Web Design & SEO for Caster Wheels Manufacturer
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Web Design
- Confidential
- Quality
- 4.5
- Schedule
- 5.0
- Cost
- 4.5
- Willing to Refer
- 5.0
"Thrive Internet Marketing cares about the outcome of their work."
- Business services
- Arlington, Texas
- 11-50 Employees
- Phone Interview
- Verified
Thrive Internet Marketing built a new company website and e-commerce system for a B2B company. They also provided optimization services.
The new site's features and content made it easy to find products, and improved SEO brought in many more inquiries. Thrive Internet Marketing offered good suggestions and demonstrated investment in the project. Despite staff turnovers and scheduling issues, the team delivered a solid product.
A Clutch analyst personally interviewed this client over the phone. Below is an edited transcript.
BACKGROUND
Please describe your organization.
P&H Casters Company, Inc. is located in Arlington, Texas. We are a manufacturer and distributor of casters and wheels. Our company is the number one supplier of these products for shopping carts in the United States.
What is your position?
I am the Marketing Manager of the company.
OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE
What business challenge were you trying to address with Thrive Internet Marketing?
I am the first marketing person which the company ever employed. We've grown significantly within the last 10 years, so a company website was launched in 2010. It wasn't getting any traffic and it didn't have an impact. Products were very difficult to find through navigating it. We're a business-to-business [B2B] company only, so even though we're not a true e-commerce website and don't sell products online, we offer everything else that would be associated with an e-commerce page. Users can put items in a cart and send them off for pricing.
We needed a fresh approach, particularly since content will tend to become bogged-down in specific lingo and information which would only be understood by other casters, especially after working in this industry for a long time. Given that our customers tend to come from the retail industry, we needed to go back and rethink our approach from the eyes of someone who was outside of the caster industry. We were making them look for products using very obscure terminology which they'd have no way of knowing.
SOLUTION
Please describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail.
Thrive Internet Marketing built our new website. They're currently in charge of SEO.
How did you come to work with Thrive Internet Marketing?
We put out a bid which was replied-to by 6 candidates. We reduced the list to 3 and ultimately selected Thrive Internet Marketing. We liked the look of their site and I had known their principal previously. He and I were members of the board for the Arlington Museum of Art. Thrive Internet Marketing was a local company, unlike our last vendor.
Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?
The total development cost for our website was around $20,000.
What is the status of this engagement?
Our relationship is ongoing, and our website was launched 3 weeks ago. The development timeline was very long, but through no fault of Thrive Internet Marketing. Our company works very slowly when it comes to making a decision about projects, particularly larger ones. As such, it took a very long time to get to first base, but once we did, the site was launched 2 months later. I think that this is not unusual for any project in which the client is late in delivering materials.
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?
The quality of the site is very good, although there was a time in which I was unsure that we were communicating on the same wavelength as Thrive Internet Marketing. Ultimately, things were worked-out through the contribution of several members of Thrive Internet Marketing who did a stellar job. They didn't stop until the result was exactly right.
Even though we had an amazing initial design, some things got lost in translation, and there was an issue with someone from Thrive Internet Marketing leaving the company. His colleagues stepped in, picked up the ball, and produced a very nice site for us in the end.
The products are far easier to find and our internal people have really appreciated the site. This told me that, if they're finding it easier to find products, the same must be true for our customers. Thrive Internet Marketing worked hand-in-hand with me and were willing to take directions. They made good suggestions and found solutions in the form of plug-ins and other modules. Ultimately, I'm very pleased with the results.
The site is brand-new, but we've gotten some good results. I had been examining analytics on our old site in order to see what kind of traffic the page was generating. There isn't much ground for comparison between the two, but so far, we've received many more inquiries in the first 4 weeks after launch than we got in the last 6 months of running the old page. Someone signed up wanting to get our newsletter, which was a surprise for us. It's too early to tell what the SEO work outcome will be, but I have been satisfied so far.
How did Thrive Internet Marketing perform from a project management standpoint?
The process for interfacing with the client in the beginning could have been improved. I understand that web agencies need to make money too, and as such, they will have certain ways of doing business, but I didn't appreciate their preference for video conferencing. If we weren't local clients, this would certainly have been understandable.
What distinguishes Thrive Internet Marketing from other providers?
I feel that Thrive Internet Marketing cares about the outcome of their work. They've gotten invested in the effort as much as myself.
Is there anything Thrive Internet Marketing could have improved or done differently?
They allocate a set amount of time for us. When our half an hour is up, it's up. This was my initial impression of Thrive Internet Marketing, but it did change over the course of the project and actually became much better. The initial interface for me, as a client, was a bit sterile. After one of our initial developers left Thrive Internet Marketing, the relationship became more intimate than it initially was.
RATINGS
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Quality
4.5Service & Deliverables
"Thrive Internet Marketing doesn't receive a perfect rating because there were some issues on the e-commerce side for which we had to hold their hand more than we'd have wanted...given that it was one of their first projects of this kind."
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Schedule
5.0On time / deadlines
"Thrive Internet Marketing was always there for us. I was usually the one who was late."
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Cost
4.5Value / within estimates
"...either the client will provide it or it will be produced by the vendor. The breadth and depth of the content which I would be providing wasn't immediately apparent to me...appreciated being made aware of what the content producing task actually implies"
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Willing to Refer
5.0NPS