Texture Plus

Leading U.S. Manufacturer Experiences 114% Increase in Leads & 30% Increase in eCommerce Sales

Case Studies —

Texture Plus designs tools and manufactures polymer-based faux wall panels that mimic stone, wood, metal, and brick. They do all of their manufacturing in the U.S. at their headquarters in Lincolnton, North Carolina. They were one of the first companies to enter the faux panel space and have been leading the industry for over 30 years.

Campaign Goals

• Increase organic traffic to Texture Plus’ website in order to increase sales leads and revenue.
• Increase Texture Plus sales by reaching more global retail stores, design professionals, contractors and homeowners via a digital marketing strategy. Vital redesigned the Texture Plus site in 2014, and in 2017 Texture Plus asked Vital for help with their digital marketing program.

Challenges

Two factors were driving Texture Plus to pursue a more consistent digital marketing strategy:

1. New competitors entering the field
2. Existing competitors increasing their investment in digital marketing tactics

As Texture Plus’ competition grew more intense, the need for it to stand out and capture both organic search engine and paid advertising real estate increased. At the same time, the increased competition resulted in paid advertising bids increasing, which made it critical to maintain Texture Plus’ cost per lead. Furthermore, it became paramount for Texture Plus to build an email list in order to gain ground against the encroaching organic search engine and paid advertising competition.

Campaign Results

Vital’s multi-pronged digital marketing approach to achieving Texture Plus’ goals resulted in:

• Increased organic traffic 39% Year Over Year (YOY)
• Increased request quote leads by 114% YOY
• Increased content download leads by 1,200% YOY
• Grew email list annual subscribers by 1,100% YOY
• Decrease cost-per-lead (in PPC) by 28% YOY
• Increased eCommerce sales by 30% YOY

“Since we began partnering with Vital all of our most important KPIs are strongly trending up and to the right, including the most important one – sales.”, says Stefa Normantas, Marketing Director, Texture Plus.

Vital’s Solutions — Strategies & Tactics

• Foundational Assessment: The first step Vital took to help Texture Plus achieve its goals was to conduct a foundational assessment of its website to answer two questions: 1. How is it performing? 2. How can it be improved? The foundational assessment identified any marketing assets that were missing that needed to be addressed in order to execute a successful digital marketing campaign.
• User Experience: To provide visitors to Texture Plus’ site with a pleasing user experience, Vital implemented the following:
  • Segmentation: To make it easier for both commercial and residential visitors to find what they were looking for, Vital broke Texture Plus’ content down into verticals for each group.
  • Side Navigation: To mimic the shopping experience of eCommerce stores, Vital added a side navigation bar to Texture Plus’ site. It is faster and more efficient for visitors to scan.
  • Product Pages: Vital ensures that Texture Plus’ product pages give visitors just the right amount of information to help them find the product they are looking for and convince them why they should buy it.
  • Cart Abandonment Email Marketing: The Texture Plus site aims to generate both B2B leads as well as direct eCommerce sales. In order to generate more eCommerce sales, an abandoned cart email campaign was implemented. It captures the full value of all website visitors who add a product to their cart.
• Pay Per Click: Pay Per Click (PPC) entails advertisers paying for ads on a given platform, such as Google or Facebook, and then paying for the clicks they receive. When not done correctly, PPC can be a very costly endeavor. To ensure the highest ROI for Texture Plus’ ongoing PPC efforts, Vital carefully analyzes keywords relating to the company’s brand, products and content, then creates specific PPC campaigns using ones with the highest click-through rates in order to drive maximum customer search traffic to its website.
• Content Creation: To generate more indexed pages and opportunities for Texture Plus’ site to be found by search engines, and thereby increase leads, Vital writes content — blog posts, e-books and more — that engages its target audiences, conveys the value of its products to them and incorporates PPC keywords with the highest click-through rates. CTAs (Calls To Action, in the form of a button or link) are incorporated into content to convert visitors who are engaging with it into leads.
• Conversion Strategy: With multiple conversion goals (sample requests, quote requests, eCommerce sales, email subscriptions, etc.) Vital conducted a full analysis to determine the best path to conversion for many visitor types. The resulting strategy converts the right visitors at the right time.
• External Linking: Vital runs an external linking campaign on behalf of Texture Plus to help drive traffic and increase the PageRank of its site. Essentially external links to pages on Texture Plus’ website “tell” search engines that its content is good enough to share.
• Targeted Email Campaigns: Email, when used effectively, remains one of the most reliable and efficient ways for marketers to get their message across. Vital introduces Texture Plus’ new products and promotions via email in a manner that creates excitement and moves recipients to take a desired action.

