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How Inbound Marketing Helped a Niche Chinese Business to Increase Sales by 200%

Overview

Starting from scratch with a niche B2B company with no previous marketing experience can be a major deterrent for many agencies. Overcoming the initial SEO hurdles and the expense of content creation and website building can also be a huge barrier for smaller companies struggling to find a marketing budget. PEL is a great example of a small company that decided to finally invest in marketing and have done so well they are now the top of Google and the envy of all of their much bigger competitors.

Project Plan

Client Location
Shenzhen, Guangdong

Services Provided
Content Creation, Website Design, Website Development, HubSpot Integrations

Related Sector
Eyewear Testing and Inspection Service Provider

Languages Supported
English, Mandarin

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The Challenge

First established in 2004, PEL is an eyewear quality control and inspection service company operating out of Shenzhen, China. PEL assist most Western businesses, with the daunting task of ensuring quality and industry standard compliance for eyewear produced in China. Third-party inspection is very important in China where factories often pay-off inspectors to pass low-quality products and impartial third-party testing companies with integrity are a rare commodity.

PEL was looking to finally become competitive online, generate more leads and hopefully become an industry leader for information about eyewear inspection and quality control. The challenge was high, PEL’s competitors included huge (and very well digital-established) companies such as Intertek and InTouch which offer eyewear inspection as an ancillary service, therefore, have much higher domain ratings due to the power of their other content. 

PEL was in desperate need of a local partner who could interface with their staff in-person while also being able to handle the challenge of such a niche B2B topic independently as PEL would not be able to spend much time on marketing. After seeing Oxygen’s success for other B2B manufacturing and quality control related clients in the area PEL decided to sign for a one-year marketing retainer in 2017 (which still continues to this day).

Lack of Imagery for the Website

One of the first main challenges with creating content for PEL is that we weren’t able to find any related stock imagery online. Initially, we thought about using vectors but eventually realised that this would have a negative impact on the ‘trust factor’ of the website. We decided to travel to China with camera equipment and spend a day in the factory taking photos with the client so that we would have a library of media to use for the website and future marketing campaigns (without extra charge to the client). This proved to be immeasurably useful for creating marketing materials and content on the website – after all it would be less-than-ideal to be writing blogs on eyewear inspection and not have any relevant photos!

Outdated Website

PEL’s previous website and marketing materials were out-dated and had very little information about the kinds of services and tests they offered. Organic traffic was nearly non-existent and it was clear that there needed to be a huge focus on creating content in order to get the website performing well enough to compete with their competitors. When we began researching PEL’s services and looking at the technical documentation we quickly realised that even our native Mandarin-speaking staff wouldn’t be able to make accurate translations due to the difficulty of the technical Chinese characters. Instead, we would spend weeks interviewing Zenobia and learning about their processes, start to finish, to ensure that our English information was educational and correct.

Below: The old PEL website.

Old PEL website

The Solution

The Results

Organic Growth

PEL has become a digital ‘expert’ around all things eyewear quality control or inspection related. Organic traffic has seen excellent growth and large spikes during periods which were able to create content on trending topics such as ‘blue light blocking lenses’ before the topic became hugely popular online (you can see the correlation in the spikes below).

PEL organic growth

 

Keyword Growth

Getting to the top of Google was not an easy feat, but through regular blogging, keyword research and most importantly, updating the blogs frequently based on performance, we were able to reach our client’s goals. PEL now ranks for over 679 keywords related to eyewear quality control and inspection with many being in the top-10 on Google.

PEL google keyword ranking

Lead Generation

As with any new website, content on PEL’s website performed slowly at first, but eventually gained a lot of traction through our ABM efforts on social media. Since the launch of the new HubSpot website and content, PEL has generated over 931 leads, including 259 MQL/SQL’s. This is an estimated 16.6X more leads than PEL would have otherwise generated given the performance of their previous website and marketing efforts.

PEL’s website traffic sources 2

Creative Lead Nurturing

After months of collecting leads and nurturing them with content and offers, leads began to automatically qualify themselves as MQL’s through continuous interaction and matching pre-defined requirements. Through offering options to convert, such as free consultations at eyewear trade shows, we were successfully building trust and convert loyal subscribers and leads into customers. In the example below, a single lead visited the website 10 times, 52 different pages and interacted with multiple automated email outreaches before eventually booking a consultation at a trade show with PEL’s CEO and converted into a customer.

Example: The 10-month journey of a visitor from lead to customer.

PEL lead to customer journey

PEL website on iPad and iPhone

Future of Marketing With PEL

As PEL has evolved to become an online leader for content, so competitors have stepped up their marketing efforts in order to compete with us. Many of the blogs are now slowing losing position against bigger companies who are now also competing for those keywords. In order to stay on top, we have both monthly and quarterly keyword reviews to ensure that we are updating the content required to hold our position.

In order to diversify our marketing efforts, we are adding new features to the PEL website and marketing plan in Q3 this year. A new ABM strategy, new video, video advertising, an advanced chatbot and a new automatic quotation system integrated with PandaDoc are just some of the new ways we will be helping PEL achieve success in 2019.

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