Digital Marketing Audit
Brute Force Games
Account Manager
Lori Byrd
Key Team Members
Jarred Juett
Brute Force Games—a tabletop gaming store in San Diego— aimed to engage new community members by increasing awareness of their offerings.
Situation
Brute Force Games (BFG) is a popular tabletop game store located in San Diego, California that supports fans of Magic: The Gathering, Warhammer, board games and more. After moving to a new location and a larger space, owner and CEO Sean J. sought more awareness among the immediate community and the broader region. While earning product revenue was an important goal, the priority was on building community through recurring event participation and increasing foot traffic overall.
Process
1909 DIGITAL needed to understand the current state of BFG’s presence across search, digital advertising, organic social media, and their website before building a multi-channel marketing strategy. We carried out an in-depth audit to assess what channels and tactics would best achieve their goals.
1909 DIGITAL completed a comprehensive Audit with insights and recommendations for BFG’s next steps.
Solutions
Brute Force Games engaged 1909 DIGITAL initially for a comprehensive digital audit. The intent was for the Sean to decide if he supported the optimization plan and wanted to carry it out on his own. Proposed solutions hinged on SEO updates across the tech stack and organic content development. He agreed with all of the recommendations in the audit and agreed that the proposal went beyond the capacity and skills currently on the BFG team. It was decided that 1909 DIGITAL would carry out the plan laid out in the audit.
The BFG team decided that they preferred for 1909 DIGITAL to implement the recommendations with an extended contract.
Considerations
Crystal Commerce was a required component of the tech stack due to its proprietary relationship with a key eCommerce solution, and was a known challenge—both for the audit and for implementing tactics—due to its restrictive nature. The limitations affected our access to site metrics, tracking, content updates, and UX optimization.
We had to get creative to work around a restrictive web platform in order to implement key tactics.
Results
- We built a process around creating content that was: Searchable, Unique, Authoritative, Authentic, Sharable.
- We worked towards store-related information being easier to access on the website.
- We created and managed highly successful digital ad campaigns to drive awareness and sales among specific gamer communities and hobbyists.
- We overhauled BFG’s presence on Google Business Profile and tied their eCommerce system to Google Merchant Center.
- We provided a framework and best practices to better humanize the shop’s social media content.
- We wrote keyword-driven blogs that helpfully answer questions that the store’s audience would actually search.
We had the opportunity to support and carry out all of the SEO recommendations over the next 12 months.