How To Get Customers For Printing Business
Overview
The Rube Goldberg Machine is a machine intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and overly complicated way. Typically, these machines eventually result in achieving a stated goal – like the production of a single gold ball – but to get to the goal, there is a series of triggers that initiates the action of the next step.
Getting new customers for a printing business can seem like a Rube Goldberg Machine at times. And for our printing business client, this analogy is spot on.
When we first started working with the company, a $1,000 / month Google Ads campaign had been running for years without any maintenance. The website needed to be updated to reflect the services of the company. But most importantly, everything needed to come together to produce the stated goal: the production of a golden ball (new customer).
How do you generate leads for a printing company servicing franchises?
Challenge
The printing company was generating about 300 visits per month to their website from organic search, paid ads, and direct visits. It was very rare for any of this traffic to convert.
Because of the low to no conversion element of the printing website, the company was very dependent on attending three national tradeshows for leads. These tradeshows came with heavy expenses, and sometimes took years to realize a return on investment.
To make matters more difficult, the website was outdated and not reflective of the company.
Low traffic. Outdated website. Sales pipeline largely dependent on a few annual events. It was time to go to work.
Solution
Our solution was a three step approach: secure the foundation with a new site; invest heavily in SEO, and gradually wean off of reliance on paid activities like tradeshows and pay per click advertising.
The website was developed on WordPress. Services pages were restructured. Case study pages were added. Conversion tracking was implemented.
Next, content was created in the form of blog posts and landing pages. Each piece of content targeted a keyword that would attract inbound traffic and reduce paid ad costs.
Finally, as content began to rank, we gradually reduced paid ad costs for keywords where we now had organic visibility.
With this strategy in place, did we produce some “golden balls?”
Result
You bet we produced some golden balls.
After launching the WordPress site and executing the initial SEO strategy, we started to see positive results. Over time, some of the highlights include:
- Average of 10 genuine leads per month
- $0 paid advertising costs via Google
- Cancellation of one national tradeshow
- Almost a 20x growth in organic traffic, going from 300 visits per month to 5,400 visits per month
The organic growth of the client’s SEO success has been incredible. We started our engagement in January 2017, and continue on today. Here’s a graph that illustrates the growth of traffic and keyword visibility:
This isn’t just traffic. It’s valuable traffic. This chart shows the change in the equivalent value of the organic search traffic, should that traffic have been acquired via PPC.
That’s quite a bit of value. We went from $413 of traffic value to more than $18,000 per month.
But most importantly, this traffic is valuable beyond graphs because it produces the objective: golden balls (new customers).
