Are you actually repelling your customers with your content?
When I first connected with Rocky Mountain Forest Products and their annex company Granite Liquidators, that was exactly what was happening.
Rocky Mountain Forest Products is a decking and fencing wholesaler that sells direct to the public, offering some of the best deals on a variety of wood products. Unlike most fencing companies, they get their wood straight from the mill, cutting out the middleman. If you're in the carpentry or DIY world, this is ideal.
They actively sought help after receiving dozens of calls over several months that they were thinking of buying from the company until they saw their site and read some of their content.
In RMFP's (Rocky Mountain Forest Products) case, this problem seemed to only affect their website content, landing pages, and product descriptions. Luckily, they had an outside company handling blog content at the time, and for their industry, the topics worked just fine in attracting customers. Though even there, we made some changes.
Now, this isn't very common for companies that I've come across. It's a severe case of disjointed content with and inconsistent flow and an overwhelming amount of typos. However, what MANY businesses DO experience, is a high bounce rate and a great loss of potential customers.
This is because the content doesn't reach them. It doesn't show hit their desires or their pain points. It doesn't show them a real solution or answer their burning questions- the questions that will help them decide whether or not they want to sign up/ buy.
Where RMFP went wrong: While companies often struggle the most with their blog content- often writing topics that attract the wrong audience- this was the least problematic area for RMFP. Instead, it was their website, product descriptions, and landing pages- the very pages they needed to optimize the most. Their pages had no consistency in messaging, and were focused too much on themselves, rather than on the desire of the customer- which was to have a beautiful deck/ fence at a low cost and without hassle.
The 5 Steps I Took To Bring In 30% More Leads In 2 Months
While I generally focus on optimizing my clients' blog, it was clear that RMFP had more pressing issues. This is why my process always starts with analyzing where the company is NOW and understanding the goals and where the company wants to be.
Step 1. Analysis
I generally create an immediate, or priority, task list with things that don't necessarily need to be involved in the strategy. This includes things like broken links, missing meta data, etc.
A lot of content marketing agencies and professionals start with understanding who the audience is, but this wasn't necessary with RMFP. They'd already nailed down (pun intended) who their audience was/is, and their blogs already spoke to that.
Instead, they needed consistency... and brand voice... and much, much better content that spoke to pain points and desire.
The goals of RMFP were pretty simple:
Stop receiving negative phone calls from customers
Create a better-looking website that didn't drive customers away, but instead attracted them
Clearly explain what they offer
I had to spend time evaluating their SEO efforts, which weren't entirely off point, all things considered. They were luckily focused on local SEO, which was another positive. From my evaluation, I determined that the real problem was that, though they knew what they wanted to communicate, they had trouble putting it together clearly. This translated as far as their product descriptions, which were fairly basic and offered very little appeal or offered little vision to customers (in interior design and construction, customers often have difficulty visualizing end product. Being able to draw a vision helps push them to purchase. They need to see how they can use something and why they should).
From this, I put together a task sheet, including:
Rewrite all of the website pages, except blog pages
Discontinue their existing landing pages and write new ones
Rewrite all of their product descriptions
While this is a very short list, it was an incredibly daunting task. There were dozens of product descriptions and web pages, and though they had trouble writing content or themselves, they were proactive in marketing efforts. This meant a lot of landing pages as well, which they continually a/b tested.
Step 2: Diving into their pages
The first task I jumped into was to rewrite their front-facing webpages- the pages that customers see immediately upon entering the RMFP's, and their annex company Granite Liquidator's, sites.
The biggest issue I saw was that the content didn't match from one paragraph to the next. It lacked consistency, message, or any type of cadence. These pages happened to be at the root of those phone calls they were consistently getting stating that they looked like a scam company or, in the very least, that they looked unprofessional.
This isn't an isolated issue for companies. Even if the problem isn't this extreme, there are a lot of companies that struggle to come off as genuine, professional, or even as the experts that they are.
Once I fixed the most visible pages, I began changing the rest. I rewrote the content for flow and messaging, but also for SEO.
Product descriptions
After these pages, I moved on to their product descriptions. There were a ton of them, and even though they weren't as damaging as the other webpages, they weren't compelling anyone to purchase. That's the entire point of those descriptions.
I spent three weeks rewriting descriptions- there was enough of them to fill up the entire three weeks.
The changes were pretty strong. I used emotional language and visualization to get potential buyers to notice the subtle colors in the granite, how they would look in their kitchen or bathroom, and even what colors they would pair well with.
Here are a few examples:
Buying is a highly emotional process, especially for high-value items that you're going to use and look at constantly, that sit at the heart of your home (the kitchen), and that is uniquely difficult to visualize. That is why I went the route of more emotional content designed for better visualization.
Landing pages
Landing pages were already a highly effective tool for the company, so I sought to continue that. However, the content was consistent with the webpages, in that they needed to be reworked in their entirety.
I scraped all of the existing pages and created new ones that continued their messaging from the new webpages.
Backend changes
Other changes the site needed to undergo were smaller, less impactful changes. Nevertheless, they were still just as important. Some of the changes included:
Meta descriptions- some of the pages were missing meta data, or at the very least the meta data didn't have a keyword.
Broken links
Updates to SEO- a lot of pages weren't optimized
Internal linking- they didn't update content with links to new articles of related topics.
A lot of these changes made the pages easier to find, and easier for Google to index.
Blogging
I worked with RMFP for a year and a half, and in that time, I wrote at least one blog a week. This build up a considerable amount of internet cred for them.
Their focus on consumer content was pretty well centered, so I didn't change much of their approach. However, I did focus more on answering the questions of the consumer. Some of the articles include:
Promotion
One of the most common mistakes B2B's and B2C's make is to publish content only on their site, and neglect any type of promotion. At the time, RMFP had little in the way of an online presence. Even their own social media had been neglected, and they'd only had Facebook.
I took rather simple measures to promote their content.
First, I started sharing all of their articles on Pinterest. It's a massive resource for people planning their home remodels. The marketing director came to me one day asking which articles I'd shared on Pinterest because that was suddenly one of their top sources of traffic to their website.
Other sources of promotion were connecting to interior designers in the area to ask them to link to our resources. This was the biggest challenge, met with a lot of no's. But ultimately, there were a few that continue to partner with the company.
The Results...
As the headline suggests- within the first two months of improvements, the companies' sales team received a bump in calls by 30%. In addition, they stopped receiving complaints about their site. A few residual benefits include:
They now have 12,000 keywords on their site, and their organic traffic consistently rises, and now trends from over 6,000 visitors a month.
When you fix the biggest issues on your site, optimize for SEO, answer the burning questions of your visitors, and show your professional expertise, you win an audience that actually wants to buy from you.
Interested in getting results for your business?
If you're tired of working with agencies that promise results, but only bring you traffic instead of leads- here's how working with me is different:
I take a full-scale look at your website, not just your blog content
I take over your blog entirely. You don't have to worry about developing ideas, promoting your content, or anything else.
I dive into your audience's need to determine the kind of content they really consume and build a strategy for reaching them where they already are.
There's no obligation. No big fees. No time strained contracts.
If you'd like to work with me, email scolley@writedestinationagency.com. Include:
Your name & role
Company name
Marketing goals
Link to your blog
If you'd like to replicate my process for your website/ blog, I've summarized my process into a 5 step cheat sheet:
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