Marketing Case Study / Behling Racing Equipment

Behling Racing Equipment Case Study

Smashing the Internet Retail Perception to Pieces and increasing traffic three-fold within the first three months

[Featured Quote]

“After struggling to make our old website work, Kevin came in, introduced us to a new platform, and showed us how to use our internet presence as a sales tool rather than a brochure. It is good to know that whenever I need website or general marketing advice he is only a phone call away, and the information will be top-notch.”

Brian Mattson Behling Racing Equipment

The Initial Problem

Behling’s has been a retailer of auto racing parts since the seventies serving not only the local auto racing market but also running a substantial catalog business often shipping nationwide and even globally to places like New Zealand and Australia.

The main driver of traffic to their business was word of mouth and catalog distribution by mail. They wanted to develop another marketing arm to their business by offering their catalog online. The largest problem thrown into the mix is their large inventory which consists of over 10,000 SKUs.

They were sold their original website platform on the premise that their large inventory wouldn’t work with simpler website systems. It was difficult to use, customer service was barely existent and had a very expensive monthly subscription attached.

On top of everything, monthly traffic was very low for their industry. The site wasn’t SEO optimized so even if all the other problems were fixed, traffic would still remain low.
The entire experience with their previous web company damaged their perception of what internet marketing and retailing could provide for them.

They felt trapped by the idea that a new website would be a monumental project and they would have to start from scratch.
What they didn’t realize was even a simple website, with a good marketing plan in place, will return more for their business than their current platform.

A WordPress Platform Switch

After meeting with them and discussing what they wanted to achieve both short and long term, we decided to make a couple of different changes to their entire web marketing strategy rather than just building them a different site.

Phase one of the plan included a switch of platforms from their old system to WordPress. WordPress has evolved through the years from strictly a blogging platform into a powerful SEO friendly content management system used by some of the largest properties on the web.

WordPress can be integrated with shopping carts to create a great retailing site, while still easy enough to allow anyone with the most basic computer skills to update and manage company content. Anyone who has used common word processor software can update a WordPress site.

Behling’s had an internal person doing the design work on their catalog. So naturally, he became the lead on the design project and handled the content. While Kevin managed the basic configuration for SEO and the traffic funnel.

Integrate the Marketing Plan

Their marketing plan would come to incorporate both online and offline strategies together. But let’s first look at the two basic approaches most businesses take.

1. The website is the central hub to everything. It can be used to build mailing lists, educate, sell a product, and take orders … 24hrs a day … 7 days a week. This puts the website a the central hub of a business. The website is essentially the business face and web sales pages are created to push the customer toward the

shopping cart instead of an offline phone number. The online shopping cart is the

only way to view the products.
2. The second approach gives the customer the power to choose how they want to

interact with the business. The website becomes an additional marketing and sale arm of the company as well as a brick and mortar location. Things like creating a downloadable print version of the catalog, special coupon offers that can either be redeemed online or printed for in-store use or including a physical address field in the list builder so company communications can be received by mail.

Behling’s decided to go with the latter because
A) They were already seeing massive success with their printed catalog.
B) Building a website to handle everything proved both complicated and expensive.
C) Walk-in sales and personal customer interaction still was the primary driver of traffic to their business.

They wanted a more robust web solution in the future, but a better option, for now, was to start slow, get a good website in place, and concentrate on building traffic. Margins in the racing industry are typically very low, so getting a large amount of organic traffic was the goal.

Getting the Traffic to Behlingracing.com

Another growing trend in the online world is businesses creating leaks in their sales funnels and pushing customers away from their own websites to go to places like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or YouTube. These are great places to aggregate traffic, but at the end of the day, you want the traffic funneling back to your site.

Relying on any of these sites as a home base for your business interaction on the web can be disastrous if any of these platforms shut down or blacklist the company page.

The Facebook Effect

The auto racing community is heavily involved on Facebook. This seemed to be a good source for initial traffic to the new Behlingracing.com. They did have a Facebook page but rarely updated it.
We showed them that a simple posting of something valuable once a day to their site would work wonders to not only build an online audience but begin to push traffic to their new freshly optimized site.

They began a daily regiment of posting of some technical tidbits or a couple of offers at least once every day. They saw an instant increase in the size of their Facebook audience, but traffic numbers up on their site increased also.

The Ebay Leak in Traffic

Until the time permits to get a shopping cart up and running on the site, a decision was made to install an eBay store on to the front page of the web site.

This does provide an outbound leak of traffic away from the main site, but it was an easy and inexpensive solution to a full integration of an e-commerce store on the site. Because of their large inventory, a very robust shopping system would need to be built. This is costly and time-consuming.

The bad part of eBay is, once shoppers are funneled to the Behlings eBay store, it is too easy for them to browse listings from other retailers.

The Content Marketing Solution

There are only two things a buyer wants from a racing retailer, education and solution with parts. We recommended beginning a content marketing strategy of writing and posting a regular string of educational articles to the new site. Their in house person was given a format and some general guidelines to follow when writing the articles.

The best part of this solution was that Behlingracing.com had a long domain history. Their articles were quickly indexed by Google and traffic started to flow almost from the beginning.

The End Results

After only a couple of months of activity, traffic had increased almost three times what it had over their previous site. The more pages wrote and indexed, the more traffic started to flow.

Behling’s also saw a savings of several hundred dollars a month by not having to pay the costly monthly subscription needed for their old website plan.

And, as new catalog items become available, new items are easily updated within hours rather than days like their old system. As content production continued into the coming months, they kept seeing an increase in traffic with each new page to get installed.

About Behling Racing Equipment

Behling Racing Equipment is an auto racing equipment retailer located in Butler Wisconsin. They specialize in retail sales within the local area but also service a vast number of customers nationwide and internationally through their catalog sales division. For more information visit their website at www.behlingracing.com or call 1-800-255-4117.