Blackbox Document Solutions gained new customers by streamlining its online marketing and lead generation mechanism
Marketing your business online can be challenging at the best of times. Understanding which elements of your online marketing are delivering quality leads and being the most effective at bringing visitors to your business can be time consuming and is often considered a bit of a dark art.
When Blackbox Document Solutions wanted to expand its business over a 12-month period, principally by gaining new customers, it knew that streamlining its online marketing and lead generation mechanism was going to play a key role in achieving its goal.
Colin Griffin, MD at Blackbox Document Solutions, explains: “One of our biggest challenges wasn’t that customers were not coming to our website, but that we were leaking leads and losing opportunities to turn their interest in us into a sale.”
This is something that happens to a lot of SMEs and it is a combination of speed and process that are needed to get a new customer over the line. Griffin continues: “You have to get back to customers within hours or they will have moved their transaction forward with another provider. I believe this is just as true for business customers as it is for consumers.”
The marketing push
Blackbox Document Solutions had three key strands to its marketing push to grow the business. The first was to generate a greater number of customer leads online through advertising on Google. The second was to ensure that the company captured and processed all the leads coming into the business quickly and accurately. Finally, the management team wanted to increase the conversion rate of those leads into paying customers.
Having used search engine marketing services from ReachLocal, a digital marketing and advertising solutions company, the company was keen to see how its other lead generation and marketing tools could help. Blackbox Document Solutions gave them the brief of helping them take complete control of their marketing processes and stop them leaking leads and, started using ReachEdge, an integrated marketing solution for small and medium sized businesses that claims to enable businesses to maximise the impact of their marketing spend and quickly manage leads through a mobile app.
Working with ReachLocal, Blackbox made changes to several areas of its online marketing to achieve its goals:
- Firstly, a new responsive website was designed and built. This gave visitors a better first impression, improved search engine rankings, gave visitors the information they needed and attracted more calls and emails to the business. Responsive web design has become increasingly important in recent years as more people use mobile devices to access the internet and conduct research. Responsive web design enables a website to display and function at its best on whatever device the consumer is using. So your company looks great and people can easily find the information they need, without getting frustrated and going to a competitor before you have had a chance to impress them.
- ReachEdge helped improve the speed at which staff could respond to new leads through the use of software that notified them of a lead and provided all the contact information to their phone via the mobile app, SMS, or email every time someone contacted them. This allowed them to classify the lead and follow up instantly. If a potential customer has contacted three companies for quotes and one responds to that request quicker than the others, they immediately have a competitive advantage.
- Automation technology and processes were put in place to help nurture and engage prospects by sending communications relevant to their business and services they are considering purchasing. All of this was set up easily using templates in the solution and automated to a prescribed schedule from a lead’s arrival to its current status.
- Tools and reports were implemented that allowed Blackbox to see where leads were coming from, conversion rates and the potential revenue from all new customers.
Griffin added: “We gained a great deal of insight into the effectiveness of our different marketing channels. Some we closed down, others we invested more in or tweaked to reflect the search terms that potential customers were using. It means we are spending wisely and learning from any mistakes, all based on evidence, not just hunches.”
Results
Since using the ReachLocal solutions, the efficiency with which Blackbox Document Solutions gets customer leads has improved dramatically. The company has been able to attract larger customers, experienced an increase in quality leads by 50 per cent and the conversation rate has been pushed to over 80 per cent.
Griffin confirmed: “We have transformed the way we get quality customer leads and the efficiency at which we are able to manage those leads once received.”
“When people ask me what I’ll be doing in the future, I say more of the same; you have to keep repeating the process because nothing stands still in marketing.”
“Your competitors are changing what they do and the way customers find you is always evolving. It can be as simple as a keyword trending downwards over time. It’s a cycle and ReachEdge helps us stay on top of what is happening to invest wisely and give us the best chance today of reaching new customers.”
