Table of Contents
This case study is about a time when I worked with a local NYC pest control company that was on the verge of complete death and brought them back to life with the help of some creative marketing chops and massively helpful tools like Buzzstream.
The players:
- The Client: A local NYC pest control business who was dying on the vine.
- Mike Bonadio: A marketing pro tasked with the challenge.
- Buzzstream: The marketing tool of choice to help aid in saving the client.
When I first met the client and spent some time talking to them, I understood that they used to have a rather sizable pest control operation throughout New York City. However, it had dwindled in size and lost a substantial amount of revenue over the years due to new players coming in and poor marketing.
Given that I already had years of SEO experience under my belt at this point and enjoyed a good challenge, I decided to help them. I got started figuring out how to save their business from looming failure.
The Seemingly Impossible Challenge
I don’t need to explain how competitive something like pest control is in NYC.
The problem is, nobody cares about pest control and definitely nobody wants to write about it! It’s a boring niche that you don’t think about until you have a bug problem. Given that, I knew I had my work cut out for me as I started to strategize how to approach marketing for something so boring.
The goal was to get their website ranked higher for organic search terms that turned into leads, clients and desperately needed revenue.
Discovering the Potential
I knew that I needed to do something that was fast and had a good chance of gaining some kind of virality, so that my efforts were compounded and could produce outsized results for the effort.
After days of research, I realized that the answer was not to go after pest control bloggers, because guess what? There aren’t any!
Creating a straight-up pest control infographic would be content marketing suicide. Instead I started to explore related niches, also known as ‘shoulder niches’, where there was more content creation, content sharing, and blogger activities happening.
How did I find shoulder niches?
First, I mindmapped industries that had something to do with pest control. Here’s what my mindmap looked like:
Some shoulder niches of pest control were:
- Gardening
- DIY/Home Improvement
- Environment
- Mommy blogs
I chose the gardening niche as the main niche to focus on due to the many gardening bloggers I saw talking about bugs!
It was at this point when I realized that in order for me to effectively attract links to the client’s site, I had to create a piece of content at the intersection of pest control and gardening, that was highly shareable and had the potential to go viral, or as viral as something can go in the gardening space!
So, I decided to create a simple but effective educational infographic titled ‘DIY Pest Control for the Savvy Gardener.’
Choosing the Weapon
Now, with weapon in hand, I turned to Buzzstream as my weapon of choice to help save the client’s business from the bog of eternal death.
What makes Buzzstream the tool of choice is simply the fact that it consolidates a lot of different workflows into a single workflow, allowing you to get a lot more leverage out of your time than if you had performed all of those different workflows separately. With its prospecting, filtering and streamlined outreach workflow, it really helps make the job 100 times easier.
Outreach Preparation
Here is how I went about doing email outreach.
Step 1: Prospecting for Relevant Garden Bloggers
After the infographic was created, It was time to start finding gardening bloggers.
Using Buzzstream’s prospecting tool, I created a research list using search operators like “gardening blogs” and related terms that would produce blogs that may be interested in the shiny new infographic.
After entering my chosen seed terms, I simply let Buzzstream get to work building my research list…
After a few minutes, it was done!
And I had my list of prospects from which to work…
Step 2: Qualifying the Prospects
After generating my research list, I did some light sorting and filtering based on simple metrics, like domain authority, recent post date.
Step 3: Executing the Outreach
After getting my email templates in place and my prospect list prepped and ready, I began outreach to the list of blogger targets.
Now, this is where many people would simply pitch people cold on the first contact and not think beyond that.
Instead, I ran a very small split test:
- Use a 2-step, permission-based email sequence vs
- Pitch directly on the first email
If I was going to save this business, then I needed to know that my work was not wasted by having a bad outreach process!
Here’s the permission email template:
Remove All Friction
If you want someone to share your content, you need to answer the question that’s on their mind: “What’s in it for me?” Remember, when a blogger publishes your infographic, they have to create additional content to accompany it and might only get a bit of traffic for all that effort.
How do you alleviate this friction? By providing a custom-made introduction, so that it’s effortless for them. This way, whether it’s a hit or not, they don’t have to do any extra work.
After I started going through my prospects, I started to get some interested responses…
Here’s the second email I sent to the people that replied to my permission email…
Split Test Results
As I was conducting outreach, I noticed that the 2-step (permission-based) email sequence got a 42.3% response-rate, compared with just 16.7% without permission. After seeing this, I began to use the permission sequence exclusively with every subsequent prospect.
As if we needed data to know this, it just makes sense. If you can get them to say ‘yes’ first through asking permission, then you have a much higher chance of being receptive to whatever you are sharing.
The Impact
As I worked through the prospects, using my permission-based email strategy, one by one, results slowly started to come in.
Blogs were publishing the infographic (along with my custom intro), where I was landing contextual, relevant links to the client’s site.
After sending out approximately 100 emails, I had landed more than a dozen high quality links from relevant bloggers and received over 1,000 social shares, which helped it spread even more.
Due to the extra firepower from social sharing, it got picked up in high-profile publications such as Lifehacker…
Mother Earth News…
and a popular newspaper in Maine called Bangor Daily News…
As I began to secure some of these more notable placements, I incorporated them into my email template to act as social proof, helping to land even more links. People might think, ‘If Mother Earth News published it, maybe I should check it out.’
In just 2 Weeks, here were the results of my efforts:
- 1,117 social shares
- 12 high-quality, relevant, contextual backlinks to the client
- Mentions in highly-respected publications
- Rankings and local New York traffic increasing for the client
Here’s a simple chart showing the total-referring domain count increasing significantly.
A big spike in traffic to the infographic page…
And local traffic from New York increased significantly from the campaign…
Revenue Explosion
Thanks to my innovative thinking and the help of Buzzstream’s time-saving workflow, the client was starting to see a way out of doom and despair.
This campaign created so much new business for the client that they had to literally hire a bunch of new staff members to field the leads and jobs that were coming in. No joke.
I was truly blown away by this, and so was the client. Business was pumping and they were back to levels they hadn’t seen in years.
They had gone from a shriveling prune of a local business, to a re-birthed success story, all thanks to some creative thinking on my part and the time-saving genius of Buzzstream.
Lessons and Inspiration
While this particular case study is about a pest control company, the same principles can be used for any other non-sexy niches. Building links, traffic, leads and sales to un-sexy niches is only hard if you have ‘that’s the way it is’ brain.
With some innovative thinking and efficient marketing tools like Buzzstream, you can kill the sacred marketing cows and win!
In the end, what turned out to be a happenstance relationship with a client in a boring industry, who was running a dying business, turned out to be one of my craziest case studies to date.
Mike Bonadio
Disclaimer: The author's views are entirely their own, and don't necessarily reflect the opinions of BuzzStream.
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