Background

IBT Merchants is a local independent builder’s merchant, based in Scotland’s central belt. The business is renowned right across Scotland's central belt for supplying quality building and timber materials to both the public and trade, from their base near Falkirk.

After Big Red launched their new website for Christmas 2018, IBT was motivated to maximise sales from the very outset. As IBT previously didn’t have an e-commerce site, Big Red Digital was delighted to advise IBT on the right blend of marketing activities, to achieve maximum ROI for their budget.

What we Did

Prior to the website launch, Big Red Digital provided a full SEO set up for the site itself ensuring the site was fully indexable across search engines.

To drive a volume of relevant traffic to the site, Big Red delivered a high-impact a PPC campaign on some of IBT's high-value products, blended with a longer-term content marketing strategy.

Working together we researched, wrote, and published weekly news articles that we posted on the website, and that were pushed out through their social media sites. These included product overviews, general advice, and special offers as well as company and industry news. Not only did these news stories give an immediate impact to their audience, they keyword-led articles will continue to provide a longer-term SEO benefit over time.

Throughout the campaign, our blend of Content Marketing and PPC pushed high levels of targetted traffic to the website. This provided IBT with a perfect start for their new online sales strategy. The marketing message encourages visitors to continue to shop for additional goods online, seek help and advice from IBT - and importantly, encourages them to come back for more.

Results

Delivering the news articles across multiple channels maximized company exposure for IBT. This helped to raise its online profile, build the brand, reach a new audience, and drive traffic to the website. IBT were delighted with over 3,265 people viewing their articles on the website. These will continue to provide a longer-term SEO benefit and will be reshared on social media over time.

The PPC campaign was equally successful and helped generate 5,292 online product sales over the highly competitive summer period. All-in-all there were 420 goal completions from the Google campaign and saw an increased basket spend as the campaign continued.

As PPC keyword data pinpoints exactly which keywords are driving traffic, the campaign helped us optimise SEO for even better results moving forward.