Lead to Conversion

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

We are a local home builder here in central Indiana building specifically on the north side of Indianapolis in all the different suburbs.

What is your position?

I am the director of administration. We are a small company so like in many companies, everybody wears a lot of different hats and, as part of my role, I coordinate a lot of our marketing efforts.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Intrapromote?

It has been to maximize our reach on social media as well as they have assisted our marketing company in optimizing our website on the technical end. They worked on maximizing our entire website meta tags and all the stuff behind the scenes, so when people are doing searches on the Internet that they get driven to the right place on our website.

We need visitors on the site to get sent to us and directed to the right place on our website and making sure that we are optimizing whatever it is those things are behind the scenes that really drive us further and further on the natural and organic search results.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in detail.

They do SEO [search engine optimization] work and they also manage our social media sites. They manage our Facebook page, Instagram feeds, and Twitter feeds. They manage all of that for us. They work in conjunction with me, our sales manager, and our marketing firm. 

They design the different ads and campaigns that we push out on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

It's a really collaborative effort between myself and our marketing firm and Kristel Klank [the social media manager] at Intrapromote and her team to come up with unique way to catch people's eye on Facebook. We target not only people that already follow us but use advertisements on Facebook to get more followers.

How did you come to work with Intrapromote?

Our marketing firm, a company called Ogle Design that we have worked with for years, is here in Carmel, Indiana. One of their principles is friendly with Erik Dafforn [the president] at Intrapromote, and he was the one that suggested Erik come in and analyze our social media presence as well as analyze our website for SEO work. 

Then, once we met Erik, we were super impressed with him, and it evolved into them not only doing the analysis on the SEO side, but also their other services of managing our social media sites. 

As I said, we're a small company, and we just don't have anybody internally that we can dedicate to doing the type of consistent posting on social media sites that make our presence active, robust, and worthwhile. We were kind of doing it piecemeal ourselves, and it wasn't working out. Ogle Design had us talk to Erik, and it just evolved from there.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

It was $10,000 to $50,000

What is the status of this engagement?

We're approaching the end of our first year with them in November [2014]. I don't get to make that decision myself in a vacuum, but I don't know why we wouldn't continue with them into the next year. They've done a great job for us. We can't just all of the sudden let our sites become dormant again. We still don't have the manpower to bring that in house. 

They've done such a good job and Kristel personally has become such a big part of our team in understanding how we do things, why we do them the way we do, the messaging that we like, the way we talk to our customers. I know we wouldn't start over with another company. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

We're up to 1,700 followers on Facebook. They've done even better than I thought they had. Our Instagram feeds and our Twitter feeds have grown more slowly. But, I also think that has to do with our demographic. We are not a first time home buyer builder for sure. Our prices put us as a move up buyer for just about everybody. I think we're going to find a bigger audience on Facebook as Facebook has trended to be older people using it and you see the younger crowds organically moving on to Twitter and Instagram. 

How did Intrapromote perform from a project management standpoint?

I think when they started managing our page we maybe had a couple hundred followers and we're well past 1,700 now in eight months. It hasn't been surprising to us that our Facebook followers have grown much faster than on Instagram or Twitter.

Then, as far as measuring traffic that's been driven to our website. We have been in the process of redesigning our website the last few months. After we are fully optimized, there will be a lot more substantial statistics that we'll be able to glean on how people are clicking through and what's being driven to our website from where. But, in this first year, we haven't paid much attention to that because we know we started from zero with them and needed to get this website redesign completed before we could really accurately measure results.

What distinguishes Intrapromote from other providers?

We talked to one other firm early on before we started talking with Intrapromote to get a feel for what needed to be done. We were impressed with Intrapromote because they gave us an analysis of everything that we had been doing that was really detailed and flushed out fully. 

They really took the time to investigate not only us, but our competition – different home builders in the area. The amount of information that they came to us with from the get-go was extremely impressive. Additionally, like I said earlier, our efforts have been so collaborative. 

At first, we were a little worried because Kristel is in Michigan and we're in central Indiana, and we were worried about not having anybody here locally. We thought she couldn't get local pictures or a feel for local events. However, she has done an outstanding job imbibing herself in our culture and in what's going on in the Indianapolis homebuilding market and getting a real sense of who we are. 

