How A New Approach Results In Historical Sales

Helping E.C. Barton & Company Renovate their Digital Marketing Approach

E.C. Barton & Company has been selling home improvement items for 135 years. They are based out of Jonesboro, Arkansas, operate in 19 states, and have managed to stay around for well over a century. While they have been doing a lot of things well, they knew that they could still be doing better.

That’s where we come in.

On their journey to improve, E.C. Barton & Company knew that the digital realm was a spot where they needed focus. They tested out working with an in-house team and some local agencies but got mixed results.

Kelley & Associates was already doing design and creative work for E.C. Barton & Company, so we understood the different brands and the goal for rebranding. Looking at the size of the project, we knew that the best solution was to work with a partner and collaborate. We brought in OCD Media and formed a powerhouse team to find the best solution together.

That’s when things changed. In our first year of managing their media together, we helped E.C. Barton & Company have their best year ever. That’s 135 years of sales history. And, in the second year, we beat that record by another 14%!

The Right Tools and Know-How

When it comes to digital marketing, establishing a well-thought-out media strategy is critical for success in today’s media world. Selecting tactics without developing a strategy will lead to bad decisions, wasteful spending, and poor marketplace results. The media strategy should act as the foundation and blueprints, guiding and supporting each step in the process. But just like a remodel, we needed to inspect what they currently had and plan the strategy around that information.

We began by looking at their stores, breaking them out based on performance and potential in order to uncover where our priorities should lie and what the current pain points were.

Once we had that information, we looked into what drives their customers. We found that there are two primary triggers for consumers in a home improvement purchase: planned remodeling and unplanned replacement.

Because the remodeling trigger is planned, we were able to identify specific stages in the consumer process where we could insert content and advertising to help drive people to choose Barton’s as their shopping destination.

However, because the replacement trigger is predominantly unplanned and unpredictable, there are limited opportunities to identify someone who will be in the replacement path in the future or where they are in that process currently. That lack of knowledge makes focusing on bottom of the funnel activities is critical for this segment.

Ultimately, we needed to take different approaches to each trigger point.

The Remodel

Segmenting the remodeling market helped us to identify and focus messaging on those who state they are intending on remodeling their home. We built a custom segmentation (see below) to further enhance the media we select and the actions we’re trying to illicit specifically for each segment.

Our findings showed that only 10% of people are Very/Somewhat Likely to remodel in the next 12 months. Understanding their media habits and how media impacts their consumer journey is key. A broad-based demographic approach will miss the opportunity to capture these planned purchases.

The stages of home improvement and remodeling start with Dreaming and Planning. To catch consumers in the dreaming and planning stage, we created partnerships with Meredith Publishing and Discovery Networks digital properties using custom-created native and branded content. This content helps the consumer transition from dreaming and planning to seeing the potential and feeling like the end result is attainable.

First, we had to get the overall strategy and spending priorities correct for each market.

Next, we fixed the tactical execution.

We knew that there are planned and unplanned home improvement projects and that media needed to be able to address both of these instances.

Barton’s had previously focused more on “bottom of the funnel” media due to the results in their strongest markets. But, from our research, we recognized an opportunity that adding some “top of the funnel” tactics would help build their low and mid-growth markets.

We used our proprietary matrix of media (DEBT) to align media with their role in building each of the critical components for success: Demand, Engagement, Brand, and Transactions.

We freed up funding by fixing foundational elements of paid search to improve keyword and bidding strategies:

Switched from generalized text campaigns to local personalized text campaigns
Switched from maximizing clicks to maximizing conversions
Added Google Shopping ads to improve e-commerce and add visual elements

We took a localized approach, building out each location its own campaign to:

Improve hyper-targetability and optimization
Report conversions on a more granular level

We collected baseline conversion data through a Maximized Conversion bid strategy.

Once we had taken these steps, we strategically transitioned to a Target Cost Per Acquisition (tCPA) bid strategy and began driving up conversions, while stabilizing the cost per conversion. We focused on getting users into the stores.

We also took action to optimize the multiple campaigns.

Ads

We added more calls-to-action:

Site link extensions
Structured snippets
Callouts

These influenced conversions and got users to find the store location closest to them.

Keywords

Added new, highly relevant, and industry-specific keywords based on Google traffic data
Discovered new competitor keyword trends based on regular search term analysis
Regularly reviewed the campaigns for negative keyword maintenance

PROJECT RESULTS

After we conducted our research and implemented a planned strategy, we received positive results as expected.

Increased overall search conversion rate by over 220% within 8 months
Decreased cost per conversion by over 53% within 8 months
E.C. Barton & Company is extremely happy with its new and updated media strategy. They are now dreaming about more projects with us.

Future Renovations

Over the course of this implementation, we also identified several other tactics to boost results. Here is a list of items we plan to test and track:

Higher TV weight levels
Cumulative effect of media mix variations
Addition of new elements (radio, streaming video, etc.)
Eliminate newspaper entirely
Expand use of paid social
Use of local cable on contextually relevant networks instead of exclusively over-the-air broadcast channels