RELEVANCE

BACKGROUND

Can you briefly describe your company?

We provide telematics for the trucking industry. It’s a device that goes in the cab or on the trailer that communicates with the dispatch office. It also provides some safety features where if the truck is in motion certain things won’t operate, which forced the drive to keep his eyes and attention on the road. It offers text-to-speech functionality, allowing it to read messages to the driver, so they can get their route or their load information. Since it’s a piece of hardware, we also offer additional add-on applications.

What is your position?

My title is manager, but I’m basically an operations manager in the marketing department.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

Could you briefly describe the business challenges you were attempting to address when you began the projects with Relevance?

First of all, in relevant keyword searches, things like fuel management, fleet management, EOBR, HOS, those types of keywords, we were not showing up on the first 10 pages of Google, Bing, or Yahoo. We wanted to figure out what we could do better on the website or what we could do to try to get us on the first page or, at least, close up.

SOLUTION

Could you describe the scope of the project?

Following their CLASS methodology, we got more than what we expected. They did a whole analysis, not only on our content but our architecture, all of that. At that point, they offered strategic marketing counsel and optimized our content for search.

How did you select Relevance as your solution partner?

I think I was contacted by them or got an email from them. We were part of Qualcomm at the time, so I was told I had to reach out to the agency that Qualcomm was already using. When I pick vendors I usually try to go after three to four, have them do demos, have conversations, even kind of do a pricing model so that we can see that we’re getting the best option and agency to work with us, and the best pricing. Other projects like when we went after our marketing automation platform, we started with 20, working with serious decisions, and narrowed it down to four for demos and then narrowed to the one we wanted. In this case, for SEO, I looked at three different companies. Slingshot, at the time they were called Slingshot, was the most responsive, seemed the most knowledgeable, and was, not by far, but I would say was the cheapest. They approached us as a partner rather than simply a service provider. They were very upfront about, “We don’t actually do the work, we provide you consulting and expert advice, and then we give you what needs to be done and you work on it on your side.” I don’t have a huge team; for the most part, it’s pretty much me. They were very upfront where other agencies were somewhat arrogant.

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

I can’t be specific. I believe we were somewhere around $250,000.

When was this project completed?

The relationship is still very much ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

How do you think Relevance has performed on this project?

I’m ecstatic with Relevance's performance. This may tell a lot about the partnership we have, but they’ve mentioned that we’re their favorite client on multiple occasions. Now, I don’t know if this is true or not, but they would just always say when they would give us things to work on, we would turn those around pretty quickly. They’re like, “Our other customers don’t work on stuff this fast. We wait months for this stuff to happen.” On the same hand for us, our IT department, when they saw that initial proposal, and it was all bound together, what was going to be done, who was going to do it, the time frame, what we would expect as far as results, all of that, they were so impressed they’ve used their documentation as a model for other vendors.

In retrospect, are there any areas that you think they could improve upon, or are there certain things you’d do differently as the client before initiating this type of projects?

This is no reflection on Relevance, but more on our side. We need more resources. I need a full-time head count just to work on the Web stuff and work on SEO and the ticketing and testing. My frustration is a result of having limited resources, and a giant list of improvements and enhancements for our site. This list will, of course, dwindle over time, but for now, a lot of things are on the back burner while we deal with more immediate needs.