If you would look at our Facebook posts, you would never know that it's not somebody who works here day in and day out. She's done a great job in communicating, staying on top of things, offering suggestions, taking our suggestions, and flushing them out fully. The collaborative nature of our relationship has been really great and pleasant surprise. I was the one who was the most concerned about not having a local person and, within a few months, she had completely erased that as a concern for me.

Is there anything Intrapromote could have improved or done differently?

I can't think of anything off the top of my head. I do think that when we move into having our website redesign finished and having a more fully optimized way of tracking the click-throughs and tracking where traffic is coming from and where it's going it will be interesting to see if there's a difference in the kind of reporting that they do for us. I know there will be. 

Right now, it's sort of benchmarking us against previous stats and we're thinking, at some point, we need to benchmark what we're doing against what other homebuilders are receiving. It will be interesting to see if the reports that we start to get will allow us to do that a little better. That's really more on us than them because we haven't really pushed forward with redesigning the website in all the ways that we know we needed to until very recently. I can't think of anything major to note for improvement. They've stepped in and filled a need that we really had which was to get a social media presence out there and they have done a great job.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

One of our companies manufacturers auditorium seats for movie theaters, performing art centers, and so on. [Our ] arm is the sales and marketing end of that whole conglomerate.

What is your role and responsibilities?

I’m the marketing director.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What was your goal for working with Lead to Conversion?

The initial goal was to revamp and redo our website so that it would have a much better presence visually with our customers to make it easy for them to navigate and find information. Then, we also added to that the search engine optimization portion of it.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their work.

We are doing social media marketing with them. We’ve talked about doing PPC [pay per click], and that’s something we’re reviewing now. 

What was your process for selecting Lead to Conversion with which to work?

I talked to a few people when we were starting the website development. I was impressed with their customer service. I was impressed with them getting back to me and listening to the needs of the company. They stood out from the other firms I was considering. I was looking for somebody who was going to take all of the nuances and details away from me having to worry about it. I would be guiding them, but they would run with it, and that’s what I got from them.

Can you give a sense of the size of the initiative in dollar terms or a personnel work-hour figure?

It was from $10,000 to $50,000.

When was the work completed?

It’s ongoing work.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Do you have any statistics or metrics to track improvement from the project?

We have definitely seen an increase in traffic with our website. Year over year, traffic to our website has more than doubled and, in some cases, tripled. The ranking in terms of when people are searching for our company are within the top three to five usually. That was not happening in the past. Overall, our website has a presence. It’s easy to navigate. It’s visually pleasing to the user as well as it’s easy to guide the user to what they’re looking for. 

They came up with options to select from which was helpful for them to narrow it down based on having already done a study of what we were doing, and what we wanted to accomplish. They made suggestions for us. The SEO is definitely helping with the ranking and getting our name out there. Not just in terms of the keywords by the market, but also the products themselves. The SEO is tied in with how everything is tagged within the website. They complement one another.

We’ve made adjustments to social media to fit our company. It’s something that’s continuously being reviewed. I meet with them once a month. They send me metrics, and that’s helpful to see where we’re at.

Are you satisfied with their performance?

I’m very happy with them. 

Is there anything unique or special about Lead to Conversion that really makes them stand out compared to other business partners?

Lead to Conversion has an eagerness to be there for the client. It’s rare to experience that these days. There’s really no “I can’t do that for you.” It’s more, “Yes, I will do that" or "I’m not sure but I will find somebody who will.” They have a strong sense of customer service.

What advice would you give to future clients of theirs?

One of the things that makes the process go smoother is for the client to provide clear and organized information. They’re trying to put something together based on what they receive from the client. It’s important that the client provide clear instructions. 

In cases where something is missed, they’re very good about tweaking it and coming up with additional options that will work better. I would encourage them to be organized and clear about the information they provide.

Looking back on the work so far, is there any area that you think they could improve upon or that you might do differently?

Not really. During the website development, there were a couple periods where it was quiet because they were doing background work. It would be better to know more about what was going on during that time. That’s just my own personal take on it. Maybe most clients don’t want to know the gritty details.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

[Our company] is a behavioral assessment company so we have publisher’s rights to the DISC [dominance, inducement, submission, and compliance] behavioral assessments. It’s used a lot in filtering applicants for hiring or team building or leadership development. 