Conclusion

The combined expertise of Vital’s internal teams — digital marketing, content, design, SEO and programming — has resulted in increased leads and site traffic for Texture Plus.

Texture Plus continues to engage Vital on a retainer basis to implement a digital content marketing strategy and PPC program on its behalf. Vital’s work is not done in a vacuum. Vital and Texture Plus team members regularly discuss objectives and strategy. This collaborative and transparent approach helps ensure that Texture Plus’ marketing goals are achieved.

 

New England Construction Firm Gains 77% Increase in Overall Leads & 178% Growth in Website Traffic

Case Studies —

Chinburg Properties, Inc. is a fully integrated development and construction firm with over 20 years of experience in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Maine. In addition to new home construction, the Chinburg portfolio of services includes: general contracting, construction management, renovation and restoration, commercial and residential rentals, and property management. In this case study we’ll outline how Vital implemented a content-based inbound marketing strategy in order to reach Chinburg’s goals.

Chinburg hired Vital to:

• Drive more traffic and ultimately;
• Drive more leads for their business.

In order to meet these objectives, Vital planned out a content-driven inbound marketing strategy heavily focused on driving website traffic and increase leads.

The Results:

The goal of any inbound marketing strategy should be to increase leads. Therefore improving lead generation was a key focus of Chinburg’s content strategy.

• Average Leads 2013: 27/Month
• Average Leads in 2014: 48/Month
• 77% Increase in Overall Leads

In order to increase leads we needed to increase quality traffic to the website. The below chart illustrates the month-by-month incremental increases in website traffic that were achieved thanks to a consistent and dedicated inbound marketing strategy.

• Average Traffic 2013: 2,500/Month
• Average Traffic 2014: 6,960/Month
• 178% Increase in Overall Traffic

The Situation:

Before Vital could get started with a content marketing strategy (writing blogs, email, and eBooks), we first had to do some brand architecture housekeeping.

Chinburg Properties is not only focused on new home construction, but they also develop historic mill buildings into residential and commercial rental space. When the project started, Chinburg Properties managed a total of six rental properties—each of which had its own website on its own individual URL.

The first exercise here was a branding exercise to unite all six of these properties under one consistent brand architecture. Before Vital, the six different properties were individually branded, as opposed to branded under the Chinburg name, so we first dealt with uniting the brands. It was important to provide users with a uniform experience across all of Chinburg’s rental properties. To learn more about this brand architecture exercise, read the full case study.

Additionally this united architecture strategy was important for website users because it allowed them to understand the full breadth of Chinburg’s offerings in one easy-to-use website. Once the brand was unified, the websites also needed to be unified. Instead of presenting the user with seven different website experiences (six rental properties plus the main home construction website), it was important to present the user with one single, fluid experience.

From a search engine optimization standpoint, this fragmented architecture presented a great opportunity.

The Opportunity: Combining Seven Websites into One.

Chinburg Properties was actively maintaining the seven websites (listed below). The first question we asked was whether combining these seven different websites under one domain would improve the user’s experience. At the heart of all inbound marketing and SEO strategy, the user’s experience must be the #1 consideration. And luckily, in this case, combining the websites made sense.

Combining these websites improved the user’s experience because these six rental properties are all in close geographical proximity to one another. Therefore if the user is looking for an apartment to rent at Chinburg’s Newmarket location, it’s not out of the question that you would also be interested in the apartments for rent at the nearby Exeter location (only 8 miles away). Thus pulling these six rental property websites under one roof and allowing the user to seamlessly navigate between them in order to find their ideal rental property made a lot of sense.

