We are fielding so many new customer calls and are looking to hire more staff to accommodate our increased demand.
Laura Sperratore
Visit: www.sperrs.com
Husband and wife team Mark & Laura are the second-generation owners of Sperr’s Fuel. As the new leaders of Sperr’s, they faced challenges familiar to many second-generation owners:
The good news was that decades of hard work had earned Sperr’s an outstanding reputation with their existing customer base. But their new-customer growth was slow.
Sperr’s was ready to try a more modern approach to growing the business: online marketing.
We helped the second-generation owners of this family business grow revenue while staying true to their customer-first legacy.
(Clockwise from top left: John, Mark, Laura, and Rose)
Research shows that customers form an impression of a business within the first 5 seconds of looking at their website. Sperr’s wanted to make the right impression and launch a new website in time for the 2019-2021 heating season.
The new website looks the part for a trustworthy local fuel company.
The timeline was tight. To launch a site that looked professional, communicated the Sperr’s story, and prompted visitors to convert, we leveraged a strategy called growth-driven design.
Growth-driven design focuses on launching with a core set of pages with a goal to add more depth to the site over time.
That’s exactly what we did.
By December 2019 (2 months after the project’s start), we launched the new Sperr’s website with 5 core pages, plus 2 compelling offers to convert prospects.
The new site gave a positive first impression to new prospects.
It was primed and ready to grow as we tackled new initiatives. Over the next 12 months, we continued to add blog content and local service-area pages as part of our SEO strategy, and add more offers, an invoice-collection form, and an online order form to convert prospects.
Sperr’s old site was driving very little traffic. Their new website was built and optimized for search engines, but launching a new site doesn’t immediately drive traffic.
We decided to take a two-pronged approach to traffic-driving.
Google Ads delivers fast traffic results and is highly customizable to what prospects are searching, geographic region, or even demographics.
We built offers and Google Ad campaigns to run through peak demand season (December through early March). Targeting ads to their service area drove qualified local traffic to their site. We reduced the budget during the warmer months and re-launched the campaigns when the weather cooled in October.
Google Ad campaigns have driven thousands of visits and funneled over 2 dozen leads to the Sperr’s team.
Blogging consistently has been proven to drive traffic and leads. We’ve previously doubled a site’s traffic through blogging. We wanted to repeat that success for Sperr’s.
We started blogging 4-6x/month in December 2019 with a goal to hit 50 blog posts by the fall. (52+blog posts has shown to be the “magic number” for accelerated traffic growth). By September 2020 we had 50 blogs published.
It’s worth noting that during the summer months, traffic growth was slow. People just aren’t searching for heat-related topics in summer, so we don’t expect it to materialize into traffic.
But once the temperatures starting dipping in the region and people started searching Google for heat and oil-related questions, organic traffic took off.
Blogging catapulted organic traffic growth (orange line), multiplying traffic by 3,000% after just 12 months.
By December 2020, the blog was driving over 2,500 visits/month to the site.
Blogging helped drive traffic and increase the overall search engine value of the website.
Sperr’s went from ranking for almost no keywords to ranking for over 140 keywords in the top 10.
Keyword growth rapidly multiplied in line with organic traffic. Sperr's website is found for key phrases prospects type into Google.
Sperr’s invoice collection system was fairly manual. They accepted checks in the office or via mail, or they took a customer’s card information over the phone.
This not only placed a time burden on their busy office staff, it also created a lag in their cash-flow.
We implemented an invoice-collection system on their website that saved them time and improved their invoicing process. Because we implemented a website that could handle a simple but modern collection system, the entire process took less than 1 day to implement.
They collected thousands of dollars in invoices without any burden on the office staff.
Sperr’s staff has been busy fielding new customer phone calls and online inquiries. So far they have dozens of new customers. They are confident they will meet their goal of 100 new customers during the 2020-2021 heating season. They are looking forward to hiring a new driver and office staff to keep up with their growth.