Banner Mattress is a vertically integrated manufacturer and retailer with 14 locations in Southern California. After rebuilding their website on the WordPress platform, and supplementing with pay-per-click campaigns, store traffic is up over 15% and organic website traffic is up over 34%.
CLIENT PROFILE
Banner Mattress is a vertically integrated manufacturer and retailer with 14 locations in Southern California. For retail customers, Banner Mattress provides delivery and haul-away, in-house and third-party financing, and industry leading price and comfort guarantees. A family-owned business since its inception in 1926, Banner Mattress has used print, radio, and television advertising to become one of the most recognized brands in the region.
THE BUSINESS CHALLENGE: GROWTH IN A MATURE MARKET
Banner Mattress was facing both increased competition and diminished demand. Their competitors include mass merchants such as Walmart and Target, warehouse clubs, and traditional department stores. While Banner Mattress has a brand advantage, many competitors had better online features and attractions. The importance of generating leads online cannot be overstated: while only 3% of mattress sales occur online, over 40% of customers research mattresses on the internet before making a purchase decision. In addition, over the past few years the bedding industry has experienced recessionary demand while dealing with rising commodity prices. These trends have compressed margins and increased the importance of sales volumes, particularly for vertically integrated operations such as Banner Mattress.
Banner Mattress approached Catalysis with a straightforward request: increase the amount of visitors to their website and drive more people to their physical store locations. With strong online competition and an aging customer base, our client also wanted to improve their overall online presence.
THE SOLUTION: INTEGRATED DIGITAL MARKETING
A simple, but ultimately ineffective, solution would have been to initiate a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign to attract more visitors to the website. However, based on click-to-brick best practices and an evaluation of client objectives, we determined that website attrition was also an issue. With over 40% of customers researching mattresses before going to the store, the Banner Mattress site would have to be information rich and have a clean and navigable design to make pay-per-click pay. In short, more visitors could have been driven to the website, but without a more focused design, additional traffic would not equate to valuable traffic. Additionally, the clients wanted to manage the website themselves, so a simple publishing platform was required.
In February of 2011, we helped our client launch a new website based on the WordPress platform. This site came complete with a new, clean look, easy customer access to store locations leveraging Google Maps, and a simplified navigation for all products and offerings. Shortly after the launch of the new website, we launched a PPC campaign using Google AdWords. Later we supplemented those purchases with additional campaigns on MSN AdCenter, which covers the Yahoo and Bing search engines.
In looking at the complete online presence of our client, we also noticed a gap in terms of being able to quickly and easily find a store location without having to go to the company website. We worked with our client to gather information about each of their 14 store locations and claim their ‘places’ on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
THE RESULTS: MORE HITS, MORE CUSTOMERS, MORE REVENUE
Compared to the same timeframe last year, foot traffic across our client’s 14 locations has increased 15.7% in the first 5+ months the new website has been live. As a result, store revenue has seen a similar increase. In-store surveys have confirmed the integrated digital improvements as the most important factor for these increases.
Customer actions, defined as finding a store on a map, getting directions to a store location, or clicking through to the website, have increased substantially. As an example, customer actions from Google Places now amount to approximately 700 each month.
Through efforts to improve our client’s SEO and page ranking, organic traffic to the website has increased 34.1% since launch. Similarly, depending on the amount of budget dedicated to PPC and other retail promotions taking place, PPC traffic has brought in from 400 to 1,800 new site visitors each month.
To refine the site after launch, we worked with our client to determine the goals or actions that they wanted customers to take when visiting the website. Utilizing a custom set of site analytics, modifications were made to more closely align our client’s goals with actual customer behaviors. Between establishing clear goals, and highlighting related actions with greater prominence, we have seen customers complete the desired actions during 60% to70% of overall visits.
ABOUT CATALYSIS
For nearly 20 years, Catalysis has specialized in the digital integration of award-winning marketing campaigns that drive connected, measurable results. Our clients include Microsoft, Moss Adams, Banner Mattress, Thunder Valley Casino, BabyLegs, and WineBid.
For more information, contact info@catalysis.com or visit our website at www.catalysis.com.
The information contained in this publication is general and is for informational purposes only. Catalysis makes no warranties, express or implied, in this material.