This past week, at The BIAKelsey Leading in Local conference in Atlanta, Kelsey distributed its new GOLOCAL awards in three categories – Sales/ Revenue, Innovation and Strategic use of digital marketing.  Nearly forty entrants were considered for these three categories and three finalists in each category were brought to Atlanta for the announcement of the winners.

Placeable was a finalist in the Strategic use of digital marketing for the successful partnership with AAA Carolinas.  Heather Mcbrien of AAA Carolinas and I represented the team and I presented an overview of what we had accomplished together to the audience, which included empowering AAA Carolinas to emerge as a fierce competitor in their local markets across all three of their primary business units (car care, travel and insurance).  These results included:

• Indexing some 1200 authoritative local landing pages for 230 locations
• Generating 800% increase in organic traffic
• Producing 35K new visitors per month
• 25% conversion rate on all unique visits to phone calls, registrations and appointments

Included in Heather’s description of some of the softer benefits that have been generated by our campaigns together was that of the decrease in the number of tire kickers that have been generated.  Specifically, Heather described that the quality of leads generated are now far more qualified and in active transaction mode as opposed to window-shopping.

Prior to the announcement of the winners, I was afforded the opportunity to share some of the specifics of the campaigns that have contributed to AAA Carolinas’ success.

Placeable’s data management platform has been leveraged to capture and convert multiple sources of AAA Carolinas location data into accurate information that remains current and flexible.  Placeable Pages expresses this unique content with smart locators, search optimized local landing pages and a supportive CMS system designed to optimize for local search.  Placeable Passes are used to syndicate AAA Carolinas data to the primary ecosystem including Google, Bing, Facebook, Foursquare, Acxiom and Factual.  Yahoo and Yelp are next.  Placeable Pages are leveraged to facilitate the expansion of unique location content and a fueled link marketing campaign for cities and agents further drive impactful results.

Although a finalist in the category of Strategic use of digital marketing, we in fact did not win.  However, had we won, I would have shared some of the following…

First I would have graciously thanked BIA and the esteemed judges on the panel.  I would have also thanked AAA Carolinas and Heather McBrien for being such a wonderful client and for joining us at the conference and for providing such a valuable endorsement for my company in such a spirited fashion.  And then I would have recognized my account teams who made everything really happen.  They are the real winners.

One of the guiding principles that makes Placeable such a special company is our call to our employee-owners to demonstrate their value everyday.  This means to demonstrate their value to themselves – to the company – and especially to their clients.  Being a finalist for this award – and the recognition by our peers – is a testament to that commitment and effort.

Placeable is dedicated to the ROI challenges that our enterprise customers face every day.  We attack the cost of waiting head-on.  We believe that nobody would accept a 76% confidence level in a pregnancy test.  We believe that nobody would accept a 51% confidence level that the surgeon might operate on the right leg once they go under.  And we feel that nobody should accept a negative consumer experience due to some level of inaccurate information about their company, when it is preventable.  We do not accept mediocrity, and neither do our customers.

Lastly, I would have invited members of the audience who feel the same way about perfecting customer experiences to come talk to us about how we can help them, overcome their data integrity issues and compete fiercely in local search as we have done with AAA Carolinas and so many other enterprise brands.