Longmarsh is an established and well-known market leader in the East Midlands for van hire, car hire and car sales. They met with Seventy9 after reaching boiling point with their old marketing partner (we’ll mention no names of course but think of the colour of The Beatles Submarine). The lack of success, lack of compelling data and activity visibility had driven the Longmarsh management team beyond the brink
Seventy9 Digital picked up the baton and has enjoyed great success so far. First thing was to plan a bespoke, Google focused, set of marketing activities to support the local hire depots as they all had important objectives relevant to each one. We then we helped their incumbent website hosting company improve the speed of the website so Google was more likely to give it pole position for when the marketing activities started.
How the pieces of the jigsaw played their part…
Like many businesses, Longmarsh is reliant on local people to find them. Where do they look? On Google of course! Google Business Listings are hugely under-rated and now that Google has nailed local searches, it is absolutely crucial that they are leveraged for maximum impact. The Digital Marketing team re-vitalised the Longmarsh business listings for each depot; Wellingborough, Milton Keynes, Bedford and Corby. We took a snapshot of how many times the four listings were getting viewed on Google searches and it was just under 30,000 times a month. At the time of writing, a year after starting with Longmarsh, we have seen that exceed 70,000 per month.
Google is developing the capability of its Business Listings at a pace and new things are being rolled out regularly that help get you business found. Are you on top of it?
We established that the Longmarsh depots all needed a slightly different approach with AdWords after doing some keyword research and competitive analysis. Initially, we targeted one of the depots with adverts just showing to people living within five miles of the depot’s location. The adverts were engineered to have maximum impact to the most likely to buy demographics and the triggering keywords were crafted for maximum effect. After some tremendous success, we continue to refine that campaign and have rolled out slight variants to support other Longmarsh depots with equally stunning results.
“But what do you do to improve SEO” is a question we frequently get asked. Well, for starters, SEO today is nothing like it was 20 years ago when it was all about page content and inbound links. It’s far more complicated these days and all the things you are reading about here (as well as others – come on, we’re not letting all our secrets out of the bag!) contribute to modern SEO. Google Search Console is the tool we use; the impact and the proof is in the data!
One of the main reasons our work with Longmarsh has been such a success is down to team work and transparency. The Seventy9 Digital Marketing team needs Longmarsh input and advice – what kind of business are they actually after, what’s the demographic, who are we competing against locally, etc. Regular meetings are held to discuss progress, share data and plan future improvements. All the Google accounts are accessible by Longmarsh management so they can see what we are doing if they so wish. With all our Digital Marketing clients, our aim is ultimately to ensure they don’t care about how much they are spending on Digital Marketing because the ROI is tangible, measurable and profitable.
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