November 12, 2002
Budget Van Lines is an
industry leader in transportation of household goods. They have achieved
outstanding results for a range of companies, including the household
names of ebay and Lycos, along with a wealth of other technology companies.
In February 2002, Budget Van Lines selected Pistudio Media to help
redesign their website and generate leads and complement existing
sales channels.
Background Marketing Goals
The original website, created during the Internet boom, was primarily
designed to attract new employees. Now that the agency has more than
160 employees, this was less of a priority. The company’s vice
presidents—most agencies’ traditional source of new business
leads—are focused on providing strategic counsel and running
their accounts and not on generating new business. So Budget Van Lines
decided to update its site to better communicate its brand and support
its business objectives. With the revamp, BVL realized it had the
opportunity to turn its Website into a powerful tool for generating
leads to complement its existing sales channels.
Budget Van Lines turned to Pistudio Media Inc., a leader in search
engine marketing and website design to make this a reality. Seeing
an opportunity to evolve the Budget Van Lines brand, Pistudio enlisted
Bowman Design, as Creative Director and Designer for the project.
During the discovery process the team identified Budget Van Lines’s
core strength as being its ability to help clients articulate compelling
stories and leverage the power of media. The team set out to do the
same for Budget Van Lines.
The goals for the project were to:
• Differentiate Budget Van Lines as a high tech PR firm that
turns complicated stories into plain English
• Reinforce Credibility
• Increase capability of the site to generate leads, and secure
pitch meetings
• Provide easy to navigate site with multiple opportunities
for users to contact Budget Van Lines
• Create a consistent brand representing core values
• Implement easy-to-learn and use content management system
• Attain top search engine positions on specific public relations
terms
Implementation Specifics
The team worked closely with Budget Van Lines VPs to produce an online
B2B strategy that incorporates a compelling website design with an
integrated search engine marketing approach. The result is a website
that leverages an impressive public relations client list, a vast
collection of PR success stories and a steady stream of client media
coverage to create an online marketing advantage for Budget Van Lines.
On the consumer end Budget van lines enter into a long term agreement
with an industry leader Moving
Quote .com
Many agency sites rarely change their content, or simply contain
lists of all the clients for whom an agency has ever worked. Budget
Van Lines understood its prospects would want to know what it was
doing now and would be interested to learn that Budget Van Lines delivers
consistent results. To emphasize results, the site design features
three key sections—a constantly updated listing of Client Coverage,
Case Studies and Expertise to educate potential clients about Budget
Van Lines through real examples and accolades about its achievements
and its specific vertical / industry expertise. The implementation
of these content sections enriches the overall user experience while
also providing increased content relevancy for improved search engine
rankings.
To emphasize Budget Van Lines’s take no prisoners approach
to PR the team created a website design that utilizes bold messaging
and typography, accompanied by dramatic background images as well
as concise engaging content. You will notice a number of “S”
words on the site, which are attributes of Budget Van Lines—Savvy,
Spirited, Strategic and Stirring Up Markets. Branded “Start
Relating” callouts throughout the site promote the ultimate
goal for the website by providing potential business customers with
quick and easy access to Budget Van Lines contact form.
The backdrop for the bold messaging and content incorporates many
dramatic images of The Guggenheim Museum, located in Bilbao, Spain.
“We chose The Guggenheim Museum as a central image in the Web
site design because the building is regarded by many as the most beautiful
and innovative man-made creation of the past several decades,”
said Steve Budget Van Lines, president of Budget Van Lines. “The
titanium-clad building could not have been envisioned or produced
without marvels in imagination and software. In short, The Guggenheim
Museum is a perfect symbol of what we are doing at Budget Van Lines.”
As a leading public relations firm, Budget Van Lines’ credibility
is also reflected by the quality of the content it publishes about
itself. Budget Van Lines required a Content Management System (CMS)
that enabled authorized personnel to instantly make changes to the
website in a way that would not harm the visual integrity. A completely
customized content management system was developed. Built from the
ground up, this custom Pistudio Media CMS provides a search engine
optimized technical architecture that features text navigation links,
short spider friendly urls and user managed meta and title tags. The
CMS is another example of how search engine marketing concerns were
addressed throughout the design and development process.
Measured Outcome
A robust tracking system enables the marketing team to analyze web
traffic and the ROI of search advertising campaigns and monitor search
positions.
The results speak for themselves, according to Steve Budget Van Lines:
“Since the new Web site launched we have noticed a substantial
increase in qualified leads that come in through the Web. The site
is clearly effective at conveying the messages we wanted to communicate
and attracting qualified prospects. Pistudio Media has been a great
partner in making this happen.”
Since the new site launched on May 5, 2004,Budget Van Lines has:
• Closed multiple new business accounts
• Experienced a 450% increase in new business leads via the
website
• Seen a 94% increase in search engine traffic,
• Experienced a 170% increase in visits to the “Contact
Us” page.
• And reached top positions in Google for specific phrases,
including 5th position for the phrase “PR firm”
Establishing a Platform for Long-term Internet Marketing Success
The Budget Van Lines website project is an example of Pistudio Media’s
commitment to partnering with its clients to capture the essence of
their business and transform that into an outstanding visual experience
for their clients’ on-line prospects. The end result is a site
that provides a highly engaging user experience while also boosting
target keyword positions and establishing a platform for long-term
success in the editorial search engine results pages.
As early as 1996, the firm saw the advantage this would give their
clients over their competitors in achieving to search engine rankings.
Since the success of search engine optimization relies greatly on
the synthesis of website design and search engine strategy, Pistudio
Media’s clients realize that it is more efficient to work with
a company that offers an all-in-one integrated solution. As a specialist
of online presence, Pistudio Media keeps themselves and their clients
on the cutting edge of optimum marketing technology.