A Successful Web Presence – It Ain’t No Field Of Dreams
“Build it and they will come.” Well, not exactly.
The old saying doesn’t quite work anymore, at least on the internet that is. Cultivating a successful web presence requires a proactive approach on the client-side and requires constant fine-tuning and adjusting to make your internet marketing strategy more visible and more effective than your competition’s. It takes time, effort and dedication
Let’s take a look at one of our clients Bramlette and Company Realtors, in Dillon Montana – one example of a client of ours that’s really “Winning on the Web.”
Tom Bramlette and I had talked about doing a new website for his company for about 2 years before he finally pulled the trigger on Blue Tent to build him a website on our SMC content management system. We worked with his existing design firm to create a great looking, user-friendly website. Tom and his staff now have full control over updating their site content. More importantly, they can integrate their email and search marketing programs with their website in order to maximize conversions.
Once the site went live, we initiated Phase II – which consisted of an email marketing, PPC, and SEO programs. The email postcard campaign was designed to communicate with prospects as well as existing clients to broadcast new and featured property listings. The results were amazing. Well over 40% unique open rates coupled with 15%+ unique click-thru rate generated a lot of consistent, quality traffic to their new site.
The PPC campaign showed immediate results in the amount of traffic that was brought to the website. Additionally, in the first week alone, they had two inquiries from big clients that wanted to list their properties with them!
The SEO campaign is where Bramlette is really hitting it out of the park. Bramlette has some very proactive employees that are in the habit of updating and adding content to their site. The results again have just been amazing. When the site first went live, their site was basically invisible to Google, they are now on page 1 for many of their most competitive keywords including “Montana Real Estate” which had over 35,932 searches last month alone.
Here’s a comparison of their site traffic from last year to this year – an increase of over 300%:
June 15, 2006 – August 15, 2006 – 10,793 visitors
June 15, 2007 – August 15, 2007 – 32,752 visitors
Where do they get their site statistics? Bramlette has completed their internet marketing toolset by integrating Google Analytics – the latest and greatest web analytics tool. It helps Tom and his staff determine what is working and what is not. They now use GA to help them make better decisions on where to spend their precious marketing dollars.
Investing in the proper tools and being proactive with you internet marketing strategy certainly pays off with some time and patience. Bramlette and Co. is a prime example of what it takes to be competitive in the incredibly competitive Internet medium.
- Jay Scherrer
VP Account Services
August 27th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
Jay- Thanks for the complete picture on your analysis, plan and results. The tripled traffic has to be incredibly pleasing to your client. The base of a good CMS … and the contributions of staff to update and drive fresh content is a great start to gaining better SEO/SEM. It’s one of the best 1st steps any business can take in looking to gain traffic, but so often overlooked in search of some magic “switch” to gain results.