“After seeing Knowledge Marketing’s demo, we wanted to work with them immediately.”
-Kelley Barnett, Director of Internet Marketing, Austad’s Golf
Challenge
After building an established brand name and anational retail presence, Austad’s saw their website (www.austadsgolf.com) as the next frontier for sales growth. Prior to 2005, Austad’s made several attempts to launch their own Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaigns but were not pleased with the results. “We felt like we were throwing money at it. We didn’t know what we were doing and had limited resources. We felt as though we were missing a lot of opportunities,” according to Kelley Barrett, Director of Internet Marketing. Austad’s soon decided to seek help from a professional SEM agency and turned to Knowledge Marketing for assistance.
Solution
Austad’s recruited Knowledge Marketing to help grow its online business and ensure that prospective customers can easily find their premium golf products on the best search engines. They chose Knowledge Marketing based on their experience, the skill sets of their technical team, industry knowledge and their dedication to customer service. Knowledge Marketing promptly designed an aggressive and comprehensive SEM campaign aimed at acquiring new customers and increasing brand exposure for www.austadsgolf.com. They started by formulating a SEM business strategy based on critical factors that impacted Austad’s business: high profitability products, market penetration opportunities, and unique call to actions as a means to acquire new customers and drive sales. These micro-strategies have increased sales while keeping customer acquisitions below Austad’s target costs. Knowledge Marketing consistently gets top 3 positions on all keywords on the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Knowledge Marketing performs ongoing reporting/ROI analysis and communicates their findings with Austad’s to help them understand where and how to grow sales through search.
Results
Upon launching Knowledge Marketing’s SEM campaign, Austad’s saw an immediate increase in sales. They have surpassed their SEM goal expectations and succeeded in surpassing customer acquisition goals. According to Barrett, “We increased our sales by 500% in a month that had historically been our slowest month. Not only have we experienced an increase in orders, an increase in qualified traffic, and an increase in per order size, we finally have a level of security and confidence that Knowledge Marketing is managing our account and taking care of us. Their service and response is excellent.” After successfully launching the US campaigns, Austad’s asked Knowledge Marketing to also generate exposure in other markets such as the UK and Canada. Within days, they were generating orders on a global basis.
