How Top Carpets and Floors increased leads by 150% and reduced costs by 94% with Inbound Marketing and HubSpot

Top Carpets and Floors is one of South Africa’s leading flooring retailers. They have 130 members spanning the length and breadth of the country and install over 200 000 floors and blinds every year.

Top Carpet’s business was doing well but they knew there were areas where they could improve. The scale of the Top Carpets network and their decentralised business model meant that coordinating marketing and sales efforts between all their members was tricky.

Customer data sat largely at a member level on excel sheets creating a black box effect when it came to who exactly their customers were and how they engaged with their brand.

That’s when Top Carpet’s Head of Marketing Sue-Re Harris approached Uku Inbound to implement an inbound marketing strategy and HubSpot Marketing and Sales Professional.

“We really enjoy working with Uku Inbound – Dane and his team are always friendly and helpful. They revolutionised our marketing strategy over a very short time.”

The Challenge

Although Top Carpets has built its business into one of South Africa’s leading flooring and window blind retailers, Sue-Re Harris, the Head of Marketing knew there was room for improvement.

Top Carpets had built a new website and were spending a large portion of their marketing budget on Google Ads with mixed results. They were converting leads at below 1% with a cost of over R600 per lead.

When Sue-Re approached Uku she had a few clear objectives, these were:

• To improve lead generation through the Top Carpets website by 100%,
• Reduce the cost of acquiring new leads by 50%, and
• Improve the customer conversion rate from organic traffic from below 1% to 5%.

The Solution

Our approach to helping Sue and her team was to create an inbound marketing strategy that would help drive more qualified leads and lower their customer acquisition cost (CAC).

We implemented HubSpot Marketing and Sales Professional to help facilitate the delivery of our inbound marketing efforts. HubSpot’s CRM also provided us with an easy way to centralise their data, get feedback from members regarding specific customers and shed light on how leads engage with Top Carpets on their way to becoming customers.

With that in mind the first step was to define their strategy which included:

1. A buyer persona workshop - This was a half-day workshop with Top Carpets senior management where we unpacked who their customers are.
2. Member interviews - We then interviewed their members to get a better sense of what business was like and test some of the feedback from the buyer persona workshop.
3. Marketing audit and competitive analysis - We then dove into their existing marketing data and compared them to their top competitors.
4. Completed their strategy - Based on what we had learnt from the previous steps we formalised their personas and put together an inbound marketing strategy that we believed would deliver on their marketing goals.

“Inbound Marketing compliments our other marketing channels and we now have an active database for our ongoing email marketing campaigns. They developed three very practical and informative guides for us which not only helped us grow our database but empowers our group members with an arsenal of information to nurture customers on an ongoing basis.”

The strategy we proposed would focus primarily on the Attract and Engage phases of the inbound marketing methodology and proposed three core initiatives:

1. Improve visitor-to-lead conversion rates by introducing specific, conversion-focused landing pages. This included 3 content offers and a Request for Quote page.

2. We introduced a learning centre and shifted their content to obsess over their buyer’s questions related to costs, problems, solutions, reviews and product features.

3. Lastly, we wanted to increase reach and reduce lead acquisition costs by utilising Facebook and Instagram advertising.

The Results

Let’s take a quick look at how the campaigns performed in relation to our initial objectives.

Did we manage to increase the number of leads converting on the website while reducing the cost per lead?

In short, yes.

The content offers allowed us to engage leads earlier on in their buyer's journey. This meant that Top Carpets was able to provide value and build trust.

The content offers converted visitors-to-leads at between 16%-28% which is well above the websites previous conversion rate of 1%. The Request for Quote landing page and the retargeting campaign had an average conversion rate of 26%.

These campaigns helped us increase the number of leads converting on the website by 150%.

Paid social media ads were used to drive engagement with Top Carpets content and as a way to retarget and nurture leads.

The average cost per lead for the content campaigns was R 28 while the RFQ campaign converted leads for R 160. That's 95% and 74% lower than the previous cost.

How did we fare on increasing the conversion rates from organic traffic?

Organic traffic has increased by 47% in the last 12 months.

The number of search terms where Top Carpets ranks in the top 3 positions on Google has increased by 100%.

The lead-to-customer conversion rate from organic traffic has increased from 1% to 7.38%.

“What we value most is the continuing support and innovative ideas in developing a complete content strategy for all our marketing channels. With all our channels integrated in one platform takes so much pressure off our team and allow us to offer the best possible marketing service to our 130 branches nationwide.”

Overall, closely working with Sue and her team has meant we have been able to help them make significant strides towards their marketing and sales goals.

If you would like to learn more about how inbound marketing and HubSpot can help drive growth for your business, then click 👉 here to get in touch, we’d love to see how we can help you.