Case Studies
PERFECT PLACEMENT:
Years Engaged
2015 - Present
Services Provided:
Digital Strategy Development, SEO, SEM, CRO, Content Marketing, Copywriting, Technical Analysis, Web Analytics
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Success Is On The Horizon.
Industry & Client Background
You may not realize it, just yet, but you are surrounded by packaging. Almost everything you purchase comes in some form of container which at one point, was designed to catch your attention. When we think of plastic bottles and glass jars, we seldom consider the dynamic process a brand undertakes to produce a container which is functional, aesthetically pleasing, durable, and recognizable. Containers are, in a true respect, a fundamental physical component of human society. Imagine the overwhelming challenge an entrepreneur faces when they want to bring a new beverage, cosmetic cream, or food product to market – the vessel in which that product is delivered has everything to do with its success.
Welcome to the excruciatingly complicated and competitive world of custom packaging solutions.
This company (let’s call them Creative Containers) started off around 1910, with its original proprietor selling glass bottles in the streets of an iconic northeastern US state. If you’re thinking Model T’s, cobblestone streets, newsboy hats, and crates full of glass seltzer bottles – you’ve got the right image in your mind. Over 100 years, this company grew into one of the leading providers of wholesale glass and plastic containers in the US, and is responsible for providing some of the most iconic cosmetic, beverage, and healthcare brands with the packaging solutions they need to deliver you, the consumer, with the products you consume every single day. And you better believe there’s no shortage of demand for the hundreds upon hundreds of distinctive glass, plastic, and metal container styles this company provides – to corporations and “mom and pop” homegrown brands all across the US.
The Challenge
There are dozens of other enterprise packaging suppliers, including Amazon, who compete in the very same market. Creative Containers came to Gallant Fish Internet Marketing by way of a failed website “relaunch” which was intended to create a more effective information architecture that segmented product categorizations more efficiently. The website launch was a debacle, because no one on the development team knew how to utilize 301 redirects from old URLs to new URLs, which led to the collapse of the website’s traffic (bye bye leads and sales). The company immediately turned to Google Ads to supplement the traffic loss while they attempted to figure out why their organic traffic evaporated, employing dozens of broad match keywords with no limitations in place to prevent irrelevant queries from serving ads (think about what the word “bottle” could trigger if left unchecked). A Gallant Fish Internet Marketing development partner referred a rather panicked Director of Marketing for Creative Containers for a consult…and within about 30 minutes…we had identified the issue, and set a plan in motion to correct the architectural mishap via redirection and proceed forward with more expansive development.
An enduring collaboration, which has now spanned over 8 years, had begun…
Approach & Impact
Since those early days of implementing 301 redirects to salvage a botched site launch, Creative Containers has come to dominate the wholesale and bulk packaging verticals. You can’t run a search for wholesale glass bottles or bulk plastic bottles or any number of vertical specific packaging keywords without encountering them at the top of the organic results. The domain ranks for over 22,750 organic keywords and has quintupled its traffic since the beginning of the project. How did we accomplish that? By applying a strategy which anticipated the customer journey, and factored organic search as a prominent channel.
The thing about omnichannel marketing strategies is that you have to thoroughly understand the customer perspective before digging into the nuances of SEO, SEM, Content Marketing, and all other aspects of internet marketing. In the case of Creative Containers, it was imperative to understand how customers (who are purchasing anywhere from 100 to 10,000 containers at a time) source the products they need to package their products. How do they find packaging providers online? What words do they use to find specific styles, sizes, and shapes of generic packaging products? The targeting strategy we defined reflects both short tail and long tail components, but also a methodical approach to information architecture optimization. We realized early on in the project that to engage industry specific audiences (think cold press juice or cold brew coffee companies who need distinctive bottle designs to make their product attractive at the store) we needed industry specific content. We created an “industry catalog” architectural segment which was so effective, that the entirety of the packaging industry proceeded to emulate it. Try searching for “wholesale glass juice bottles” – you’ll notice almost every provider in the results has a distinct architectural segment specifically for retailers of juices. Yes – we came up with that first.
The challenge today is more dynamic than ever before, simply because the anatomy of search results are profoundly complex. Competitive SERPs are saturated with search network ads, local results, shopping ads, images, videos, and People Also Ask informational results. To navigate this effectively, we rely on the fundamentals of creating content that engages audiences when and how they search – by leveraging exceptionally effective content marketing tactics to build link authority – and to tailor ad strategies that present compelling incentives in a sea of competitors. Measurement is at the core of this project, which is true of any ecommerce endeavor – you can improve what you can measure – and we rely on a defined series of KPIs to understand how organic traffic and paid search traffic work harmoniously to support new customer acquisition.
The product of our long term collaboration with Creative Containers has been a transformation for the way their business sells packaging solutions direct to companies that need containers to sell products direct to consumers. Beyond that – we enhanced the way that enterprise brands discover Creative Containers, when they need to produce a custom packaging solution to bring their distinctive products to market.
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