US Coatings is a leading provider of high-performance industrial coatings and linings. They tailor their products and services to fit the needs of their clients.
The problem: a small industrial coatings manufacturer competing against huge companies in a saturated market.
The solution: writing high-quality content that addresses target audience pain points in order to drive organic traffic in Google and gain awareness.
The result: US Coatings’ monthly traffic grew by 450%, organic traffic by 780% and website contacts by 550% in three years of working with Gorilla 76.
“Gorilla has helped us build a comprehensive online marketing strategy that’s putting real leads on the table for us every month. Their work has become an important piece of our business development strategy.”
– Mike Reed, President, US Coatings
The problem
Competing in a saturated market against big names, US Coatings President Mike Reed knew he needed to outmaneuver the competition. For a smaller company, brand awareness was a big issue. Larger companies like Sherwin-Williams and Carboline maintain a high share of the coatings market, staying top-of-mind for many of US Coatings’ target audience. Mike identified online marketing as an opportunity to develop the business.
The solution
After consulting with US Coatings, we realized creating content that addresses specific customer pain points could drive traffic from organic search. We decided to dig deeper by performing thorough keyword research into what keywords could potentially drive traffic for US Coatings via organic search. Rather than paying for Google AdWords, we wanted US Coatings to own real estate in search engines that would continue to drive compounding traffic.
We identified keyword opportunities that we could write about in order to rank over time. Rather than go after high-difficulty, high-volume keywords, we realized the big opportunity for US Coatings was identifying keywords with low-difficulty and low-medium search volume. These “low-hanging fruit” keywords were topics that were ignored by the bigger brands but happened to be extremely profitable for US Coatings. The keywords were targeted toward US Coatings’ specific buyers, rather than broad terms that anyone might search.
As an industrial coating manufacturer, US Coatings isn’t interested in a homeowner looking to paint his or her garage. Google can bring in a wide variety of traffic, so the trick was to identify opportunity keywords that addressed a specific pain point US Coatings’ customers were having. For example, the EPA released new restrictions for industrial paints and US Coatings was able to create content about different types of products that met them. This drove highly relevant traffic that converted into real leads for US Coatings to pursue.
The results
US Coatings’ monthly traffic grew more than 450% from July 2014 to July 2017. As denoted by the green bar, organic search increased by more than 780%. By consistently producing high-quality content that answered specific pain points, Google started ranking our content higher in search results for various terms.
Of course, website visitors that don’t turn into contacts won’t grow your business. Here’s how traffic impacted US Coatings’ online lead generation:
As traffic grew, online contacts generated grew 550% from July 2014 to July 2017.
Identifying your buyers’ pain points, as well as the opportunity keywords those buyers are searching for, can result in strong online lead generation. In the right niche — and industrial markets tend to be great niches for this strategy — writing great content in tandem with smart keyword research is a strategy designed for online marketing success. If you’re a B2B industrial company, you can learn if this strategy will work for your business (and if it’s the right strategy for your business) by requesting a consultation today.
