“SelectValet is definitely a start-up success story. Two things helped us achieve this. The first was our focus on presenting a great product to market – the second was Permission and their focus on supplying us a steady stream of leads. It’s one hell of a combination.”

– Mark Gilbert, SelectValet New Zealand

Launching a new business always comes with a fair amount of risk. The percentage of failures that don’t make it past year one is staggering and anything that can reduce the likelihood of this occurring can only be a good thing. And so it was with all this in mind that Mark Gilbert approached Permission to assist in the launch of his new mobile car valet service – SelectValet.

Mark, as the country master franchise for the SelectCleaning business, had seen firsthand the good work the team had done with growing this established business. But now he was more interested to hear how Permission could apply its skills to the launch phase of this new venture.

The team at Permission scoped out the work that was required, describing how this would help Mark achieve the objectives he had set for the business. This was met with approval and Permission was engaged.

Initial discussion centered on achieving some clarity on the needs and desires of the prospect audience. Mark’s team had a wealth of information on this subject but was still keen to learn more. Therefore, some additional online research was conducted by Permission to fill the gaps. Once this work was completed, the two teams worked together to produce the first draft sales copy for the site.

The Google AdWords system was seen as an ideal option to tap into a reliable and cost-effective stream of prospect traffic to ‘test’ this sales message with. Permission established an exploratory campaign and the lead flow began to build and provide a good base to kick-start the business.

After a few weeks, things started to gain momentum as the lead flow began to grow to a credible volume. While this was occurring, the valet service was also proving to be very popular with customers – repeat business volumes were above initial expectations. The project was still in its research phase and further tweaking of the sales page was completed as more information was collated on the needs of the online shopper.

Having proved that the system could convert paid traffic into leads at a profitable rate, the focus then moved to improving the site’s rankings within Google’s organic (or free) listings. This involved conducting some initial keyword research and then supplementing this with the keyword-based knowledge gained from their successful AdWords campaign. Out of this came a seed group of target keywords that were chosen for optimization improvements.

All this work had been focused on the Auckland region and, with this showing good positive signs, it was decided to roll out similar offerings to both Wellington and Christchurch. Different selling messages were crafted for each and, as before, were tested and proven on paid Google AdWords-generated traffic.

Now in its third year of operation, the business is well on track to become the largest mobile car cleaning company in New Zealand by mid this year. But when it comes to lead development, there is always room for improvement. So each month Mark meets with the team at Permission to review the stats from last month and to plan out the changes required to keep ‘polishing’ the system.