Accelerating Success for Rainbow Muffler & Brake

When Rainbow Muffler & Brake first reached out to madison/miles media about our digital marketing services after finding us on the World Marketing Collective, the Cleveland-based company knew its marketing efforts were falling short. Wanting to attract more customers to its six locations, Rainbow Muffler & Brake was looking for a digital marketing agency that could help drive more web traffic, bring in more leads in the form of phone calls and build greater awareness of the auto repair company’s presence overall.

After talking with madison/miles media, they thought our approach was a good fit, and we quickly identified several areas for improvement. With Rainbow’s approval, we immediately began implementing those changes.

About Rainbow Muffler & Brake

Rainbow Muffler & Brake is a family-owned company that boasts more than a generation of experience serving the Cleveland, Ohio, area. Since 1980, they have provided quality and affordable car repair services that emphasize muffler and brake services but also include heating and cooling system repair, wheels and tires, shocks and struts, belts and hoses, diagnostics and more.

While their name was familiar to many in the Cleveland area, the company knew it could improve visibility for its six locations — and that business would follow.

Rainbow Looks to Overcome Stalled Online Traffic

Although the company wasn’t consistently monitoring its web traffic, the owners knew the company wasn’t doing as well as it could be. They had several websites and a Facebook account and used pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to help new customers find them, but overall their efforts were falling flat and their online traffic was stalling.

Without the time or experience to dedicate to their online marketing efforts, the owners were becoming frustrated by the lack of web traffic. They wanted to differentiate themselves from the less expensive competitors who provided low-quality work, as well as stand out as a value-priced alternative to big-name competitors who offered similar services at a much higher cost. Their objective was to emerge as a high-quality, mid-priced solution for car owners on a budget.

Identifying the Opportunities for Improvement

After conducting a thorough audit of Rainbow’s existing content and marketing efforts, we noticed several areas where there was room for improvement. At a discovery meeting with Rainbow Muffler & Brake, we presented the details of what we had uncovered along with our proprietary m360 Marketing Map, outlining the business’s strengths, challenges, goals and past/current performance. Our initial efforts included creating buyer personas, analyzing their competitors, defining their differentiators and identifying local and industry influencers.

Two areas we identified that could be improved immediately were:

• Website. Rainbow Muffler & Brake had one general website, as well as an individual site for each location. None of the sites were up to date and all of them had an outdated design and lacked content. While the sites ranked in a search for the company’s name, they weren’t using keywords to draw in leads.   
• Online advertising. Online ads led to different sites, which wasn’t efficient for potential customers.

Creating a Strategy for Immediate Results

While we knew some of the changes would take longer to execute, we wanted Rainbow Muffler & Brake to enjoy some immediate benefits from our partnership, so we launched a new blog on the company’s old site while we worked behind the scenes on a site redesign. The blog provided a way to kick-start organic traffic and generate leads immediately.

At the same time, we began deploying a strategy that included backlink development, citation building, online review management, social media management and SEO. We also knew that lead-generation offers targeting their buyer personas and built around a keyword strategy could help increase their traffic quickly.

Not the Same Old Site

We knew that changing the look of the site was critical, but we also knew that redesigning Rainbow Muffler & Brake’s existing web presence went beyond its appearance. To begin with, the sites needed to be consolidated into one, making it faster and more efficient for customers to find the location that was most convenient for them.

The site also needed to do more than just tell people about the company’s services. It needed to be reconfigured to generate inbound leads and give customers a reason to visit not just the website, but one of Rainbow’s locations as well.

Before:

The old site lacked a distinctive look, and the only imperative from Rainbow was for us to include their existing logo. Our design team used that logo to inform the color scheme for the entire site, borrowing two shades of blue and incorporating them into the new site.

Our goal was to give the site a friendly, trustworthy feel while at the same time conveying Rainbow Muffler & Brake’s position as a reliable automotive authority. The images use a subtle rainbow hue effect to underscore the company’s brand identity.

Ease of use, responsiveness and clarity were also important for the site, and we addressed this by using a round sans-serif font as well as a serif font for more readable body copy.

To make it easier for visitors to find locations nearest them, we created a “Locations” section on the homepage, which shows each Rainbow Muffler & Brake location on a large, interactive, easy-to-read map that can be easily viewed from any device. 

As part of our efforts to make Rainbow Muffler & Brake’s website more visible in search results, our SEO specialists wrote multiple service pages. Each service page linked to the locations that offer that service.

We built their blog and lead generation offers on the HubSpot platform, which allowed us to provide a form for readers to subscribe to updates. Next, we created a landing page to use with PPC advertising, then wrote and designed an e-book, “How to Save Money and Extend the Life of Your Car” to capture more leads. The e-book was hosted on an additional HubSpot landing page, and we included a CTA to download the offer on all new blog posts relevant to it. We set up workflows to send follow-up emails to visitors who opted in.

By integrating a HubSpot tracking code that logged when a visitor filled out a contact phone number or clicked on a specific location’s phone number, we were able to quantify conversions from the site.

Initial Impact and Lasting Results

Rainbow Muffler & Brake began enjoying positive results almost immediately. For Rainbow, the number of phone calls they received was most important, since those calls equate directly to more customers and greater profitability.

Within just two months of beginning work with m3, Rainbow Muffler & Brake saw phone calls increase by 2.75 times, and within five months, locations were receiving five times more calls.

When Rainbow Muffler & Brake began working with m3 in September 2017, the company received 1,042 calls for the entire month. Thanks to increased exposure online, the company received a record high 6,277 calls in March 2019 and received 3,080 calls during the month of January 2020.

Website traffic also increased, with sessions rising rapidly and continuously. Before working with madison/miles media, Rainbow Muffler & Brake had 1,407 website visits in a month. Now, the number of visits has grown steadily, with 6,171 visitors in January 2020 — an increase of 339% in just over two years.

Organic traffic, which was practically nonexistent before working with m3, also grew for Rainbow Muffler & Brake. In September 2017, only four visits to the website came through organic search traffic. In January 2020, the site received 3,504 visits from organic traffic alone. Total website traffic more than doubled, going from 2,229 visits in the month of October 2017 to 4,568 visits in January 2020.

The right strategy made all the difference in results for Rainbow Muffler & Brake. They’ve achieved an amazing ROI — including increases in phone calls to each location and more quality website traffic — by working with m3.