We have multiple online platforms that connect into people’s websites in different ways or replace a website as far as delivering assessments. We have multiple websites and multiple online applications.

What is your role and responsibilities?

I am the project manager there. I deal with all the projects revolving around IT [information technology] development and marketing. I see a project from assessment to development before it goes to market.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What was your goal for working with Lead to Conversion?

When we started with them, our company hadn’t been doing a lot on our online platforms as far as SEO [search engine optimization] goes. We had multiple websites that we’d had for a very long time, but nobody had really gotten into the metadata, the AdWords, the way our website was tracking conversions, or any of that. 

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their work.

They helped us get metadata on our website and all the Google analytics and tracking. They helped us set up all of our social media campaigns, which we’ve been able to prove return on investment on our Facebook pages and ads. Our social media has been successful. 

Getting our blog set up in the right way, press releases – all of that content marketing work is included in the engagement. We meet with them 10 hours a month. We have a dedicated consultant. He goes through our link building campaigns. He goes through where we are on all of the pages for Google and Bing. 

If anything has dropped or gone up, our consultant will track changes and suggest strategies. They’ve also gone into AdWords for us. They’ve also been going through how many clicks we’re getting, how many conversions we’re getting and whether or not the clicks we’re paying for are worth the conversions. 

We’re slowly manipulating our campaigns until we’re getting the right thing. They’ve also helped us build landing page templates. They’ve done training with our staff. They’ve taken us from nothing as far as SEO goes. They’ve been great about the Google updates and give us notice that we need to change everything.

What was your process for selecting Lead to Conversion with which to work?

They were a reference. Originally, somebody who’s working IT at our office knew them or knew somebody that had gone through them and recommended them to us.

Can you give a sense of the size of the initiative in dollar terms or a personnel work-hour figure?

It was slight more than $10,000.

When was the work completed?

We started with them two years ago [2013]. It’s ongoing work.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Are you satisfied with their performance?

Initially, the consultant we were assigned to was good, but not great. We said something, and they immediately reassigned us. [His replacement has] been wonderful ever since. If we notice something, he’s on it immediately. He’s amazing. 

We just started really focusing on our AdWords campaign, and they did a dedicated period of time with us where we talked about what we wanted to do, where we wanted to go, and started it. Now, they’re doing consistent tracking for us. We feel like we’ve got a lot of personal service at least with the people who’ve been assigned to us. If there’s anything we haven’t been happy with, they’ve been great about jumping on it.

Is there anything unique or special about Lead to Conversion that really makes them stand out compared to other business partners?

We did work with one company prior to them who I felt was useless. They just focused on unimportant keywords that don’t get traffic, so they could claim wins. We’re on the top of the pages that matter. 

Looking back on the work so far, is there any area that you think they could improve upon or that you might do differently?

There were moments at the beginning where we were unhappy, but they very quickly reassigned us to different people. They’ve done well with everything else. 

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

We make material handling products. We sell them nationwide.

What is your role and responsibilities?

I am the vice president of operations.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What was your goal for working with Lead to Conversion?

I’ve been working to try to get our Internet presence up for three or four years now. The goal is to sell many more products than we did last year. We have a whole bunch of goals. We’d like our keywords to move up further than they are. We would like to increase the traffic to our site. We would like to close more orders. We were very unhappy with our website as well as our rankings in the past.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their work.

We do SEO [search engine optimization] and PPC [pay per click]. We had not done anything before with PPC. They got set up with us, and they did a good job. We started SEO and going through our site and optimizing keywords. Our site was costing us and creating too much time to make the changes that needed to be in the site quick enough. 

So, they switched the site around for us and, right now, it’s written in WordPress, which is something that they like to work with, and it’s increased our speed of getting things done. We can go in and make changes. They can make changes. We did a lot of little things to help with our conversions. We’re constantly working on things. After working with them for six months, we decided to add PPC management to the engagement.

What was your process for selecting Lead to Conversion with which to work?

