No matter what its size, every company wants to increase sales. That’s why a lot of SME owners are constantly asking how their marketing is doing – and how the competition is doing.

That was the story for my friend’s company, “YourCrawlSpace.” My friend was able to confirm that he’s outperforming his competitors and that his marketing works, thanks to share of search. Even though “YourCrawlSpace” is a small company with generic name (which can cloud search results) and which faces bigger, multi-category players, it could see its marketing increased interest because more people started searching for them.

“We didn’t really know what to expect when we started to use the new metric of Share of Search,” says Keith McLoughlin, Managing Partner at YourCrawlSpace. “But of course we’re glad to see our marketing efforts are paying off. Although the percentages don’t say much about the market split, the ranking with competitors and the timespan does give us a pretty good view of reality. It’s also good to see we’re taking interest away from our competitors. We’ll continue to track our share of search, and we obviously aim to continue to improve.”

Background:

YourCrawlSpace is a family enterprise based in McClellanville, South Carolina. It sells a patented encapsulation system for crawl spaces. For non-Americans, this means they sell a system to keep moisture out of that little space underneath the house to prevent the foundation from rotting away.
The company mainly operates in South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia, selling its system to contractors (and the occasional DIY homeowner). Most of its competitors are also local players with similar names, such as “Crawlspace Depot” ( Tennessee and North Carolina), “Crawlspace Repair” (South Carolina) and Nash Distributors. The latter is a national player in multiple categories.

How did YourCrawlSpace use share of search?

A small company with common words in its name would not get useful share-of-search results just by searching for its own name. It has to put a little care into choosing what to look for. Nevertheless, the process is pretty uncomplicated.

Step 1: Identify competition

In this case, identifying who we wanted to be compared with was pretty straightforward. By talking to various contractors we knew where they mainly bought their supplies.

Step 2: Choose the right search terms

Overview of YourCrawlSpace selected words

The generic, descriptive names of “YourCrawlSpace” and its competitors would yield misleading results if you just inserted them into a tool to obtain share of search. Meanwhile, other competitors such as Nash Distributors are playing within multiple categories so we needed to filter out the right one.

That means fine tuning search terms. A quick look at the competitor websites immediately gives insights based on the specific wording they use to describe their products or services. In our case, location and certain keywords turned out to be useful– especially in the case of Nash Distributors, where we wanted to exclude other product categories.

This overview was generated in our tool MyTelescope, but can also be obtained using Google Trends. Only difference is that it will take a lot more trial and error and you won’t have the exact volumes.

Overall volumes tend to be low, but since the same goes for the other brands and the limited geography, the comparative element is still representative.

Step 3: analysing the result

The analysis based on the Share of Search shows that YourCrawlSpace is moving in the right direction. After an increased investment in marketing during 2020, the efforts start to pay off with a steady increase in its share of search.

Besides that, it showed that the competitor with more outlets, “Crawlspace Depot,” is leading the category at the moment, but that YourCrawlSpace is taking away it’s searches. Meanwhile, Nash Distributors is seeing slow sales, especially of their crawlspace product.

Step 4: marketing strategy

We can see that the marketing efforts that started in May started to increasingly pay off towards the end of the year. That gives some indication of the time it took to make an impact. Based on those activities, YourCrawlSpace can start to see not only what activities should continue, but also variations that can run into the next year.

Tracking your performance marketing against your competitors shouldn’t be hard. With share of search you can do it in an easy way. If you want to check how well your marketing is doing, try it yourself through www.mytelescope.io

How you know your SME marketing works