Zeeland Lumber & Supply

How Inbound Marketing Helped This Construction Company Exceed Their Yearly Goals in One Quarter

Zeeland Lumber & Supply is a lumber and materials company supplying professional builders and homeowners alike. They came to Evenbound more than a year ago to help improve their position in both consumer and professional markets, develop a clear marketing strategy, generate better leads, and learn how to close them efficiently. We’d used the first part of our partnership to set goals and build a foundation for success. Now, with a solid website and sales process in place, it was time to start marketing for growth.

In Q2, our marketing strategy drove the following results for Zeeland Lumber & Supply:

At the start of 2020, we set goals to grow Zeeland Lumber & Supply’s web traffic to 10k visitors per month, and increase their lead generation to 62 new contacts per month. What followed was a marketing strategy designed to reach those SMART growth goals.

The Challenge

Developing a Full-Scale Marketing Strategy on a New Platform, in the Middle of a Pandemic

As with any project, when we started our work with Zeeland Lumber & Supply in Q2, we had a few challenges to overcome.

Muddled Messaging

Zeeland Lumber & Supply serves both construction professionals and homeowners, but their messaging didn’t reflect that. Because their content wasn’t targeted to buyer personas or keywords relevant to those buyer persona’s pain points, they weren’t delivering the right message to either group, and their content strategy wasn’t ranking well.

Converting Visitors to Leads

The Zeeland Lumber & Supply website was functional and looked great, but it wasn’t yet working to convert new visitors to leads. Their conversion opportunities didn’t extend far beyond a contact button, which meant they weren’t converting leads at all stages of the buyer’s journey, and there weren’t any value-added opportunities encouraging visitors to engage directly with their team.

Marketing Amidst a Pandemic

Our greatest challenge hit with the COVID-19 pandemic. We’d been working to grow Zeeland Lumber & Supply’s presence in the consumer market. With all non-essential projects put on hold, the challenge became marketing projects and materials that consumers wouldn’t be able to buy or install for some time.

How were we to increase Zeeland Lumber & Supply’s leads if they weren’t able to make good on those projects for an undetermined time? And did Zeeland even want to keep up their marketing efforts during this uncertain time?

Zeeland Lumber & Supply made the choice to stay the course. Though they weren’t able to close a majority of their sales during Michigan’s shutdown, we decided we’d do our best to keep on track with our goals to increase their traffic and new contacts so that when Michigan did start to open back up, Zeeland would have a sales pipeline full of contacts ready and waiting to start new projects.

The Solution

Targeted Content Strategy, Lead-Capturing HubSpot Tools, and Timely Sales Training

We already had a platform to build from and goals to work towards. In the initial stages of our partnership, we’d identified buyer personas, but we needed to draw in more of the right traffic, and convert those qualified visitors into leads. Here’s a few of the key tactics we used to reach Zeeland Lumber & Supply’s traffic and contact goals in Q2:

Content Marketing

To solve Zeeland’s traffic challenge and their desire for a better position in the consumer market, we used HubSpot’s SEO tool to build out a content strategy that would both solve and rank for questions most relevant to Zeeland’s consumer buyer personas.

We developed topic clusters surrounding Countertops, Cabinets, Decking, and other high-interest home-improvement categories for those consumer buyer personas. We made a strategic pivot to capture another segment of Zeeland Lumber & Supply’s market that was not entirely affected by the pandemic. Agricultural construction was considered essential. We developed a pillar page, cluster content, and highly-specific forms that would draw in and convert those agricultural builders.

With a content strategy developed around topic clusters targeted to consumers and agricultural builders, we were seeing a significant increase in the right, qualified traffic Zeeland Lumber & Supply wanted to convert.

How We Used HubSpot to Deliver Success

Throughout our Q2 efforts, we worked with the Zeeland Lumber & Supply team to implement a variety of HubSpot tools that would help them reach their traffic and contact goals, eventually turning those contacts into sales. Here’s a quick synopsis of the HubSpot tools used in our marketing strategy:

• SEO topic clusters were developed to grow traffic in the right markets.
• Social enables seamless integration of all social media accounts, making it easy to schedule and promote new relevant content and analyze performance.
• Conversations and chatbots are integrated strategically across the site, designed to convert qualified visitors with custom content tailored to each pillar page.
• Landing Pages provide targeted, relevant pages for incoming traffic.

• CTAs highlight content offers on landing pages, encouraging new visitors to convert, while Request a Quote and Contact Us CTAs convert leads further down the buyer’s journey.
• Forms capture key contact information, storing it in the CRM.
• Campaigns organize new leads coming in from forms according to their buyer persona.
• Workflows automatically assign leads and follow-up tasks to salespeople whenever a form is completed.
• Deals help align sales and marketing by storing all leads from forms in one place, ensuring each lead is followed up with appropriately.

• Lists ensure messaging is clear and relevant. Each lead receives the right message at the right time.
• Email campaigns and newsletters were developed according to each segmented list, with content specific to each group’s needs and interests.
• Feedback Surveys are used to collect net promoter scores. Workflows enable sales reps to reach out immediately to any detractors and passives to understand how they can provide better service.
• Reports enable us to show the Zeeland Lumber & Supply team exactly how our efforts are delivering marketing results and help the sales team visualize their success in a way that’s most helpful to them.

The Results

Qualified traffic, leads, and contacts exceeding our yearly goals.

In Q2 alone, Zeeland Lumber & Supply saw a 70% increase in form submissions, 446 new contacts, and traffic skyrocketing to more than 13,000 sessions per month on average.

Our work with the Zeeland Lumber & Supply team this quarter boosted their traffic and lead conversion numbers beyond their goals, despite the global pandemic. Our content marketing strategy worked to deliver a massive increase in traffic — well over their yearly goal of 10k sessions.

With more of the right traffic now surging in, Zeeland Lumber & Supply’s forms delivered 70% more submissions this quarter and have an average conversion rate above 7%. That tells us our forms are offering qualified visitors the information and the connection opportunities they want, at exactly the right time, converting them into leads for our client. This quarter alone, we’ve converted 446 contacts, surpassing Zeeland Lumber & Supply’s 2020 yearly goal of 62 new contacts per month by progressively more contacts each month.

What’s Next?

Enabling the Sales Team to Close All the Leads in a Full Pipeline

The Zeeland Lumber & Supply sales pipeline is now chock full of qualified leads. At the time that we’re writing this case study, Michigan has begun to allow non-essential construction. Our next project with Zeeland Lumber & Supply will be helping their sales team close all of the qualified leads they now have sitting in that sales pipeline.

And really, putting customers at ease is what it’s all about. The more comfortable someone is reaching out to your team, the more you’re going to sell. With more people reaching out to Zeeland Lumber & Supply directly, and our workflows helping their team stay on top of those leads, now it’s just a matter of putting that sales training to work. We’re looking forward to our future with the Zeeland Lumber & Supply team, and are excited to get to work helping them close the qualified sales they’ve got ready and waiting.