The previous company didn’t work out. I was spending money and getting nothing. We started to look around, but it was a nightmare to look for optimization experts. It took me about six months to choose them. I had three candidates that I liked. Sean [Bolton, CEO and co-founder of Lead to Conversion] came in and talked with us, and we liked him. 

Can you give a sense of the size of the initiative in dollar terms or a personnel work-hour figure?

It was about $100,000.

When was the work completed?

We’ve been with them two years now.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Do you have any statistics or metrics to track improvement from the project?

Our conversions are way up. Our metrics are very good across the board on almost everything. PPC has gone very well. Our metrics are great. We’re constantly getting more leads and spending less money for them. Our leads and our orders have quadrupled.

Are you satisfied with their performance?

Yes. The numbers don’t lie.

Is there anything unique or special about Lead to Conversion that really makes them stand out compared to other business partners?

They are much better than anybody else we’ve ever worked with – not even close. 

What advice would you give to future clients of theirs?

I would just say to trust LTC since they deliver results.

Looking back on the work so far, is there any area that you think they could improve upon or that you might do differently?

Our goal right now is to improve on our inbound links. Linking is what we think is going to help us organically more than anything. So, in hindsight, I guess we would have worked on that a little sooner. 

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

We are a hospitality management company. We manage and oversee and operate resorts and their restaurants and spas all across the U.S.

What is your role and responsibilities?

I’m the corporate director of sales and marketing. I oversee sales and marketing for most of the properties. Most of our work is done out one of our Hawaii properties, which is actually how I first started contracting with Lead to Conversion.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What was your goal for working with Lead to Conversion?

Typically with hotels, there are two websites to capture, visitors and revenue. You have a brand website, which is controlled by whatever brand the hotel is. There’s not a lot of flexibility with those sites. Then, a lot of brands allow you to have your own website called a vanity website. We either build that ourselves or oversee the building implementation of.

We were starting a landing site for [the Hawaii property] back in 2010 when we first opened. We were using another company to oversee the site and things didn’t work out well with them. Our goal was to drive more revenue through the website. When we first opened, the website had no history.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their work.

They oversee the SEO [search engine optimization], PPC [pay-per-click], and social media campaigns for [the Hawaii property]. We’ve expanded their scope now. We’ve got them working on a restaurant project and we’ll be pulling them in on a boutique hotel as well.

What was your process for selecting Lead to Conversion with which to work?

We researched and found them. We chose them because they were a smaller company. 

Can you give a sense of the size of the initiative in dollar terms or a personnel work-hour figure?

It was from $50,000 to $200,000

When was the work completed?

We started working with them 2 1/2 years ago. It’s ongoing work.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Do you have any statistics or metrics to track improvement from the project?

The first project was the Hawaii hotel and it was getting between 1,000 and 2,000 hits a month in terms of visitors to the site. The first year, we doubled that and the second year, we’ve doubled again. I was looking for a 10 percent increase in growth, and they’ve blown that out of the water. Our keywords are ranking on the first page of Google. We’re climbing up steadily. The revenue has tripled from where we first were.

Are you satisfied with their performance?

Each part of the scope is handled by a different account manager. The SEO manager is fantastic. He always knows what’s going on. The social media manager has a ton of energy. The PPC manager is excellent, too. They are all super knowledgeable.

Is there anything unique or special about Lead to Conversion that really makes them stand out compared to other business partners?

Lead to Conversion is a small company. I think with that, you get a little more access that way. There’s a lot more personal attention from all our account managers. We were not getting it from our previous company.

What advice would you give to future clients of theirs?

Get as creative as possible. I have brainstorming calls with them and we come up with ideas. Maybe it’s a contest on the website or a new market we’re going to go after in the SEO world. Try to implement the ideas. They have a lot of knowledge and a lot of bandwidth.

Looking back on the work so far, is there any area that you think they could improve upon or that you might do differently?

I’m in California, so they’re three hours later in the day. That’s a little difficult. There’s nothing you can do about that but with any third-party contract company you have to manage them actively. I don’t think that’s particular with Lead to Conversion. You have to remember to schedule calls and stay active with them. I’ve never hit their bandwidth. They’ve always risen to the occasion, but you have to stay active.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company.

I work for Purdue University in Indiana.

What is your role and responsibilities?

