“We were bumping up our marketing spend…but we weren’t converting” - why Cabinets by Computer chose a marketing partner to help them grow
“The biggest thing was that we were re-focusing the business onto the scalable, high growth, high revenue products. And a key indicator was we kept falling back onto the easy wins – on what we had always done, and what had done well traditionally.”
“For example from a marketing reporting perspective, it was all about clicks and impressions. The whole connection between a click and a lead, that was the piece of the puzzle that was missing.”
“It was like ‘look at how good we are. We got this many hits, the website traffic was up 20% compared to this month last year’. Yet the sales were at the same amount. So we were like, ‘Hang on a minute. Why?’”
Justin Collins, General Manager at Cabinets by Computer, had seen the business through really strong growth. What started out as a small agile group of family members selling market-leading software solutions, such as KD Max, to cabinet makers, designers and manufactures, had grown to a team of over 20, in new dedicated offices, including creating their own proprietary software, Cabinetry.Online.
The Growth Challenge
Justin knew the importance of marketing in continuing their growth, but wasn’t seeing the results he wanted.
“We want to grow our product and our business, and you can’t do that without marketing, and marketing hard.”
“That’s the one thing Gary [Cabinets by Computer founder] is always big on, is investing in marketing. And not all business owners get that.”
“But Gary understands the concept that to make money, you need to invest money in marketing, and at times you need to be aggressive about the way you market.”
“So the previous marketing was good at what it did. But now we really needed a focus on ROI and more sales-driven marketing. We noticed we commonly reverted back to what we knew, rather than pushing the boundaries to achieve more sales.”
“That was the big drive. We wanted to do more, grow more, market more, sell more.”
Shifting Focus (and Lead Quality)
Facing a common challenge, especially for established businesses, was the need to shift the focus from what had worked to get the business to it’s current position of success, and move to the next level that would sustain the next 5 years of growth.
And the biggest indicator that marketing needed to change? The lead quality wasn’t good enough.
“I was personally handling quite a number of the inquiries. We would generally operate on a 20-25% conversion rate for leads. So if we are bumping up our leads, providing the quality remains the same, we should be getting the same conversion rates and growing the business. That wasn’t the case. “
“We were bumping up our marketing spend and getting better metrics, but we weren’t converting at the same rate.”
So the challenge for Justin and the leadership team was to make sure they had the right people and the right plan in place, to achieve the growth they knew the business was capable of.
“We had been looking for a new marketing manager, but had had some challenges along the way. It had turned into a three-month period where we were running the business without marketing. And while it was okay-ish in the short term, it’s not ideal.”
“We needed a short-term solution. I was worried that we’re going to regress in that time without that direct marketing leadership and direction. So that was the problem.”
Fresh Perspective
“The resolution was bringing in someone with experience and expertise to help align the ship and also use it as an opportunity to look holistically at the business from an outsiders perspective, as to what we’re doing, and whether we’re on the right track.”
Justin then engaged with Good Business Better. While an external consultant was not originally high on the list, getting an independent set of experienced eyes to review their marketing and business, quickly gained traction.
“The challenge was, as a business we had no marketing experience. We had ideas, but didn’t know if there was different approaches or better ways of doing things. But in reality, there might be a whole other different approach that's so much better.”
Like when you bring any provider into your business, it’s all about finding the right partner and making calculated investments. So how did Justin decide if Good Business Better was the right choice for them?
“Yeah, it was interesting, because it's obviously an expense to the business, and you don't know what you're going to get out of it. But I think given we're in that sort of transition period, it seemed like a golden opportunity for us to say, ‘Okay, we've gone for the last four or five years, we've done what we've done to get to where we are, now we're wanting to go to that next level’”.
“So, why don't we use this as a re-evaluation point where we look at what marketing we're doing. Make sure if we're doing stuff that's really good in there, let's continue to do that. And if there's gaps in there that we should be doing, let's start doing that.”
“It would also give us the opportunity to realign as a business and make sure that we're on the right track. And I think having an impartial set of eyes on that, who has no context to the business, has no emotional attachment, is really the best way to do that.”
Hiring Or Getting Help (or Both)
It’s an interesting challenge being a business owner or senior leader and choosing when to hire that experience into your team, versus bringing in consultants to review at a point in time. Justin knew he needed both. Ultimately they wanted the marketing experience in-house to drive that next-level growth, but also wanted an independent view to evaluate what they were doing, using industry expertise and best-practice.
“It's definitely different. Because a new marketing manager, to an extent, they’re not in to rock the boat. They're there to fall in line. You may get some people that push back, and say this is completely wrong, but generally it takes a bit of time to build that relationship.”
“From a consultant’s point of view, their position is to come in and be objective. Not have that same bias.”
In much the same manner that has helped Cabinets by Computer grow their software, they quickly evaluated the experience of Good Business Better against the investment and decided to get on with it.
“We're pretty big on jumping in the water and, trying something out and seeing if it works. The big thing that we wanted to see was an impartial analysis of the business. We think we're doing good stuff. But is it actually good? And what are other businesses doing that’s really good?”
Investing the Time
Once Justin and the team had decided on bringing in Good Business Better, he appreciated it took a bit of time to share company and industry specific intelligence.
“There was a little bit of initial learning time, to get Good Business Better up to speed with domain knowledge and what we do and our products.”
