ones with the largest advertising budget. This money was spent on TV, Radio, Print, Trade Shows, and the like. Because of its “free reign,” the budget was not closely monitored for literal Return on Investment (ROI), but simply to make sure a “consistent” flow of business came in.
Today’s “consumer engagement” specialists are evolving at a rapid pace, and those resistant to change will likely be spent faster than their annual advertising budget. No longer is it appropriate to consider advertisers and marketers one in the same.

Advertisers tend to spend money, whereas marketers tend to make money.

Big difference? Absolutely. But that isn’t to say that advertisers don’t have a role in the consumer engagement process. In today’s outdoor industry, TV, radio, and print are very powerful modes of marketing. However, for the first time in history use of internet driven devices exceeded the use of any one of those platforms. In order to succeed in marketing effectively through the internet, it takes a new wave of thinking…organic.
Like the food, organic in the internet has the same base term – natural. Organic internet marketing, often termed Inbound Marketing, reaches the targeted consumer through natural search methods. Those companies stuck in their ways with paid advertising, have no shortcuts here. Research from Google, who currently owns 90% of annual searches, recently showed over 82% of clicks on their Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) were on organic links, with the small balance on those paid “Pay per Clicks.”
It’s all about relevant, unique content. If you create content the user is likely to look for, then the odds of directing them to your website, and subsequently services and products, is astronomically higher. The traditional advertisers that plan to use “available content” from other feeds and blogs will often fall short again, as content is connected to the original source and your posting is simply a “backlink” for the original page.
In the end it’s simple. Embrace the fact that advertising still has its place; but be fully aware that it WILL NOT provide you a complete marketing strategy.