Getting the numbers right for a national brand
The job
From 2018 to 2023 I ran the marketing for Kitchen Studio, a national kitchen retailer with fourteen showrooms. National TV and radio, Google Ads, websites, event sites, the lot. The early creative was a team effort. Making it work, and measuring whether it did, was my job.
A new kitchen is a big purchase. You're asking people to trust you with the most used room in their house, so trust was what every campaign was built on.
The reports were wrong
When I took the account on, the reports looked healthy. Then I looked at what was being counted. 84% of the "conversions" were an analytics setting that counted anyone who spent five minutes on the website. They weren't leads. They were people browsing.
Years later, the ad platform was still overstating things.
In the months I checked, it claimed between six and seventeen times more conversions than actually came in.
So I stopped trusting the dashboards and built my own check. Every website form and every 0800 call, qualified by hand, every month. It's slow work. It was also the only way to know for sure what the money was doing.
Nobody was answering the phone
Digging into the sales side turned up another problem. Over 35% of calls to regional showrooms were going unanswered. The designers were busy with customers on the floor, and people ringing in were hanging up.
There's no point paying for ads that make the phone ring if nobody picks it up. So I set up a call centre to answer the national calls and qualify each lead before it went to a designer.
Helping the designers sell
Better leads only help if the team can turn them into jobs. So I built an online sales training platform for Kitchen Studio, with a profile for each person to track their progress and video modules on everything from how buyers make decisions to building trust with a client.
The platform came with one-on-one mentoring for sales teams and designers around the country, so the training carried through to how they worked with customers. When the internal Kitchen Design Awards came round, I was in the room cheering them on.
What came of it
Website leads grew 126% over three years. Through the 2023 construction downturn they were still 61% above 2019 levels, and across five years the annual media spend stayed broadly flat.
Kitchen Studio also picked up Reader's Digest Marketing Excellence recognition: runner-up in 2021, then the award outright in 2022 and 2023. That sat alongside being voted Most Trusted Brand in the kitchen category year after year.
Seeing Kitchen Studio up there next to the likes of Resene and Whittaker's was a genuine pinch-me moment.
What I took from it
Most of what worked came down to checking things nobody had checked, then putting the money where the customers actually were. It's what I do for every business now, whatever the size.