About the client company
British Gas Business (BGB), part of Centrica, is Britain’s leading supplier of energy and energy services to businesses, in both the public and private sector and from small and medium sized enterprises to large multi-site companies. Over 950,000 businesses choose British Gas Business to supply their nergy in the UK.
Strategy – broader business issues the company is facing
BGB occupies a dominant position in its marketplace as the leading provider of business energy. However, the market has becoming increasingly crowded, particularly online, where many businesses have seized the opportunity to promote B2B utilities services and new players such as SwitchforBusiness.com, and other price comparison and aggregator sites, have entered the B2B sector.
BGB now operates in a market where it is easier than it has ever been for customers to find information about business energy, compare prices and switch provider. BGB’s challenge is to maintain its leading position in the face of increasing customer choice and competition online.
Objectives of the campaign
BGB’s aim was to cut through competitor noise and dominate the search results to maintain its leading position – to ‘own the podium’ online.
Steak had worked with BGB for over a year and were already achieving success from paid search. The opportunity for 2010 was in natural search. The goal for the ‘own the podium’ campaign was to maintain dominance in paid search and to achieve the same dominance in the natural listings. Steak was also tasked with developing landing pages to improve lead conversion rates.
Specific objectives were:
- To achieve a 50:50 split of traffic to the BGB site from paid search and natural search
- To get all of the 100 keywords identified as being of the greatest significance tothe natural search campaign in top 10 natural search positions on Google within 12 months
- To generate traffic to the site, and for that traffic to convert, a lead was considered to be a visitor that either completed their details on the site, or filled in the quotation request form, or requested a call back
- Improve landing page conversion rate by 10 per cent
The target audience
BGB targets small and medium businesses, and larger multi-site organisations, across all industry sectors. BGB estimates that there is a market of around 4.2 million potential BGB customers in the UK. Although the exact person responsible for purchasing energy supplies varies considerably between different business types job function does not tend to influence the way in which people search for information on business utility providers online. People tend to search using generic terms such as ‘business energy provider’ and ‘business electricity’, no matter what their job role or the type of business they represent. The range of businesses that BGB is able to service is also so broad that most usinesses that search online for an energy supplier are potential customers. Therefore the campaign for BGB as led by proposition – by promotion of price and service – rather than by targeting a specific demographic.
Media channels or techniques used
The campaign involved paid and natural search marketing, plus mobile search, and included the following key activities:
- Increased paid search spend significantly whilst undergoing constant optimisations tominimise wasted clicks
- Implemented a new dayparting strategy – results showed that during the weekend the click-through-rate decreased, therefore a strategy was imposed that paused broad match
- bidding during the weekend so that budget was focused on phrase and exact match
- keywords at this time. This meant that weekend budget was focused on users with a higher
- propensity to convert
- Developed over 50 dedicated landing pages for different target keyword groups. These landing pages were produced to help inform the user and increase content to improve
- natural search results
- Created a very targeted content campaign that placed content ads on specific sites relevant to BGB
- Built four specific landing pages to support the paid search campaign and improve user journey to encourage conversion
- Launched mobile search ads for the first time for BGB
Timescales of the campaign
The research phase for this campaign took place in December 2009, with activity running from January – June 2010. The research phase involved a thorough audit of the existing paid search campaign to identify keywords which were performing well in the paid results but not the natural listings.
The launch of the four new landing pages, the start of the mobile search activity, and the implementation of various search engine optimisation techniques, were staggered over a three month period so that each element could be tested and its impact measured.
Client testimonial
“It was imperative for BGB that we ‘own the podium’ online in the first half of 2010. We spend the vast majority of our marketing budget online as this channel is the core business generator for us and search marketing is at the heart. Steak applied the same intelligence that had made our paid search marketing successful to our natural search, in an integrated manner that allowed us to ‘own’ the search results pages in a competitive market and deliver brilliant improvements year-on-year performance.”
Tania Ugwu, e-business manager, British Gas Business