Construction Case Study
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:
Percent Increase In
Form Submissions
New Contacts
Sessions per Month
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.
” Evenbound has done a lot to develop our website into a rich platform. The richness of information we have now is much different from Zeeland Lumber & Supply pre-HubSpot, & it’s all working to make it easier for customers to connect with Zeeland Lumber & Supply.“
As with any project, when we started our work with Zeeland Lumber & Supply in Q2, we had a few challenges to overcome.
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.
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.
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.
” At this point, our activity level is so high. Evenbound has done a really good job in terms of the amount and consistency of the marketing and sales activities that we’re able to complete, helping us pull in and close more deals. Having a tool like HubSpot is allowing us to manage customers and opportunities, and it’s putting the sales team in a place to succeed.“
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
” Today, the way the consumer is engaging is changing in front of our eyes, regardless of industry. With Evenbound’s help, I feel that Zeeland Lumber & Supply is very much ahead of the game. We’re getting more people to connect with us online, in less formal and engaging ways. What we’re doing is putting customers at ease. “
At Evenbound, we're all about helping our clients grow. We use inbound and outbound marketing strategies to deliver you the qualified traffic and leads you need for serious growth. And we have a lot of fun doing it.
hello@evenbound.com
(616) 215-0626
41 Washington Ave. #390
Grand Haven, MI 49417
Join the Evenbound Community! Get updates on recent Evenbound news.