Boom Times - Apache Oil Strikes Customer Gold

Until recently, small local businesses have been largely off from the benefits of performance-based pay-per-click search marketing. From the search engine side, it's been relatively difficult for businesses to limit their ad placement to anything smaller than a national audience; that meant wasting ad dollars on distant clicks that could never turn into customers. And from the enterprise perspective, tailoring ads and bids to meet the needs of several search platforms meant spending more time on marketing than most small businesses have available.

But that situation is changing. Search engines are making it easier to impose geographic limits on their paid ad campaigns, and marketing firms are springing up to serve the particular needs of local and regional companies with limited time and money to spend on search advertising.

Pasadena, TX-based Apache Oil took advantage of the services of one of those new specialist firms four months ago, and vice president Kenny Isbell is glad it did. The first search campaign managed by ReachLocal netted his oil wholesaling firm about $40,000 in new billings from first-time customers, he says. And he points to $70,000 in new business during the last six to seven weeks as strong evidence that SEM will keep producing results.

Isbell lets ReachLocal handle most of the micromanagement of the bidding and placement, but he takes advantage of the tracking reports and call logs that the firm sends to his attention, notifying him how many viewers clicked through to his Web site, and who called the numbers listed in the ad-linked pages or e-mailed for price quotes and estimates. Isbell and his sales team make sure to follow up on those customer contacts to ask if all questions were answered and all requested information supplied. "Petroleum is a competitive business in Houston", he says. "We set ourselves apart through personal service and quick turnaround."

In fact, the results of Apache's short experience with search engine marketing have been so good that they may soon lift the company out of its regional niche. It wouldn't take much, Isbell says, to take the company national and start shipping truckloads of industrial oils and lubricants around the country -- now that he knows he can generate customer leads via search engine marketing.