Kay Plumbing | Local Business Case Study
600x the traffic. More than 3x the leads.
Our partnership with Kay Plumbing makes for a good case study in how we help local businesses generate more leads and sales online.
The Client
Kay Plumbing was stuck in an all-too-familiar digital marketing trap for 21st century local business owners: throwing money and time down a hole with no measurable results. Contractors made huge promises and smart plans, but at the end of the day? The phone just wasn’t ringing.
- Their website generated some leads… but not nearly enough.
- Contractors offered expensive solutions… that never solved anything.
- No one could clearly explain what was broken and why… so nothing ever changed.
The Analysis
Without robust analytics, a concrete strategy, and to-the-penny tracking of on-site conversions, it’s impossible to know what works and what doesn’t. And if you don’t know what’s broken, how the heck can you be expected to fix it?
It didn’t take us long to spot Kay’s fundamental issue: they were working blind. Everyone was.
Think about that a minute and you’ll see why we’re so frustrated with “digital marketing” companies out there. Imagine taking a job without being able to measure anything, or to know which dimensions to adjust and how.
On day one, we started turning on the lights. One year out, Kay Plumbing gets 100 quality leads per month and is hiring more plumbers.
Turning it Around
Analytics & Performance Tracking
Trying to grow a local business without first establishing accurate performance metrics is like working without tools in the dark. Before we could troubleshoot Kay’s website and develop a new plan, we had to get a clear idea what was going on. Their analytics systems were reporting inaccurate results and not sharing data correctly across systems; first thing was to gut out all that old code and establish real performance tracking.
Social Media & Review Management
We built a social presence that established Kay in people’s minds as an authority on local water quality and plumbing issues, while using plumbing memes and social engagement to show they were approachable. This keeps Kay in the back of folk’s minds when plumbing issues occur and helps spread the word when they have sales or promotions.
Web Design & Optimization
We audited Kay’s site performance, their organic traffic, and how visitors interacted with the site. With that in hand, we could troubleshoot performance and build something better. In parallel, we studied who was using Kay’s site and how Google search users looked for plumbers. The combination let us design a site that dominated local search traffic for plumbing services and helped users get the support they were looking for.
Targeted Advertising (Google & Facebook Advertising)
Targeted advertising is not magical, but it can be very powerful when paired with the kind of performance tracking we do. We can measure which keywords, sentences, and marketing messages contribute to real online lead generation, and how much. This lets us dial in the precise combinations consumers respond to — and deliver quality plumbing leads at significant savings.
The Results
If there’s a single, central lesson to our experience partnering with Kay Plumbing, it’s that you can’t work in the dark. Build accurate and meaningful performance tracking, first, or you’re almost guaranteed to waste money. We turned those insights into a lead generation system: social media and ads that pull in prospects, a lean website that turns them into leads, and a review management system that automatically solicits online reviews from Kay’s happiest customers.
600%
Organic Traffic Growth
100s
New Online Reviews
Multiple
Job Applications per Week
3x
Quality Leads Each Month
$1,000,000
Increase of almost $1,000,000 in annual revenue