Customer Profile
The Client’s identity is anonymized in this case study, as it contains real revenue figures, response rates and corporate strategy. The Client is a company that specializes in the manufacture and sale of roofing products, windows, and related accessories for residential and commercial buildings. They are a global leader in this industry and offer a wide range of products for direct purchase by consumers, indirect purchase via installers, online purchases and also large commercial engagements.
Project Requirements & Challenges
The Client sought to create locators for both Residential Dealers and Installers. Additionally, they also needed a solution for Commercial customers. The audiences, brands and deal sizes between these applications varies widely since commercial relationships can represent large building projects worth over 7 figures while residential applications are higher volume, but lower dollar amounts per engagement.
Both residential and commercial applications required Location Pages which could capture potential customers early in their selection process. The Client had identified that many purchases originated directly from the 3rd party installer, where the opportunity to inject 3rd party products into the solution created a potential for lost revenue and an inconsistent branding experience.
Objectives
The MetaLocator team met with the Client to listen, assess and understand the project requirements and also to demonstrate the solution capabilities and relevant examples. The Client selected MetaLocator based on our ability to fully accommodate their requirements and our expertise in guiding them toward the best solution strategy.
The primary objectives MetaLocator discovered during requirements gathering included:
- Provide a simple way for residential prospects to identify a nearby, highly-qualified installer for their roofing project.
- Direct customers searching the web for “roofing products near me” and similar keywords to Client-branded search results for local contractors in the Client’s preferred provider network.
- Capture, track and fulfill inbound Leads from the Locator and Location Pages.
- Provide a completely separate branding experience for residential and commercial customers while maintaining a single administrative system.
- Easily capture and update data such as reviews, address data, store hours and more.
- Track the performance of the solution from all angles including various ongoing pay-per-click ad campaign investments.
Execution Strategy
The MetaLocator Enterprise Services Team leveraged years of experience and best practices to understand, define and address the requirements. MetaLocator’s off-the-shelf solution was leveraged as much as possible to avoid custom coding or complex logic. MetaLocator follows a refined strategy for each Enterprise relationship that begins with a focus on the end user’s experience first.
Key Strategy 1: Serve the Customer First to Maximize Revenue
A buyer-centric approach manifests throughout the Execution Strategy. First, when presenting results in the Locator, the following best practices are evident:
- Present results automatically with zero user input. A locator should react and relate to the user automatically. A user immediately seeing mapped nearby locations helps the user orient themselves and immediately understand that resources exist near to their current location.
- Present a bold call to action. Users respond to calls-to-action. Presenting a bold CTA increases leads, conversions and performance measurability. Promoting the most measurable communication path helps keep the Client in the conversation and maintain tracking and branding.
- Present the right result, not just the closest. MetaLocator sorted the results based on distance, but also based on the number of quality reviews, the response time to dealer inquiries and the number of ignored customer inquiries.
These and other best practice strategies yielded Locator results that were well-poised to generate trackable leads and satisfied users.
Strategy 2: Create Branded Location Pages to Capture Organic Traffic
In order to maximize local signals to capture searches for target key phrases a series of location and hierarchical pages were created. Each set of pages served the purpose of capturing local intent at each level of geography. The pages were created as follows:
Top Level Page: A top-level page which links to each US state in addition to the number of installers in each state. This directory page was linked in the corporate Website’s footer to help search engines fully index the complete geography of locations.
State Pages: A page for each state that links to every city with a dealer. The URL also included the full state and city name as the user progressed down through the hierarchy.
City Pages: A city page that also includes full address details, local schema and links to nearby cities. Notice the search option is presented in the case the user reaches this page from Google and wants to perform an additional search.
Location Pages: Finally the Location Page itself is presented including every detail available about the location. This canonical resource aims to be the best representation of this geographic location online, and therefore the top result in local and traditional search results. Local signals including local keywords, reviews mentioning the location, address and contact details are presented prominently.
Strategy 3: Create Audience-Targeted Brand Sites
MetaLocator designed and executed a separate Locator and set of Location Pages for the commercial audience. The commercial and residential buyer personas are very distinct in messaging, brand recognition and sales cycle. The design approach was modified to convey commercial application readiness and a similarly bold call to action.