From a link building perspective, this situation was a huge opportunity. Here’s why:

• Combining Existing Links – Links from third party sites send signals to search engines about how important the site is that they are linking to. Having seven sites on seven different URLs split up the total links pointing to any one of their domains. When the seven sites were combined into one, all the links were also combined. For conversation’s sake, let’s say each of the seven sites had ten links pointing to them, so when we combined all the sites under one domain, we consolidated all those links to be 70 links pointing to one domain.
• All Future Links Earned Are Consolidated: Once all the domains were consolidated under one domain, it amplified the impact of any future links earned to any of the websites. Thus providing a means to continually improve the website’s domain authority.
• Future Content Strategy Benefits all the Businesses: Much of Chinburg Properties inbound marketing retainer with Vital is spent on creating great content in the form of blog posts. When each new blog post is published, the value of that content benefits all seven of the businesses as opposed to just one.

Below is the full list of domains that were combined:

http://www.chinburgbuilders.com/
http://cochecomills.com/
http://onewashingtoncenter.com/
http://newmarketmills.com/
http://www.canalstreetnh.com/
http://www.exetermill.com/
http://www.millportnh.com/

We decided to combine all these domains under a brand new domain that represented all the brands. This new domain became www.chinburg.com. Therefore not only were we combining domains, we also had to pull off a SEO-Friendly Domain Migration. This essentially means transferring the full contents of one domain and moving it under another (in this case www.chinburgbuilders.com to www.chinburg.com), and then setting up all necessary page re-directs so as to not lose any link equity in the process.

The Inbound Content Marketing Strategy

Once all the brand and website domain architecture projects were completed, we began our inbound content marketing strategy. This strategy was focused on the goals of growing both the new home construction business, the commercial real estate rental business, and the residential rental business.

In order to hit these goals, Vital drafted a content strategy focused on writing new blog posts and web pages. During the course of the inbound marketing program with Chinburg, Vital created over 50 new pieces of blog content and web page content. Additionally two new eBook landing pages and a 4-minute video were added to the website.

All the content created for this inbound marketing strategy focused on educating around topics of new home construction, how to build an eco-friendly home and how to procure commercial office space. Chinburg has a rich photography library, which helped further improve the overall quality of their content. The investment Chinburg Properties made in professional photography was very important to the overall success of this campaign because the photos helped give website visitors an idea of the true quality of the finished product Chinburg is known for.

Additionally, this inbound strategy also focused on sharing all the exciting news happening at Chinburg Properties. Vital wrote news posts about new home developments, green building technology being used on their homes and new homes they recently finished construction on.

This represents just several of the 300+ keywords that are tracked for this campaign.

At Vital, we’ve helped all kinds of companies implement effective inbound marketing strategies—content-driven strategies designed to drive web traffic, increase leads and drive keyword rankings. We’re proud to tell the story of how we helped, and continue to help, Chinburg remain among the best thought leaders in their industry. Their success is our success.

Full testimonial:

“As Chinburg Properties evolved over time, it became challenging to tie together our services in a unified way. We needed help to refine the brand story and to integrate expanding lines of business and new communities. At the same time the landscape of marketing was rapidly changing, as online, mobile and social platforms replaced more traditional marketing. It became clear to me that Vital could help us to address both of these challenges.

Working with Vital has been an intense and rewarding experience that has born great success. Their commitment to understanding our business and our needs is unparalleled. We have spent countless hours brainstorming together over the best ways to address new opportunities and those sessions have produced excellent results. It is clear that they value the relationship and that they continue to work on solutions. The strategy and the execution reflect our vision and voice. The metrics speak for themselves.

Vital is at the cutting edge of all things inbound and I have full confidence that our investment of money and time is yielding the very best possible results. And finally, I genuinely enjoy working with every member of the Vital team.”

Jen Chinburg, Marketing Director