Deliver It Group is one of South Australia's largest and fastest-growing transport companies, offering specialised logistics solutions from start to finish.
In 2019, Deliver It won the BDO's FastMovers award for fastest employment growth — receiving one month free of our Digital Leverage Program as part of their prize. With the fast growth of the business, the transport company was looking for ways to improve their leads and was keen to explore how digital marketing could help them.
Transporting goods is what Deliver It Group is best at, but they were delivering this service on two fronts. There were a lot of calls for one-off and ad-hoc delivery jobs, but they knew that ongoing contracted jobs are where the most growth potential and opportunities are.
Deliver It needed a way to effectively reach people looking for specialised transport services on an ongoing basis, particularly within the commercial sector.
What we did: Google Ads
Through a Complete Digital Audit of the business, we quickly identified that Google Ads would create the perfect opportunity for Deliver It to reach people searching for the services they offer.
Initial keyword research identified that the search volume for courier services in SA was large and could potentially bring in a lot of business. However, due to high competition on those keywords, we concluded that to maximise a limited budget it would be far more effective to focus on keywords specific to the niche nature of Deliver It's services.
Short-tail, generic keywords such as 'courier services' or 'delivery services' are highly competitive and can cost a fortune to bid for. So we narrowed the targeting down to roughly 1,400 niche searches each month on terms like 'refrigerated transport couriers' and 'commercial transport Adelaide'. Focusing on more specific keywords let us reach people with higher commercial intent — and because they were less competitive, they were far more cost-effective to bid for.
Website friction
Reviewing the Deliver It Group website, we identified critical areas that could be improved to maximise the performance of paid campaigns and increase conversion rates.
Humans are impatient by nature, especially online. If something is too hard, we leave and try another. Over years of browsing, we've developed behavioural expectations of what a 'good' website is: we expect it to load fast, to give us the information we need instantly, and to be a seamless experience. When elements make it difficult — slow speeds, clunky design or poor content layout — it becomes friction, making us more inclined to leave.
We strongly emphasised the importance of a user-optimised website: the client can run the most effective campaigns and bring in the most relevant traffic, but if a user does not convert to a lead, the system fails.
Website content optimisations
There were two main points of friction identified on the Deliver It website. The content was very text-heavy, making it difficult for users to navigate without reading through slabs of text; and a lot of the content was written about the company itself rather than to the users. These are very common and easy mistakes we see a lot of businesses make.
Users typically look for two things when entering a site. First is relevance — does this communicate a solution to my specific problem? Once that's answered, focus shifts to credibility — am I making the right decision? — where company history, employees, awards and testimonials become effective.
Using the AIDA framework, we worked with Deliver It to restructure and optimise their content — capturing attention with clear headlines and images, piquing interest with solutions and benefits, and justifying desire with the credibility content they already had. This made the website easy to navigate, and users could get the information they needed instantly.
The results
Upon running Google Ads campaigns on Deliver It's newly optimised website, leads came in immediately. Within the first month, they had already received over a dozen leads — one of which was a national chain that offered a commercial tender worth over $2M.
Within 3 months, they saw an increase of 110% in overall leads generated compared to the previous period. Deliver It also received commercial contracts from some of the biggest supermarket and retail chains in Australia, worth well over a quarter of a million dollars. The combined value of all leads within the first 3 months would total over $1 million — all from only spending $2,000 on ad spend. Talk about a return on investment.
This came as a result of the niche keyword targeting, which brought in the qualified commercial leads the company had been seeking. Traffic to the website increased by 130%, of which Google Ads attributed 65%+, and the user-optimised website lifted the conversion rate by 20%.
Deliver It are now almost at maximum capacity and are looking to further expand their fleet of trucks as more ongoing work comes in.
"We have had a wonderful experience working with Market Ease and are very impressed with the amount of knowledge and experience that they have within the digital space. They provided very valuable recommendations which not only helped us build a strong digital marketing strategy, but gain momentum on the exact type of work through commercial and business-to-business leads that we were after.
Since partnering up with Market Ease, the results have been amazing! The website has been receiving consistent enquiries and within 3 months of running our campaigns, we had a total combined leads value of over $1M and are completely flat out with work lining up by the day."
The takeaway: you don't need a big budget to win big contracts. By targeting niche, high-intent keywords and removing friction from the website, Deliver It turned $2,000 of ad spend into over $1M of qualified commercial leads.
