bayern munich and marketing
Bayern Munich is a professional football team playing in the Bundesliga in Germany. They are currently the best team in Europe and the World after winning the Champions League and Club World Cup in 2013.
‘What does a football team have in common with web marketing?’ I hear you ask, well I am going to explain how their strengths and systems also play a part in our SEO process.
Doing SEO we all have to make sure the website has a strong base and build up before it becomes a successful website and this is actually the same for a football club, you have to make sure that everything is right on and off the pitch before you can become a winning team.
Building a Platform
To achieve a strong base in your SEO work the site needs to be able to be crawled by search engines, pages should load quickly and the site should have a good architecture so that users can navigate it easily and find the content that you want them to read and share.
The Bayern Munich team have achieved a solid base with their goalkeeper Neuer (possibly the best goalkeeper in the world) and then 4 quality defenders of Lahm, Alaba, Martinez and Dante in front of him to protect them from the opposition; each player has a different set of skills to do the job that is required. You need this kind of defence so that your attacking players can go onto the field and do the job that they are paid for, which is to score goals and expose the opposition.
Commitment – The web/football team have to be fully engaged with and devoted to the plan that has been set, making sure that everything they do follows the plan and that they don’t let the team down.
Discipline – Everyone knows what their job is, so if one person strays from this plan the whole web/football team suffer.
Planning – Make the team aware of the goal, what is needed from them and what is classed as a good season/campaign
Patience – Building a solid foundation takes time, SEO is not a short-term fix and it takes time to make it work, similarly there is no short-term success in football, so you invest in players that you can mould into the plan you know will achieve success.
Structure – You need to make sure that your website has the correct URL structure so that everything on your site can work and showcase itself; this is the same for Bayern, Pep Guardiola the manager needs to have the right formation so that they can get the right players in the right positions to do the job that is required in order for them to win games
History – Having a domain with a good history improves trust and authority to the search engines so when you do create content it already has a head start with being found higher up the rankings. Over the years Bayern has been a very successful club, people remember when you have won trophies before and this helps when buying new players because of the reputation of the club.
On-site & Off-site
Design – Providing a great user experience when on the site is crucial if you want users to enjoy being on your site and stay there, so having a good design is important from a user engaging point of view. Bayern plays their home games at Allianz Arena with a 69,901 seating capacity, it is widely known for its exterior of inflated ETFE plastic panels and is the first stadium in the world with a full colour-changing exterior. All of this makes their home games a unique experience for the fans.
Research – Researching your keywords for an SEO campaign is one of the most important tasks because if you don’t have the right keywords then the campaign won’t work with bringing in traffic or awareness to the brand/site; basically your keywords must be right in order for you to achieve your goals. When Bayern was looking to build a team that can be the best they had to choose players that suited the requirements and that fitted with the strategy of the team.
Meta Data – Getting the correct Meta data on each page and making sure it is relevant is important if that web page is going to be found for the right terms and therefore get a good click-through rate via search engines. When Pep Guardiola does a team talk before the game he explains to his players the objective and makes sure that the players know their roles for the game ahead.
Content – Having great content on your site can make your website stand out and bring traffic and new users to the site, this has the same meaning for Bayern but their content is the players. Getting the world-class players like Gotze, Muller, Kroos and Mandzukic that make the team perform well and also bring a greater audience to the games to watch the stars play.
Fresh – Keeping your content fresh and adding new pages to your site helps search engines crawl your site more frequently, Bayern do this by using a squad rotation process, so getting the best 11 players out on the field and keeping them fresh. Then if they need to inject some new talent to the squad they can do so by going into the transfer market and bringing in a new player.
Speed – Speed of a website is more important than ever, especially when 57% of users abandon a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, so making sure that your site speed is good is absolutely crucial. When Bayern need to get up the field quickly they have players like Robben and Ribery who have lighting pace that can turn to defend into a goal scoring opportunity and this is one of their main attacking threats against the opposition.
Links – External links are still a popular way of search engines knowing how good your site is by the number of links and the quality of the link. Having good internal linking between pages is a great way for users to get around the site and use anchor text correctly. Before you reach the Bayern first team they have a second team and youth team, so by being scouted at a young age, you will progress through the teams and then link up with the first team.
The End Game
Social – Having social media as part of your web marketing strategy is essential so that you can promote your site and engage with your users. People are using social media more and more so being active with updates and tweets is a great way of building the trust factor for your brand. Football teams nowadays are not just about the game, more and more it is becoming a brand so being active on social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook is important for a club to go worldwide and build its audience. Bayern has over 950K Twitter followers and is active every day.
Reputation Management – What people are saying about your website really does matter, if this is good press then users will be more willing to visit your site and purchase the items they are after instead of going to a competitor, they will also hopefully share their experience online with their friends which will encourage more traffic. With the way Bayern play there football and with the players that they have, they have many plaudits from journalists, fans and pundits which has resulted in them having a great; they are now regarded as better than Barcelona who was the Kings of the World for many years.
Being a Success – How do you judge if your SEO campaign/website is a success? You need to be looking at traffic figures, converting customers, brand mentions and profit. If all of this is up then the process is working and hopefully, it can go from strength to strength. A football team like Bayern Munich are judged on the number of games they win, how they win and the trophies at the end of the season, so being Kings of Europe currently they are fulfilling the objective.
Full Time
Thank you for reading and I hope you have enjoyed this post and now know how much a football team has in common with a web marketing campaign!
I would be very grateful if you could share this on your social networks or you can drop me a tweet.