“We have a reasonably complex set of products and, and markets that we service. That’s a problem that we inherently face, whether it's a new company we're working with, or a new employee we're bringing in, it always takes a bit of time. So I was just big on making yourself accessible and being open and honest about our products and what we're doing.”
The Review
Tom from Good Business Better spent one day a week over three months working with Justin, and the marketing team to review their marketing. There were three key stages to the review:
Work out what was working, and what wasn’t
Re-align the business on the things that were going to make a difference
Put an accountable plan in place for the marketing team, and wider business, to achieve that next-level growth
The Results
At the end of this period, Justin was presented with a comprehensive 32-page marketing report, which not only addressed these key stages to the review, but also summarised the key challenges for the marketing team and provided clear recommendations on how to address them.
The report also included a range of value-add insights above the initial brief, such as Q1 objectives for the marketing team; a deep-dive analysis into a key product line; Google Ads analysis with actionable insight; ever-green content identified from historical work that could be re-used; and content ideas to continue to build the brand and ‘trusted-advisor’ status with their target market.
Lastly, Tom also provided education sessions for the marketing team on Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO), Search Engine Marketing (or SEM) with Google Ads, creating market research plans that give the answers you want, and the also case study methodology – more on this shortly.
The Impact
Justin had this to say of his time with Good Business Better:
“We've implemented a bunch of cool things on the back of it. There was the UTM tracking, which we now have across everything. I mean, why the hell we didn't have that before? I'll never know.”
This now allowed Justin and the marketing team to identify where their leads were coming from, so they could double-down on the advertising that was working, and cut-back on the spend that wasn’t converting.
“It's saved us, having that line of sight. There has been a couple of instances where we're getting bad leads, and then we're able to see, ‘oh, hang on a minute, we're using these keywords that aren’t relevant’”.
“Now I can look at the inquiry form and see that search terms are ‘home design software’. And I can ask how was that even a keyword in the first place, as it's not even part of what we do.”
“So now I have the data to be able to make a call on something without having to go through hoops and hoops, or relying on someone else telling me that this isn't working.”
“So I think it's given greater visibility to everyone, as to where are these leads coming from. That's been a really good one.”
“We also got a lot out of the Employee Summit. Bringing everyone onto the same page was a big help. We’re still talking about that. We're looking at running another one again, this year.”
Tom and Good Business Better also helped Justin structure the first-ever employee off-site day, including a company strategy, marketing strategy and clear goals for the teams. Tom also recorded a video on value exchange to help re-set the focus on the key things that mattered.
“It also helped with the clear strategy. We still use that as reference, and it’s part of our language now – when we talk about ‘blue-chip manufacturers’.”
Inbound Marketing
On top of the clear strategy, Justin also wanted a good method to drive high quality leads through inbound marketing. Gary, Cabinets by Computer founder, is all about working smarter, so was keen to build an always-on growth engine in addition to paid advertisement. Under-pinning this was the Good Business Better case study methodology, which the marketing team used to better understand their target market, their pain points and which channels they trusted for information.
“We’ve also shifted to more content-based inbound marketing. So more articles about our clients are being created.”
“In March we had six good manufacturer leads on the back of the articles we’d written in industry magazines. It was one of our biggest months of inquiries for Cabinetry.Online. We had nice clear ads in the magazines together with full page case studies of our clients. And most of the leads said it was on the back of reading the case studies.”
Recommendation To Others
When asked what advice Justin would give to others considering an external marketing consulting partner, he had this to say:
“Just do it. Because of the impartiality that you'll get from it. You will get answers that you need, not necessarily that you want to hear.”
“If I go back to the UTM tracking links as an example - that is clearly something that we should have been doing.”
“Another thing that you did really well was question ‘why are we doing this?’ How are we tracking what we're doing? How do we know that this is working?”
The Sacred Goats
“Those sorts of questions make you question why something is done a certain way. We take it for granted. We call it a ‘sacred goat’. Something that just happens in the business.”
“New people come into the business, and often without realising, you continue to protect the ‘sacred goats’. Why is it a ‘sacred goat’? No one knows. The business inevitably grows to a point, and you do things a certain way, just because they have always been done that way.”
“It gives you that opportunity to have a bit of self-questioning and self assessment. It helped us identify the ‘sacred goats,’ so we can then work out if they are helping us, or maybe holding us back.”
Do You Want To Level Up Your Growth?
If you want a fresh perspective on your marketing, or need some help evaluating what is working, what isn’t, and what you can do to get your business growth to the next level - get in touch with us today. We’re happy to start with a coffee chat (coffee is on us!), and we can help get you started.
The Goals
For those who are interested to know more of the nuts and bolts, below were the goals for Cabinets by Computer in working together with Good Business Better:
A detailed review of where the team spend time today and how this aligns to revenue and profitability of the business
This will include a SWOT analysis of current activities, outlining what is working well, what may be a distraction and what opportunities there are
An agreed set of success measures so we know if what we are doing is having an impact, ideally automating this to be able to review monthly or quarterly as the business needs it (depending on business tools/data availability)
2-3 ideas on how to best achieve the business objective of getting more manufacturers using Cabinetry Online
An agreed plan to bring those ideas to life and a way we can measure if it's having an impact
A simple and accountable 1-2 page marketing strategy to help align the team and help review current and future activities