Flyline Search Marketing
Serving Penny’s By Plaza Flowers
About six months ago, Chris Drummond, owner of Plaza Flowers and Penny’s Flowers, hired our firm. We were brought in to create a sustainable lead stream, reduce dependence on wire-in orders, boost brand recognition, optimize the primary website, create more wedding and event opportunities and to build and deploy the tools needed to be achieve a more dominant and competitive position in the Philadelphia market. At the time we began serving Chris, he was operating two primary websites. Those sites were https://pflorist.com and https://pennysflowers.com. Chris Drummond is an icon in the floral industry. He is President of SAF and known throughout the industry as a creative entrepreneur with a high propensity for giving back to others.
In our first few weeks with him, we built a new free standing blog, created a wedding website, started optimizing his primary website and began to evaluate the overall competitive landscape in the Philadelphia area. The competition in that market is fierce to say the least. There are a number of large, well established floral design firms operating in the market. These firms are for the most part using some pretty sophisticated online tools and tactics. That is precisely the kind of challenge our team loves to dig into.
One thing was very clear to us from the start. The the fact that Chris was operating two duplicate websites was likely going to create issues for him with the search engines. The search engines use Artificial Intelligence systems to manage their search platforms. These AI systems are equipped with machine learning. These state of the art systems run on some of the world’s most sophisticated super computers. Google was an early adopter of this approach. In fact, most believe that Google likely pioneered this strategy and approach, as it relates to information collection and the delivery of relevant organic and paid search results. Their Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) are arguably the best in the world industry at delivering the most “relevant” answer to search queries they receive. I believe the proof is in the data. Google holds a completely dominant position in the Internet search industry.
For years, Google and the other Internet search providers used human coded algorithms in their platform. The Artificial Intelligence systems replaced those human coded algorithms. The super computers that the AI systems run on can process thousands of transactions in seconds. It was clear to our marketing team that Chris Drummond needed to merge his two duplicate websites into one. That would allow us to build out one more powerful and relevant site. In talking with Chris, we choose to keep the site that had the strongest historical ranking. As we merged the two sites, we built a 301 redirect package that ensured that customers using the pennysflowers.com site would continue to find the content they were looking for. As we rolled out the new merged site, we also ramped up efforts to introduce the world to the new merged brand. The new company is called “Penny’s By Plaza Flowers.” We all felt that Plaza and Penny’s customers were going to love the new brand name. Customer reaction has been very positive so far. Online results have improved since the merge.
There are a number of reasons why you should not operate multiple websites that serve up the same replicated or re-purposed content. First, there is the issue of website relevance and page rank. We believe that the search engines seek out and reward new, original and relevant content. We also believe that the search engines will not assign a high ranking or relevance to a site that is serving up replicated, re-purposed or redundant content. In creating the Penny’s Flowers site, Chris’s web development firm replicated the exact content from his Plaza Flowers site. The data in Google Analytics was pretty clear. Both sites were being boat anchored in the two site configuration. Based on this and other experiences, our team believes that it is very likely that anyone who attempts to operate two identical sites would seem the same data trends.
Think for a minute about how the search engines go about their business. Google, Bing and Yahoo all send automated robots out onto the worldwide web. These BOTS operate every second of every day. When BOTS find new relevant content that they haven’t indexed, they capture that information and deliver it back to the search engine server farm. The server farms at Google have more indexed more information than any other singular entity in the world. Their server farm is massive. Arguably one of the most elaborate and sophisticated computer centers in the world.
A second reason to not operate two redundant website is the brand confusion that scenario creates. We felt Chris would be far better served devoting all of his, and our time and energy into building one super brand. A foundational element of our marketing program is to help clients build the most powerful brand possible. We have found that strong brands can thrive, even during times of economic downturn. Chris was already somewhat on that track when we met him. I think having us on his team gave him the confidence to take the plunge. As mentioned earlier, the name selected for the new merged company is “Penny’s By Plaza Flowers.” Based on the most recent online results, it appears that our customers are reacting well to the new merged brand. Here are some data points for March of 2020. Online sales at Penny’s By Plaza Flowers are up 77.42%. Online revenue is up 90.16%. We feel pretty good about these numbers. Chris is now on the path to a stronger brand. He is also well positioned to benefit from sustainable long term growth.
We are thankful for the opportunity to partner with Chris Drummond. He is everything everyone said he was. Kind, thoughtful, extremely smart and totally engaging. Our team is learning so much from him. We are well on the way to earning his trust, respect and his friendship. Thankful for that. The challenge of helping to reshape the competitive playing field in Philadelphia is something we found irresistible. What a great market. The key data metrics are all trending up. We look forward to delivering long term success for Penny’s By Plaza Flowers.
New Marketing Tools
We are just getting started with deploying the tools and program elements that will be needed to take Penny’s By Plaza to the next level. Take a look at the new blog we created. You can access the blog by going to https://pennysbyplazablog.com. Our blog team will be creating some great articles, photos and sharing lots of exciting news about the Penny’s By Plaza firm.
Penny’s By Plaza Blog
In addition to the blog, we also built a new wedding site for them as well. You can view that site at https://pennysbyplazaweddingflowers.com. Brides in the greater Philadelphia area should contact the Penny’s By Plaza wedding staff. They create luxurious, upscale wedding flower packages and offer FREE wedding consultations.
Penny’s By Plaza Wedding Flowers
Our firm works with more than a dozen flower shops, located all across the United States. The shops that we strategically partner with are family owned and operated. Most have revenues of approximately $700,ooo per year or more, at the time they bring us in. Every flower shop in our the floral group we have created is experiencing solid growth. We welcomed the newest member of the group last month. It is a company out of Indianapolis, Indiana. We will be talking more about them once we get all of the elements of our comprehensive program plugged in and working for them. Our expectation is to help them grow into a dominant position in that great market.