I’m the director of digital marketing for Purdue University. My group oversees the Web development, the social media outreach, and mobile development for Purdue at the top-tier level.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What was your goal for working with Lead to Conversion?

We need a strategic partner to help us refine the SEO [search engine optimization] for our website. We’re trying to drive a little bit more engagement through higher ranking in the search engines. I would say now we are driving a little bit more traffic to the site. We’re in a competitive field even just within our region in the Midwest. There’s several other universities that are focused on science, technology, engineering, and math. We try to figure out the different ways we can stand out, and search engine optimization is one of those ways.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their work.

They’ve helped us not only craft content for our pages, the schema, the metadata information behind the scenes that’s in our HTML code and looking at how the site performs as a whole. They’ve also done some onsite visits to do strategic advice around the areas of social media, a little bit of paid media, how we do things with Google AdWords, pay–per-click campaigns, and things similar. We just recently relaunched Purdue.edu on August 4, [2014]. They looked extensively at the mobile and the responsive presence of that, and gave us advice on the functionality, and how things are working on the sight.

What was your process for selecting Lead to Conversion with which to work?

We looked through several different firms, basically an RFP [request for proposal] process. We had been working with another firm previously, so we kind of knew what we were looking for in a partner. It really came down to them knowing our industry, and knowing how to work within search, and how everything’s set up.

Can you provide a ballpark dollar figure for the size of the work that they’ve done for you?

Behind the scenes, they generate about 30 pages of content for us per month, in addition to what they’re doing with statistics and doing the review. So, I’d say they’re pulling in 40 hours per month, but it’s priced between three different team members.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the results of the project?

The project is ongoing. We talk to them twice a month to go through how the site is performing, things that we can tweak, and make sure everything is set up.

Are you satisfied with how everything has gone?

Defiantly so. When we started out the campaign, this would have been late October of 2012, the site was doing fairly well in search. One of the issues was that in certain key areas around engineering or science, it was starting to lag a little bit. With Lead to Conversion’s campaign, they helped us set up and recraft parts of the site. We saw probably a two times over traffic increase to those specific academic disciplines, with engineering, science, and math. Overall, there was maybe a 4 or 5 percent uptick to the overall traffic to Purdue.edu.

Is there anything unique about Lead to Conversion that really makes them stand out, compared to other companies?

It’s one of those things where they put a lot of effort into understanding the industry. They worked with a few higher education groups before, but when they sat down with us, Purdue is a little on the unique side. It is really about getting to know the client, digging in-depth. Even before we signed the contract with them, they looked through our site and found some things, in preliminary data grabs of looking at how people were using the site, and came up with a lot of insights before we even sat down and signed anything. That to me was one of the things where they came in knowing what our challenges were, and had some advice on how to fix those right off the bat, that makes a big difference to me.

Those calls every other week that we have with our senior project manager, he goes through everything in detail. It’s not only discussing analytics and showing growth, he describes decreases and what we could do behind the scenes to change problems.

There’s always a ton of advice and that spans into the things we’ve done social media-wise. Their CEO Eric [Dafforn] has always been keeping a finger on the pulse of news that’s going on with the university. When he does see things that pop up, I usually get an email a half hour later saying that there’s something we can do to help on the search side of it. So, things like that are kind of above and beyond.

Looking back on the work so far, is there any area that you think they could improve upon or something that you might do differently?

Looking at a checklist of deliverables, that’s something that I always look for in project management. We know when we’re getting things from them. From our standpoint, I thinks it’s kind of shared both ways, that we can say here’s what we’ve got to accomplish in the next month, and tic things off as they’re done, making sure the tasks are implemented on our end, so they can see the results on theirs.

This redo of Purdue.edu during the last several months, we’ve gotten a lot more in-depth with changes and updates. So, they’re watching, I’d say every day they’re looking through our development URLs and saying, "OK, what if you change this?" We change it and we’d go back through testing, and they are usually right.

Since we're doing this remotely and via phone a lot of times, it’s easy to run through a checklist when you’re on the phone. To have something printed out in front of you saying, "OK, here’s the bullet point, this is what we need to hit, and make sure we complete the requirements." Just kind of a visual cue reminder from the client end, I thing would be perfect as an improvement for project management.