As everyone knows, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Apparently the same can’t be said for Wolves. Wolf Paving, an asphalt paving contractor and manufacturer serving Milwaukee and Madison, WI, is celebrating 75 years in business in 2016. Some companies that have been around that long can easily get complacent with their marketing and rely on the status quo to grow their business the ‘old fashioned’ way. Wolf Paving isn’t one of those companies.
In the Fall of 2010, Sean Wolf contacted Stream Creative looking to make some changes in the way they were marketing their business. Sean and Devin Wolf, President and Vice President of Wolf Paving, had the foresight to realize there had to be a better way to generate business than relying on phone book advertising and other traditional channels.
Stream Creative introduced Wolf Paving to Hubspot and the inbound marketing philosophy in early 2011, and the results speak for themselves.
- 2013 saw a 37% increase in traffic over prior year
- 2014 saw a 69% increase in traffic over prior year
- 2015 saw a 127% in increase in traffic over prior year
This is truly a case study in how committing to an inbound marketing strategy can help grow your business. Sticking to the plan with your content publishing strategy compounds over time, and the results can be transformational.
With these kind of results and track record, why would we consider redesigning the website? Well, much like Wolf Paving, Stream Creative isn’t a company that rests on its laurels either. As we discussed in our Hubspot Impact Awarding winning site for R&R Insurance, we believe there are always areas of improvement whether its from a design, usability or development standpoint under the hood. Testing, measuring and improving clients websites are part of who we are as a company. In Wolf’s case, we specifically wanted to improve the sites design and usability, but also make a big splash to celebrate Wolf Paving’s 75th year in business.
One area of improvement we wanted to make with the site’s design was to make the site more visual. Over the past several years working with Wolf Paving we’ve had an opportunity to go out in the field with Wolf. We had created a pretty substantial image and video library that we wanted to leverage with the new site. Rather than just tell people how great Wolf is, we also wanted to show the breadth of services and scale of their operations.
Based on our buyer persona research and customer interviews we wanted to take this opportunity to segment the sites navigation differently. Rather than focusing on Wolf services, we wanted the navigation to lead with our buyer personas interests: commercial, residential and municipality paving. By changing this, our thought was these very different personas would be able to find the services they were looking for quicker.
Once the new website comps had been designed and approved, we used the content staging tool within Hubspot to stage the entire website prior to launch. This project was a COS to COS conversion, so swapping templates to the new design was a snap.
So far, since launching the site the results have been encouraging to say the least.
- 106% increase in Traffic from February 2015 to February 2016
- 93% increase in Leads from February 2015 to February 2016
Even more importantly, call volume and sales have increased according to Sean Wolf.
Wolf Pavings 2016’s paving season is already well positioned to be another record year for the company. Having a content strategy, strong website design, testing and measuring your marketing initiatives, and being willing to accept change can help your organization too.
