Pesky Problem
Most people won’t seek out a foundation specialist until their basement floods or has water issues, and with little rain, we needed to deploy a strategic plan to generate leads for Epp Concrete when the weather wasn’t demanding action.
In past marketing partnerships, Epp was left on dry ground: virtually few no sales leads tracked back to marketing efforts thus leaving all the lead generation to slower in-house efforts. In addition, Epp didn’t know what his online marketing strategy was or what the results were gaining him, leaving him in the dark and spending a lot of money each month.
After a brief audit of Epp’s analytic account and Adwords campaigns it was clear there was tremendous need for improvement. One initial finding is Epp was paying a lot of Adword dollars on a waterproofing campaign. With no use of negative words within the campaign, his ads were showing up to anyone Googling waterproofing for any reason, be it, tent waterproofing or work boot waterproofing. This wasted valuable dollars and generated zero results. Based on this and other initial findings, Dave turned the marketing reins over to us.
Marketing Strategy
To encourage new users to find Epp Concrete’s services, we deployed a multi-faceted online approach using social media, web re-marketing ads, Facebook ads, YouTube Ads, Google AdWords, website re-marketing, email marketing, YouTube campaigns and website optimization including blogs. Noting that the name Epp Concrete in itself was causing confusion in the marketplace we simplified their tagline to“We Fix Basements”. Epp doesn’t do flatwork, such as pour driveways, and we wanted to make sure each lead was pre-qualified with a basement repair issue. We purchased the domain name www.wefixbasements.com and directed that towards the site. Much time was given to adding content to the website on both their individual service pages but also on their blog ensuring potential customers who are referred to the site by paid ads can learn more about the company and their services. Organic content was also shared over social media sites. Gaining attention of new prospective clients through paid ads on Facebook, YouTube, and Adwords. These ads drew valuable online audience into their social accounts and to their website who otherwise wouldn’t have been aware of Epp’s company as a solution to foundation issues.
Through monthly evaluations, we made corrections and enhancements to each element of the campaign to ensure optimal efficiency with their marketing dollars and deliver the highest return possible. Marketing messages were both informative on foundation issues in homes as well as shed light on Epp’s commitment to community. We targeted re-marketing ads to users who had visited specific areas of Epp’s site with an ad tailored to that service and driving them back to that specific service page where they could request a quote.
TM Results
Our monthly reports are very detailed allowing our client, for the first time, to truly understand the strategy and results of his own marketing. Raw metrics showed month over month increase in engagement of web users with the Epp brand as well as increase market awareness towards their services.
Compared to 2016:
Web
- Users on Epp’s website increased 89.73%
- Web sessions increased 89.77%
- Page views increased 53.26%
- The average time on page for users on Epp’s website increased 16%
- Number of exits decreased 23.82%
- Google Search campaigns saw a 41% increase in clicks
- Overall AdWords costs decreased by 27.8%
- Re-marketing ads increased 113% in clicks throughs
- Organic search users on Epp’s website increased a whopping 191%
Social
- Facebook following increased 18%
- A newly created Instagram account garnered 122 followers in its short two-and-a-half months of existence, entirely organically
- YouTube videos received a total of 37,232 views
- Youtube average view duration of 1.02 minutes
- Email marketing produced an average open rate of 21% which met industry averages
While all metrics are positive and show the campaign is a success by itself the proof is in the pudding as they say. In this case the pudding would be sales leads. We are happy to report very positive results there as well. By the end of 2017, over half of Epp’s sales leads were coming in via our online marketing strategies. These online strategies also decreased his marketing spend by 46% while still serving up the sales leads needed by the company.