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Top Carpets and Floors is one of South Africa’s leading flooring retailers. They have 130 members spanning the length and breadth of the country and install over 200,000m2 of floors and blinds every year.
Top Carpet’s business was doing well but they knew there were areas where they could improve. The scale of the Top Carpets and Floors network and their decentralized business model meant that coordinating marketing and sales efforts between all their members was tricky. Customer data sat largely at a member level on excel sheets creating a black box effect when it came to who exactly their customers were and how they engaged with their brand.
That’s when Top Carpet’s Head of Marketing Sue-Re Harris approached Uku Inbound to implement an inbound marketing strategy and HubSpot Marketing and Sales Professional. “We really enjoy working with Uku Inbound – Dane and his team are always friendly and helpful. They revolutionized our marketing strategy over a very short time.”
The Challenge
Although Top Carpets and Floors has built its business into one of South Africa’s leading flooring and window blind retailers, Sue-Re Harris, the Head of Marketing knew there was room for improvement. Top Carpets and Floors had built a new website and were spending a large portion of their marketing budget on Google Ads with mixed results. They were converting leads at below 1% with a cost of over R600 per lead.
When Sue-Re approached HubSpot Partner Uku Inbound she had a few clear objectives, these were:
- To improve lead generation through the Top Carpets and Floors website by 100%,
- Reduce the cost of acquiring new leads by 50%, and
- Improve the customer conversion rate from organic traffic from below 1% to 5%.
The Solution
Uku Inbound’s approach to helping Sue and her team was to create an inbound marketing strategy that would help drive more qualified leads and lower their customer acquisition cost (CAC).
They implemented HubSpot Marketing and Sales Professional to help facilitate the delivery of their inbound marketing efforts. HubSpot’s CRM also provided an easy way to centralize their data, get feedback from members regarding specific customers and shed light on how leads engage with Top Carpets and Floors on their way to becoming customers.
With that in mind, the first step was to define their strategy which included:
- A buyer persona workshop - This was a half-day workshop with Top Carpets and Floors senior management where we unpacked who their customers are.
- Member interviews - They interviewed their members to get a better sense of what business was like and test some of the feedback from the buyer persona workshop.
- Completed their strategy - Based on what they had learnt Uku Inbound formalized their personas and put together an inbound marketing strategy that would deliver on their marketing goals.
The strategy focuses primarily on the Attract and Engage phases of the inbound marketing methodology and proposed three core initiatives:
- Improve visitor-to-lead conversion rates by introducing specific, conversion-focused landing pages. This included 3 content offers and a Request for Quote page.
- They introduced a learning centre and shifted their content to obsess over their buyer’s questions related to costs, problems, solutions, reviews and product features.
- Lastly, to increase reach and reduce lead acquisition costs they turned to Facebook and Instagram advertising.
The Results
Let’s take a quick look at how the campaigns performed in relation to our initial objectives. Did we manage to increase the number of leads converting on the website while reducing the cost per lead?
In short, yes.
The content offers allowed us to engage leads earlier on in their buyer's journey. This meant that Top Carpets and Floors was able to provide value and build trust.
- The content offers converted visitors-to-leads at between 16%-28% which is well above the websites previous conversion rate of 1%. The Request for Quote landing page and the retargeting campaign had an average conversion rate of 26%.
- These campaigns helped us increase the number of leads converting on the website by 150%.
- Paid social media ads were used to drive engagement with Top Carpets and Floors content and as a way to retarget and nurture leads.
- The average cost per lead for the content campaigns was R 28 while the RFQ campaign converted leads for R 160. That's 95% and 74% lower than the previous cost.
- Organic traffic has increased by 47% in the last 12 months.
- The number of search terms where Top Carpets and Floors ranks in the top 3 positions on Google has increased by 100%.
- The lead-to-customer conversion rate from organic traffic has increased from 1% to 7.38%.
