Catering Marketing Case Study: Ranking and Reviews Drive Conversions
May 21, 2018
Marketing for catering businesses tends to be fairly straightforward – but that doesn’t mean easy. Here’s how an Atlanta based catering company achieves success using Marketing 360®.
What does it take to successfully market a catering business in a large urban area? Let’s break down how this Marketing 360® client became the go-to choice in Atlanta for corporate lunches.
Specialization
The majority of catering services will cater any event, from office parties to weddings. This seems like a sound idea, but as we often observe with digital marketing in competitive markets, it’s possible to offer too much.
This catering service specializes in corporate catering, and furthermore, narrows that focus into what they call corporate dining solutions.
In other words, they don’t just cater business Christmas parties. They specialize in luncheons that some businesses order on a weekly basis.
This type of specialization creates a kind of agility. They do one type of catering, and that allows them to do it very well.
If you needed a business lunch catered in Atlanta, who do you think you’d choose?
SEO and Paid Search
Having a niche is one of the best ways to ensure that you can rank for your highest-value keywords.
This site ranks comfortably for their best keyword phrases:
This gives them the freedom to go for more general keyword phrases with their paid search, where they geo-target the main corporate locations in the the Atlanta area (that is, they target the word “catering”, but geo-target the ads so only someone searching in an area that’s mainly corporate offices will see the ad).
Along with direct traffic from people who already know them, these two channels make the majority of their conversions (60-day):
Reputation and Reviews
One thing we know is that today reputation is essential to business marketing. Online reviews are as persuasive as any content a business can create about itself. There is no marketing material with more value than a review like this, written on Google:
Their Top Rated Local rating score of 98.4 shows that this catering business really delivers for their corporate clients.
The business makes this happen with their exceptional service, but it also helps to have the Marketing 360® reputation management team gathering reviews to make sure they look as good online as they do in person.
Conversion Based Website Design
If you look at 90% if catering websites, you’ll see a massive image of a dish or maybe people eating, and you’ll have no idea where their service area is or how to contact them.
Another reason this business converts so well is they make it easy to convert. How often do you see a caterer that has their phone number on the homepage, above the fold, three times?
Instead of a self-indulgent story about the challenges the business owners faced starting out and how they overcame it all with their passion for cuisine, this website gets straight to it by encouraging people to call so they can arrange their catering.
A 7.15% conversion rate doesn’t lie. This catering company is feeding the Atalanta business community thanks to a tight, well-executed marketing plan.