Rack N Road Truck and Vehicle Outfitters
Rack N Road owns and operates 10 retail locations across the Western U.S. in high-tech “Internet savvy” markets. Started in 1991, and in early “old school” advertising days, Rack N Road enjoyed huge growth year after year. By 2003, annual sales hovered around $10 million. Rack N Road is a specialty niche business that sells racks, hitches and sport trailers for travelers looking to utilize space in their vehicles for their next road trip. In 2002, Rack N Road spent over $200,000 a year in yellow page advertising, and another $200,000 in traditional advertising, (direct mail, newspaper, local cable TV). The company also practiced great guerilla advertising by doing vehicle wraps, direct sales and some event marketing.
Problem
Sales flattened in 2003 and the business had a hard time competing with national online discounters pulling business away from Rack N Road stores because of lower prices and no sales tax. Larger big box retailers blanketed traditional advertising due to economies of scale. Advertising as a percentage of sales was at an all-time high and sales were declining in some stores. These barriers just about took the business under.
Solution
In 2004, Rack N Road cut yellow pages by 90% and blanketed every Internet yellow page site and local free search engine, and eliminated traditional advertising completely, which stopped the bleeding to the bottom line. Sales remained flat but advertising costs were driven down as a percentage of sales by 60%.
At the beginning of 2006, after the company conducted another in-depth SWOT analysis, Rack N Road worked with Bauer 360 and did two things that completely turned the sales and business around.
The first step was to truly understand that the website was fast becoming the front door to their company. It was rebuilt by a company from India, saving the company $75,000 and the results were more than satisfactory. Rack N Road knew that since they were a “specialty niche” retailer that it was important to let all customers know about the services that the big box and discounters couldn’t offer.
The second step was called project “Get Local”. Every page, and every localized PPC campaign was focused around driving the customer to the local store page, not driving the customer to the shopping cart. The store page became the “goal” that the company had set up in their Google Analytics program, and the results were phenomenal. Bauer360 incorporated Google’s Polygon geo-targeted mapping program and smarter keyword buys to only allow customers in Rack N Road’s direct markets to see their ads. This brought Rack N Road a targeted, trackable, and at a fraction of the cost of national campaigns way of driving new business to their stores.
Since this has been in place, Rack N Road has seen sales recover to the level they were when the business opened 15 years ago. “It is so nice to be able to launch a new product or category and know our new local internet marketing campaigns will allow us to once again have successful launches, therefore almost guaranteeing sales for years to come” says General Manager Chris Barnes, of Rack N Road.
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