“Permission has been an integral part of our success. In our business it’s all about engaging with the right type of prospect at the right stage of the sale. Working with Permission has helped us tap into a steady stream of these types of people.”

– Mike Candy, Agrigarden Distributors

Agrigarden Distributors are based in St Heliers, Auckland, and began working with Permission in January 2006. They represent the Grillo Ride On Mower brand in both Australia and New Zealand, as well as other leading garden equipment manufacturers.

When Agrigarden and Permission first met, the Agrigarden operation was in its start-up stage and the business had limited market awareness. The website had just been finished and required promotion. There had been some use of the traditional methods of promotion, such as print and magazine advertising, but this was seen as a cost-prohibitive option for long-term use. So, the general consensus was to head online and attract those prospects using the Internet to find the products they offered.

Prior to meeting Permission, the St Heliers team had set themselves up with a Google AdWords account and started their own advertising. And yes, while their credit card had taken a slight hit and they had attracted some clicks, they were not sure if this method was providing a worthwhile return. So it was with a slight element of urgency to get some traction online that Permission was engaged.

The web development team responsible for building the site introduced Permission to the Agrigarden team. First off, and as a way of proving some level of expertise, Permission began work on optimizing their Google AdWords account. This was quickly brought up to a best-practice level and any wasteful spending was removed.

During this work Permission found that, while their AdWords advertising in the New Zealand market had been performing reasonably well, similar efforts in Australia were not producing such good results. Permission presented a way to re-configure the account to improve this situation, which was accepted by the Agrigarden team. Once implemented, this quickly changed things and the Australian AdWords traffic rocketed upwards by over 400%. The Australian lead count grew by the same proportion and the business started to take off.

Once AdWords was under control, Permission then focused on optimizing the main website so it could be found by those clicking on the results shown in the organic (free) part of Google. Fortunately, the website developers had designed the site so that changes like these could be made, and it was a relatively simple task to have the necessary page content altered.

As is normally the case with altering organic rankings, it took longer to effect a noticeable change than the prior work done in Google AdWords, but still the site slowly moved up in the rankings for the search keywords the business was targeting.

During those early years, the business quickly became established and more and more dealers joined who were willing to support the Agrigarden product across Australia and New Zealand. The Australian market grew at a promising rate so it was decided to build a separate lead generation system specifically for this market to capture as much of the available demand as possible.

The first step was to learn more about the Australian consumer. Permission conducted some online prospect research to add to the existing knowledge the Agrigarden team already had. Based on this work, a draft appointment page was written. This worked well and this initial version provided a solid 25% lift in conversion results.

The layout and content of this page has since gone through a series of iterations. Using Google’s Website Optimizer product, the team has split-tested various versions against each other to slowly, but progressively, creep up the conversion rate month by month.

Improving the organic search results for this Australian content has also come under focus. Even with the increased competitive nature of the market, there have been some solid improvements here.

All this has culminated in a steady, reliable and affordable stream of new prospect enquiries flowing into the Auckland offices of Agrigarden each week – all ready for them to disseminate to their dealers in both Australia and New Zealand.