Local Pest Control Company Surpasses 2018 Goals With Inbound Strategy

The Problem

As a small, local business, Cypress Creek’s primary challenge is competing with national brands like Orkin and Terminix. Because of their hyperlocal focus, much of their sales come seasonally, particularly from spring to late fall, despite pests being a potential year-round issue.

Beyond their size and location challenges, Cypress Creek lacks an internal marketing team, making even the most basic marketing actions difficult. Elements like PPC, blogging, and email marketing fell to the wayside – making their opportunities for gaining leads through inbound strategies very minimal. However, that doesn’t mean the team at Cypress Creek lacked ideas in the past – just an outlet to act on those ideas. So, they reached out to a local agency to help grow their website traffic. But they only assisted with PPC, and Cypress Creek wanted a more robust inbound marketing strategy.

That’s where Lynton came in four years ago, to help tackle specific challenges such as:

• Underperforming PPC started by a separate agency
• No initiatives, content, or offers to grow organic traffic
• Retaining their current clients, while increasing their base
• Lack of a marketing department to implement marketing ideas

The Solution

Before zeroing in on specific campaigns and ideas, we knew Cypress Creek needed a user-friendly CMS and marketing automation platform to see success. Therefore, our first step was to implement HubSpot and its marketing tools to carry out our inbound strategies. After that, we were able to put specific strategies into action to grow their inbound leads.

PPC

Cypress Creek had seen some success with a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign but wanted to see even further results. After carefully doing keyword research and approving everything with the Cypress Creek team, we implemented Google AdWords, running different campaigns throughout the year, starting in April 2018 and ending in December 2018.

Their overall cost per conversion of $26.44 was well below the industry standard for professional services of $49.74. Other impressive metrics from their AdWord campaigns:

• 151,960 total impressions
• 4,234 total clicks
• $2.01 CPC (below the industry standard of professional services $2.56)
• 1,559 total conversions (with the aforementioned $26.44 cost per conversion)

Blogging

Before working with us, Cypress Creek’s website didn’t have a blog. Because blogging is an excellent tool for traffic, engagement, knowledge, and conversions, we knew right away we had to begin publishing articles on their site. We started with sporadic scheduling, but by last year, were able to write three high-quality blogs with relevant CTAs a month successfully.

The top three blogs of 2018 collected great views for this tiny-market company:

• How a Mice Infestation Can Affect Your Health – 3,340 (with a 3.71% CTR on its CTA, 3,011 new entrances, 5 contacts, and an average 4 minutes on the page)
• Why Do I Have Ants in My Bathroom? – 2,812 (with 2,726 new entrances, and an average 3 minutes on the page)
• Identifying Asian vs. German Cockroaches in Your Home – 2,101 (with 1,940 new entrances, 2 new contacts, and an average 3 minutes on the page)

While working with Cypress Creek, we’ve been able to amass an average of 290-296 blog views per month for their top five blogs.

Landing Pages

Cypress Creek hadn’t used landing pages as a resource for converting contacts before their HubSpot implementation. HubSpot’s landing page tools made it easy for us to create several landing pages for the company. Through A/B testing of their copy, CTAs, images, and forms, Cypress Creek was able to succeed. For their top three landing pages of 2018:

• Schedule Service (the most direct way for them to receive business) – 1,794 views, 364 submissions, 20.29% view to submission rate
• Coupon Savings – 2,106 views, 395 submissions, 18.76% view to submission rate
• $50 Offer – 1,045 views, 127 submissions, 12.15% view to submission rate

Research done by unbounce shows a 12% submission rate is good across ten popular consumer industries – making Cypress Creek’s above average. Also worth noting - those same landing pages had strong view to contact rates.

Emails

Another tool we began utilizing after introducing Cypress Creek to HubSpot was the platform’s email marketing capabilities. Before our relationship, Cypress Creek wasn’t able to segment users into different email lists, making their email campaigns less effective, due to the fact Cypress Creek targets two very different audiences: residents and commercial companies.

Now, after taking the time to determine their various segments, they use HubSpot to send information to the right people at the correct time. For example, they now have regular lists such as:

• Residential Leads
• Residential Customers
• Commercial Leads
• Commercial Customers

These users get monthly newsletters, along with specific email campaigns based on the season or ongoings in the company. They perform exceptionally well for their industry, as well. The industry average for professional services such as pest control are:

• 18-20% OPR
• 2% CTR

Cypress Creek’s overall average email metrics are:

• 23.6% OPR
• 2% CTR

Thanks to HubSpot’s segmenting capabilities, we were able to show Cypress Creek how to send hyper-focused emails to specific lists. In doing so, they see average metrics such as:

• 50-67% OPR (with a recent email achieving a 100% OPR)
• 12-16.67% CTR