Two years ago, at a trade show, I met the owner of an SME of about fifty people who wanted to bring his website up to date.
While I was trying to learn more about his business, in an attempt to assess the benefit of a web approach in his case, he spent the entire meeting trying to convince me that he was just a “tube bender,” that he had nothing special to say, and that ultimately the web would bring him nothing more.
Two years later, we finally redesigned his website, which needed it if only for image reasons. Then, helped along by pressure from certain shareholders, he still took the step toward a promotional approach: an AdWords campaign and (a dash of) search engine optimization.
So it has now been 1 month since all of this was put in place. Certainly, we are only at the beginning: the landing pages are not very targeted, for lack of in-depth marketing work, the sector-based approach is poorly developed, and SEO will take time… but it’s working.
Even we, at the agency, remained quite cautious about the result: 1 qualified inquiry per month would have been enough to make the business model viable, so that was our objective.
How surprised we were to see that over 30 days, there were 16 quote requests, some of them from buyers at large corporations. Of these 16 requests, 7 have a reasonable chance of succeeding, for recurring runs of 1,000 to 6,000 parts.
And guess who now wants to accelerate the process? Proof by example remains foolproof.
