Generating more leads using online marketing: A success story

International Machinery is a Canadian dealer of used and restored heavy-duty trucks that has been in business for over 30 years. Family owned and located in Maple Ridge, B.C., the company prides itself on maintaining high standards of quality, as well as on rigorous restoration and inspection of its inventory.

In recent years, International Machinery has leaned heavily on its online marketing. Specifically, it has built a well performing website benefitting from strong organic search traffic and online lead conversion. The website was bringing leads at a regular pace, but as time passed, the look and feel of the site began to feel dated.

In 2016, the team decided to give the website a refresh. They selected an agency partner in the U.S. who specializes in truck and recreational vehicle marketing. They felt they were safe with a digital marketing agency who understood their business. The new website launched in the spring of 2017, with the hope it would help grow the business.

New website did not perform as expected

The new website was stunning and the logo refresh looked great. However, as soon as the new website launched, International Machinery’s owner, Mike Faulkner, could tell there was a problem.

Qualified leads from the website had stopped coming in after the launch of the new website. And the previously steady flow of leads did not return as time went on. Could this be due to a shift in the industry? Was there a technical problem with the website? Faulkner contacted the agency he was working with to get some answers, but nothing changed with the leads despite many calls and meetings.

After six months of poor results from the website, Mike decided to get a second opinion on what might be happening. BDC stepped in to help.

A new approach leads to impressive results

The results of working with BDC were impressive, including a 184% increase in leads from the website. As work with BDC wrapped up, Mike reported a great month, landing six sales in nine days thanks to website leads.

“Our experience with BDC has been an eye opener in regards to the ins and outs of the online marketing world such as search engine optimisation (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM) and website analytics,” he says.

Step 1: Perform a digital audit

So how did the website go from producing no leads to helping land six deals in nine days? Well, we first had to look under the hood, review the website’s technical performance and inspect everything that makes a website perform well online.

We found that International Machinery’s website had some technical flaws and one major error that happened upon the launch of the new website: Their 301 redirects had not been properly setup, which caused the loss of their online SEO ranking.

Step 2: Create the foundations for sustainable online marketing activities

We met with the agency partner and shared the findings. We also gave them a list of repairs to make to the website, and mentored them so they could better support Mike and help grow his organic SEO.

Our recommendations included:

• Reviewing and optimizing the website’s metadata (the information the website sends to a search engine such as Google or Bing).
• Defining the personas of customers the website is trying to reach.
• Defining keywords to focus exclusively on qualified leads.
• Updating key content on the website to better communicate the unique qualities of the business and improve organic results.
• Focusing the agency on making up for the lost organic ranking due to the error on the 301 redirect process.
• Reviewing SEM text-based ads to better appeal to the ideal customer—buyers looking for used trucks.

Step 3: Refine the digital marketing strategy

With a solid foundation in place, we worked with Mike to better define his digital marketing strategy and then spent time with him through an implementation period. One of the things we did was help him run online marketing campaigns to better understand how to manage and direct his team and agency partner.

The results

The changes BDC put in place for International Machinery have the phones ringing again and qualified leads are back in full swing. After four months, their website saw a:

International Machinery has been very happy with the results of the project so far. “BDC quickly uncovered all major issues with our new website and the site provider,” Faulkner says. “The agency turned out to have done basically everything wrong. Our leads dropped dramatically once we went to our new web provider, but BDC had the leads coming back in promptly.”

How about your business? Do you need help to setup your online marketing campaign? Would you like a second opinion on the performance of your website? Get in touch!