The commercial locator leveraged MetaLocator’s Territory Search feature to ensure the 1MM+ value Leads generated from the locator were equitably distributed to the sales team according to their territory distribution.
Strategy 4: Pull Data from Multiple Sources to Create Complete Profiles in MetaLocator
Locators with out-dated or incomplete data can fall quickly out of utility. Local search, UX and reliability are all negatively impacted by poor data quality. Installer, dealer and commercial sales representative data was stored in a variety of databases and in many cases incomplete. Initially, the data was available in the following sources:
- The installer data was in SalesForce.
- The dealer data was unmaintained, incomplete and in a legacy locator product.
- The sales representative data was in a separate CRM which included their sales territories.
- Store hours, reviews and phone numbers were commonly incomplete throughout the data set.
MetaLocator staff configured recurring, automatic data import jobs that pulled installer data directly from Salesforce. MetaLocator also provided data enrichment services to complete missing information such as store hours and reviews. Dealer data was imported in a one-time batch operation and the data is now maintained directly in MetaLocator’s Content Management System.
Strategy 5: Track Leads to Maximize Customer Satisfaction and Revenue
Over the course of an initial 20-day study period, before leveraging MetaLocator’s Lead Optimization tools, this customer captured 974 high-intent Leads for commercial and residential applications. During the study period, 43% of inbound leads were not acknowledged by the 3rd party dealer. Each Lead having a value of approximately $5,000-$10,000 means the lost revenue due to ignored customer inquiries peaked at approximately $100,000 per day for a total loss of 2 MM in revenue potential during the study period.
Armed with this data, the Client was finally able to see these issues and take action to address root causes including:
- Incorrect contact information for the dealer
- The dealer was no longer in business
- The dealer no longer stocked or serviced the Client’s brand
- The dealer was busy, unavailable or otherwise not interested
By addressing these and other root causes, the impact was immediate and permanent:
The drop in “Ignored Rate” (shown in red above) was precipitated by the Client’s action based on the data revealed by MetaLocator’s Lead Optimization feature.
Leveraging MetaLocator’s Lead Optimization tools, the Client was able to:
- Automatically send lead reminders to unacknowledged leads
- Request status updates for each lead
- Re-assign unacknowledged leads to nearby Dealers
- View and export a list of Dealers by response rate
- View a comprehensive dashboard that identifies captured revenue, average response times and ratings
- Display the dealer’s average response time in the Locator results and in the lead notification itself
- Communicate to dealers to show a direct correlation between their response rates and new business opportunities
The Lead Notifications also included communication that notified the Dealers of their average response time, further encouraging them to respond quickly.
Outcomes
The Client profiled in this report has been a satisfied MetaLocator customer since 2017. The project was regarded as a significant success that transformed the effectiveness of their dealer programs and strengthened the organization as whole.
The following outcomes are among the top accomplishments in in the first 6 months this project:
- Increased lead response rates by 75%
- Captured approximately 15 MM in previously lost lead value
- Decreased lead response time by 43%
- Drastically reduced administrative overhead by automating data synchronizations
- Captured over 1000 pages indexed by Google, including #1 position for the Client’s primary target local search terms for “near me” and City-named searches.
- Discovered a previously unknown seasonality of dealer response rates, where MetaLocator identified that dealers are more prone to be unresponsive in the summer months, a critical time period for this customer.
Conclusion
In conclusion, MetaLocator’s solution successfully addressed the Client’s requirements and delivered positive outcomes for their business.
This customer learned that tracking is essential when relying on 3rd-party networks to fulfill the promise of its brand. Summary dealer reports miss the full picture of customers that never received a reply.
By following a buyer-centric approach, MetaLocator’s strategy yielded a set of branded customer experiences that were well-poised to generate trackable leads and satisfied users.
Overall, MetaLocator’s solution enabled the Client to create a winning solution that serves their installers, dealers, and customers, resulting in increased revenue opportunities and a consistent branding experience across all touchpoints.
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