The Online Marketing “Tipping Point” for Many Small Businesses

 

For small businesses, there is a fine distinction between having a “digital presence” and leveraging your online presence to ring up sales.  In many cases, it only takes a small push to start seeing real results.  We recently helped a San Francisco Bay Area home improvement contractor make the transition.

THE SITUATION

The client was the clear Bay Area market leader in their category of home improvement. The owner invested approximately 20% of gross sales in magazine advertising to brand the business and produce call-in leads. For the past 4 years, this marketing approach filled the owner’s calendar with an average of 12 consultations a week. The owner also invested in a website which acted as his online brochure with information about his business and images of completed projects.

THE PROBLEM

In late 2008 and early 2009, the magazine leads reduced significantly. The owner continued to invest in advertising but by May 2009, he was forced to reduce his spending in order to maintain payroll, given the lack of business. This reduction in spending reduced the size and frequency of his ads and their positioning in the magazines, which resulted in an even further reduction in leads as less readers were exposed to his message. The owner turned to Meriam Media for advice.

ANALYSIS

Meriam Media started with a holistic review of the client’s marketing and sales strategies and discussed goals and achievement benchmarks for the client. The primary goal was to generate quality leads. This goal needed to be accomplished with a minimal investment outlay that could be easily scaled based on results. The secondary goal was to position the client to remain the market leader in the longer term and to pick up market share from any competitor fall-out.

SOLUTION

Meriam Media identified the digital space as the optimal medium for the client to generate leads through a scalable marketing strategy which would also enhance their position as a category leader. The first step was to optimize the client’s “brochure” website into a 24/7/365 lead capture tool. The second step was to create scalable online advertising campaigns to drive traffic to his website and capture qualified leads. The third step was to create a PR campaign to consistently produce content which is relevant to the client’s prospective clients and positions the client as an industry expert.

RESULTS

Meriam Media optimized the client’s digital marketing by:

• Creating lead capture on his site for interested consumers to easily set up appointments
• Incorporating tracking mechanisms to evaluate the performance of the client’s digital marketing efforts
• Building out and managing social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to communicate more effectively with customer and prospects
• Launching targeted, scalable cost-per-click advertising campaigns on major media networks
• Creating a publishing calendar and developing content to educate his market
• Building out article links and blog sites to distribute the custom published content
• Manage his digital marketing strategies on an ongoing basis

The entire digital marketing campaign investment outlay is only a fraction of his previous advertising budget. After launching the program on July 1, the client has significantly increased the amount of visits to his website, received on average of 7 leads per week and has achieved an after-margin return on investment of more than 250%.