B-to-B Seller Opens Up to Customers
How does a business-to-business enterprise retool to increase its appeal to consumers?
When Brandon Whildin joined Dekalb, Ill.-based Diamond Tour Golf as director of marketing about three years ago, the company had almost no Web presence. Diamond had been importing and selling golf club components—heads, shafts, and grips— about seven years by that time. The business was conducted mostly over the phone and dealt in volume-discount sales to small or mid-sized club makers. It was also very seasonal. “Three quarters of the year you would do great, but that last quarter you were just working to keep the lights on,” Whildin says.
He saw a need to reach out to the individual golfer, and even more importantly, to those just taking up the sport. So Whildin turned into a do-it-yourself search engine marketer, bidding on 20 or 30 keywords. By last year, that outreach effort had begun to pay off in increased consumer sales. But Whildin himself felt “overwhelmed” by the effort of keeping track of a growing stable of keywords. Even more, he knew that Diamond’s Web site needed overhauling, and he had no idea how to hook into the array of shopping engines then gaining momentum as marketing tools.
So Whildin went out looking for a search engine marketing (SEM) agency, settled on Chicago-based Resolution Media, and began working with them to transform the B2B supplier into a full-fledged Web retailer.
First, Resolution upped Diamond’s keyword bids almost tenfold. The company now uses about 2200 to 2300 terms in their search strategy. Most of these are low-traffic, low-cost words costing about 10 cents a click; only about 300 change price actively.
Getting the search terms in place took about half a year. Then, last September, Whildin and the agency began planning a more organized strategy to reach out to golf consumers. The first step was to introduce a strong Web-based holiday promotion for the retail trade. In past years, Diamond had offered a small number of assembled golf sets at a discount price: “a few woods, a few irons, throw in a putter and a bag for $200,” Whildin says.
But this year, Resolution helped Diamond tour put together a selection of club heads in different categories, each of which can be customized with a choice of two shafts and grips. The promotion is prominently bannered at the top of Diamond tour’s home page, and prices are discounted somewhat to increase the appeal to golfers already familiar with the company.
“The whole Web site has to be re-thought when you’re making a transition from wholesale to retail such as Diamond Tour’s,” says Resolution president Matt Spiegel. “In B2B, it’s really just about saying, ‘Here are the products.’ But when retail consumers land on your page after a search, they want to know which of your 25 different iron heads is right for them and why.”
Whildin also instructed Resolution that he was willing to accept a lower return on ad spending in this last quarter of the year if that expense resulted in new customer acquisitions.
As of now, he’s pleased with the results. The holiday promotion began in the first week of that month, and by November 30, Diamond’s sales were up $100,000 over the same month in 2003, a 57% increase. Even better, 50% of those conversions were first-time customers.
Going forward, Whildin foresees that the Diamond Web site may morph into two separate sites, one for wholesaling components and another for retailing fully assembled clubs and golf sets. Sales are now about evenly split between wholesale and retail, which helps Diamond’s bottom line, since margins are higher and discounts shallower on consumer sales. The company’s product line is now fully integrated into some of the major shopping engines—Resolution’s achievement, since Whildin admits that managing data feeds to those engines was totally out of his league.
