About this website.
In 2008, with locations around New England (Albany, Nashua, Portland, and Woburn), over ten years of history providing lawn care services, and about 50 employees, Lawn Dawg was facing a problem many medium-sized B2C businesses face: “how do I get more customers?” Previously, their marketing was based almost entirely on telemarketing. But when the do not call laws came out, they were in a pickle—their main source of leads had dried up. They had made a significant effort in advertising, marketing, and online media, but met with limited success.
Launching into new markets
So at the end of two tough marketing years, Lawn Dawg contacted MESH for help with their marketing. Our first suggestion was to do away with the old logo. It had served them well as a smaller business, but Lawn Dawg had really evolved over the years, and the home-grown logo just wasn’t cutting it with new customers. We also made some recommendations regarding their web site—from all sides: marketing, design and tech. We also created a multi-pronged marketing campaign that included SEO, sales letters, social media, email blasts, and online advertising. In December of 2008, Lawn Dawg signed on for a logo overhaul and complete web site redesign.
Inspired re-vision.
MESH stayed true to the original concept of having a happy, energetic dog as the mark—including the big, floppy ears. We also stuck with using a color palette that wasn’t the norm for the industry. Many other companies were using blues and greens. We selected orange and green as the core colors, while using blue as an accent color. We freshened up the type, and really tried to convey a “green” (think environment) business, that tied into their EarthCare Lawn Service.
Cost savings 101: don’t fix what isn’t broken.
For the web site, to save Lawn Dawg money, we kept the initial eCommerce underpinnings—but that was the extent of what we kept. The original site was almost nowhere to be found on search engines, was completely static, and was not working at converting browsers to buyers… or at least people interested in getting a quote. In fact, calls to action were located below the fold—or under the natural break in the page at the bottom of the screen—so buyers had a tough time locating quote and buy buttons. We redesigned the site to reorient around their new visual direction, developed the site in a robust, SEO friendly content management system, and put in place an SEO program that had them in top listings for their key words in one week.
Better, trackable results.
Jim Campenella, owner of Lawn Dawg called us on the phone the first week after the site launched in March of 2009 saying, “we’ve had more leads generated through the site in the last four days than we have in the last 10 weeks of this year.”
We have recently launched the sales letter campaign, the email blast, and the online adwords campaign for Lawn Dawg and await the results.