First to Buy
Situation
First To Buy are a small family company which collects scrap cars free of charge or pays a small fee for a car which is coming towards the end of it’s useful life. In most cases the cars can be improved and made roadworthy again but some are sent to the scrap heap. The original website did not have content rich copy and the only hits were via expensive Google Ad words. A limited marketing budget meant limited exposure and the hits to the original site were below 20 per day with only 14 cars a week being collected. With the original focus also being on scrap cars the quality of vehicles being collected was very low and many had no resale value.
Objectives
To develop a new website that took into account the geographical coverage and to explain in more detail the simple process of having your car removed by a professional, qualified and caring company.
To use local place names to drive down Google Adword costs. Scrap my car is a round £2.00 per click where as scrap my car Croydon is only £1.50. Which means the marketing budget goes further and you only get enquiries from the locations covered.
Action Taken
Ray Watson of Irun Kingswood designed the new site in conjunction with the client using the Web Build Pro E-Commerce package. After a short training session the client was able to use the Content Management facility to create and launch individual pages relating to major town names. These are the landing pages for the Google Adword campaigns.
Outcome
The new site with its location specific pages is now pulling in 150 unique visitors per day, an average of 53 cars per week being collected. That is a four fold increase in car turnover. The more detailed copy on the site and the focused targeting has also seen an increase in the quality of the cars being collected and that has a knock on affect in terms of the resale value. 1st to Buy are now making significant profits on a weekly basis and this is funding expansion into other vehicle related services.
"We needed to increase the volume and quality of site visitors so that we could improve our chances of finding cars in what is a very competitive market.
Irun helped us to put together a new website, advised on and helped to write the copy for each of the main pages and advised on keywords for our Google Adwords campaign. We had tried previous companies who had made similar promises and not delivered, they all seamed more interested in getting you more clicks for less money but did not recognise the importance of the correct type of click ( a customer who costs you £1.50 per click but is serious is worth far more than 3 customers at £1.00 who are just surfing).
Irun Kingswood brought an understanding of not just click increase at reduced costs but combined this with a marketing strategy that targeted active customers so not only did we have an increase in clicks, but we found a proportional increase in enquiries linked to those clicks, Irun Kingswood also helped us hone our website to target more specific areas and a better quality of enquiry which has not only brought our cost of conversions down from £17 each to on average £12 but has increased profitability as due to a smaller collection area and a better class of vehicle being collected our profit margin per car has increased. We were also given training on how to alter our web site content, the Irun package makes this very easy and allows us to very quickly adapt to any changing market conditions.
We are delighted with the results and have now had to move our business to a much bigger garage and storage complex to handle the increase in cars and therefore business."
Ryan Clarke, Director
