Stars and Strikes is a chain of 11 (and growing) family entertainment centers in the Southeast. While they retain a family-owned business vibe, they’re opening in new cities every year — and their centers are massive. These are more than bowling centers; their 11 centers feature laser tag, arcade games, bowling, escape rooms, and even bumper cars.
Like any small business growing fast, they were challenged with a need to expand in the digital space faster than they could staff up. Unlike many organizations in the old school entertainment and attractions industry, they understood the need to reach customers — especially parents — online and through inbound marketing. But we gave them additional news they didn’t expect: they needed a new website.
“From the onset of the project, the team at Big Sea provided us with very personable, customer-focused service. We had an intense approval process on our end, but the Big Sea team always made working together easy; from new requests bubbling up, to last minute changes, the overall approach was hard-working but always positive. The choice to have Big Sea design, develop and manage our website has been one of the best decisions that our company has made.” — Scott Harris, Director of Marketing
Stars and Strikes Family Entertainment Center
We don’t love having to tell prospective clients that they need to invest more than they expected. But we do love assuring them that digital transformation will help them grow their business.
With Stars and Strikes, we knew from the very start that we could only do so much to help them without a new website. Along with issues with speed and responsiveness, most of the copy on the existing site was embedded in images — rendering it invisible to search engines. Oof.
To grow, Stars and Strikes has to rank for kids’ birthday parties in various regions around the Atlanta metro area and beyond. However, beyond running paid search placements, they had very little visibility to parents searching for party venues. Not good.
Their existing site wasn’t built in a way that gave us the ability to make small, impactful changes. Instead, we needed to tear it down and rebuild it more responsively, optimized for lead generation, and full of optimized content for Google to gobble up.
We kicked off the project with a full-day workshop with their team in Atlanta, meeting with stakeholders from their 12 locations. We talked about their processes, operations, and challenges. Together, we identified goals and a long-term strategy that began with developing an updated style guide, overhauling their digital marketing and ad campaigns, and launching into a website build.
While we were there, we took photos and video for marketing materials, played a few games of laser tag, and experienced the great food and old-fashioned service at Stars and Strikes first-hand. The strong kickoff meeting gave us the best possible foundation for success.
People on the go want to have fun as easily as possible. To that end, we designed and developed a mobile-first experience that makes it easy to locate your nearest Stars and Strikes location, reserve a fun family experience, or book a birthday party. All features can easily be accessed by phone, tablet or PC. Convenient forms and workflows not only delight customers, but make it easier to generate leads and track attribution.
Paid Search Traffic Increased
Social Traffic Increased
Referral Traffic Increased
Email Traffic Increased
We love seeing killer results, especially when it means more families are finding a fantastic place to have fun.
We saw the following quarter over quarter results after three months of launch:
