Content Marketing Case Study
From humble beginnings in St. Louis, Missouri, Ben Goedeker started Goedeker Radio and Television Repair in his home in June of 1951. The company proved a success almost from the start and in 1998 opened a 50,000 square foot mega-store for selling and servicing just about any television and television accessory every made.
However, in recent years, the company has been struggling against larger retailers coming into the area and even more from giant online retailers selling many of the same or comparable products on their sites. Price was not always an issue. This just reflected the new way most people now purchase things.
Looking for ways to turn things around, two family members built an e-commerce website for the company and they spent about three months studying online marketing techniques and search engine optimization.
The website they built proved very effective, as the company went from $6 million in sales in 2009 to $48 million in 2013. “Moving online has transformed the company,” says Steve Goedeker, the eldest son now running the business.
Despite the successful increase in sales, the company found that it was not ranking well on Google or other websites. Getting traffic to the Goedeker site was very dependent on a “never-ending treadmill,” as Steve Goedeker called them, of paid ads on search engines. Not only was the treadmill never-ending, it was also becoming a costly treadmill.
“As we were looking for ways to grow, content marketing kept coming up,” says Matt Davis, the company’s search engine optimization director. “The experts [we talked to] were all saying ‘You need to be in content marketing’ in order to grow.”
I define content marketing as:
“A marketing program based on the sharing of quality, credible, and pertinent information that generates traffic to a company’s website and, along with it, interest in its products and services…leading to sales.” For many businesses, it takes the form of an ongoing stream of blog postings and articles on a company website.”
Deciding this was what they needed to do, the company hired full-time writers and began publishing a daily blog mostly about home renovation and appliances, which was also shared on different social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.
Now that the content marking program has been going on for more than 12 months, the results are starting to come in:
- Sales online have increased 14 percent, much of it attributed to the content marketing program.
- The number of links back to the company website – which help search engine optimization tremendously – have gone from 3,000 in late 2013 to more than 40,000 today.
- Site visits have increased significantly. In fact, one blog posting about painting walls with watercolors got 30,000 visits alone.
- Sales this year are expected to grow to $60 million with the help of content marketing.
More on content marketing can be found here.
