$2.8 Million Increase in 6 Months While Only Spending $750 on Advertising

Industry: Steel Distribution
Result: $2.8 Million Increase In Revenue In 6 Months With A $750 Ad Budget.

The Situation: The client sold all types of steel to fabricators across the western United States. They were selling "Prime Steel" with ease but were having a hard time selling a more lucrative product called "Secondary Steel". Secondary steel was a prime quality product but had a negative perception in the marketplace. The fabricators thought it was a lesser quality material when, in fact, it was simply useless inventory for the mill due to order overruns and inaccurate orders. The mill didn't want the inventory so they sold the steel at a huge discount to distributors like our client.

The Objective: The Company hired Profit Growth Group to help them put together a marketing campaign and strategy that would change the fabricators perception of secondary steel. The bottom line goal was to sell higher quantities of secondary steel and less prime steel without sending salesmen to visit the fabricators or spending much on advertising.

The Solution: After doing the appropriate amount of research on both the target market (fabricators) and the competition, Y2Marketing put together a strategy that would not only change the perception of the fabricators but would spur them to take action and start placing orders for Secondary Steel rather than Prime Steel.

When talking with the fabricators they consistently said that they had never tried secondary steel but they had heard negative things about it and didn't think that it met the requirements set forth by the architect and engineers leading their projects. When we mentioned that it did meet the requirements and that it was made of the same materials as prime steel their interest level went up dramatically especially since it would add up to 42% to their net profits.

Now that we knew they'd be interested in the product if it met their requirements we just had to overcome their initial fear and skepticism that was holding them from placing their initial order. To do this we guaranteed the order. We guaranteed that they would be 100% satisfied with the quality of the material or we'd not only send a truck to pick the steel up but we'd give them $500 for their time that they invested in trying our product. This was a very bold guarantee but the client knew, from experience, that virtually nobody would ever send the steel back because it met or exceeded all of our claims and their requirements. Since they had a database of current customers we simply sent a fax once per week to the fabricators communicating the advantages of using secondary steel and our guarantee.

The Result: Within several weeks they had picked up 7 new sizeable accounts and their current database was now placing orders for more secondary steel rather than the prime steel they had always purchased in the past. Within 6 months their sales were up $2.8 Million and they had only spent $750 in long distance charges from the weekly faxing campaign they had run.