What was the scope of their involvement?
Their involvement has been just incredible. We talk almost on a daily basis. I don’t think any of us anticipated the daily interactions that we’ve been having, mainly because we were accustomed to our previous vendor who we would talk to once a month or once every six weeks, which probably was indicative of some of the challenges we were having. PBJ was able to do an under-the-hood assessment of all three target areas, and they identified several red flags for us to be concerned about. They put forth a proposal to address those red flags. They also helped us in what we needed to do to accelerate and increase our success rate on PPC and AdWords and also SEO which we’d never done before.
When we decided to work with PBJ, one of the first things that we did was just start to overhaul our website. Our website has tens of thousands of items, and it needed a major overhaul just because of the years of mistakes. They’ve done extensive work with just renaming photos, renaming product descriptions, working on our search filter, and working on the overall feel of the website as far as the interaction on the site itself and interaction on the cart.
We consider PBJ part of our company because they know everything about our products. They know where we want to spend, how we want to spend, and take into consideration our high-profit margin products. They have taken a comprehensive approach to how we’re spending our money and making sure that we’re getting the biggest bang for our buck.
On the SEO side, one of the biggest components that we’re learning is getting back links to non-affiliated sites to Foremost but sending them over to our website. What we did over the past six weeks is launch a blog. They’re in charge of doing all of our blog entries, which have been pretty extensive, along with a calendar of when those blog entries will go up over the next six months, twelve months, etc. They’re responsible for writing all of those blogs, finding the information, and putting the keywords into those paragraphs so that we can get higher results on organic search.
They’ve also taken on our email marketing campaign. We’re reaching out and targeting specific current customers of ours, and then we’ll expand that to include future customers.
We have four people from PBJ who we work with consistently, including Philip [CEO], David [CSO], Michael [Head of SEO], and Bennett [Digital Marketing Analyst]. I know there are people behind the scenes working with them on their team.
How did you come to work with PBJ Marketing?
We had talked to a lot of other companies by doing an interview process. It really seemed that PBJ knew what they were talking about, but they weren’t just interested in what they were talking about. They were really interested in us as a company. When they started talking to us about profit margins and making sure that we were spending money on products that we’d make money on, it was really fantastic. They really care about how our company succeeds, not just about how they look on the clicks. We felt that they had the most detailed assessment and were the most engaging and articulate. In the tech world, one of the challenges is that sometimes when you deal with people that are non-tech oriented, such as us, things get lost in translation. Being able to communicate what they were trying to achieve but also listen to us was really paramount in making sure that we had a company that we wanted to partner with.
How much have you invested with PBJ Marketing?
We’ve spent between $40,000 and $50,000 on their services. Including our AdWords spend, we’ve spent between $120,000 and $150,000. We’ve increased our budget consistently because we’re really satisfied with the results and trust them. It is really a sign of our true partnership, I think.
What is the status of this engagement?
We started working with them in January of 2017, and the work is ongoing.
Through PBJ Marketing’s on-trend industry awareness, 30 new students have enrolled in the specialized program, increasing department revenue by $600,000. The team’s ability to meet aggressive deadlines and provide a cohesive vision from multiple data streams continue to impress.