Targeted Website Triples Business for Niche Creative Entrepreneur

"...trying to get people to understand that I can meet their needs is a big hurdle for getting people to find me on Google." 

Heather Zager, owner of MADE Apparel Services, explains how Blockbeta Marketing helped improve her website, resulting in nearly 3X growth.

MADE works with designers who want to take their sewn product ideas to manufacture. Blockbeta is a marketing consulting firm specializing in niche businesses with unique business models.

Video Transcript

My name is Heather Zager, and my business is MADE Apparel Services. And, I help designers with ideas for sewn products get into manufacture. I started my business a couple of years ago as an idea, and it gradually grew and now it is sustaining me every month.

I started with Squarespace and got my website up as best as I could. Did a lot of research, a lot of studying about what it took to build a website for the very start of my business. But eventually I realized my limitations in not only my time, but in my abilities and my understanding of the backside of websites when it has to do with: search engine optimization and getting people to click through on things, or getting customers to actually call me and allow me to answer their questions, and explain a little bit more about what I do.

So trying to get people to understand that I can meet their needs is a big hurdle for getting people to find me on Google. And I knew that would be a difficult area, so I needed to find somebody who could help me with that. I started working with Blockbeta about a year and a half ago.

The Challenge of Target Marketing



One of the challenges that I ran into was understanding the different types of clients that I would be working with. I had experienced numerous different clients, and I couldn't quite put a finger on it, and Robbin helped me to understand that I had segments in my client base. We looked at analytics, we looked at where people were coming from, and got more information, and outlined that I actually had a difference between fashion designers looking to launch a design versus people who had innovative ideas that had never been sewn before, and they wanted to get into manufacture.

And then I had people who just had products; were out there, but if they wanted to make improvements, and they needed a tech pack for manufacturer also. So that was the part I knew I was missing in my website and getting it targeted. But also getting the conversions, looking at where they were coming from. All of the behind the scenes stuff that made all of that happen; to have good clients that were what I was looking for, and I was what they were looking for. 

A Professional and Cohesive Result

My website has gone from something rudimentary, but visible and acceptable for starting a business and turned into something much more professional and cohesive across the different pages; took my clients and my customers down a more correct journey for what their needs were. Created value, helped them to understand what it is that I do, became educational, and these were all things that were my vision, and I just could not figure out how to get it to be cohesive and wrapped into a website. 

And today it is full of analytics and information and working links and all the backend stuff. I'm a lot more confident about than when I first started trying to do that on my own.

My business has continued to grow.

And I've probably doubled, almost tripled, my revenue since I started working with Blockbeta. 

So we've come a long way in the last year and a half, and now that my understanding is a lot clearer and I understand marketing better, I've come to realize it is something that is constantly moving forward and merging and congealing, and it's always different and growing. And I will always need marketing on a regular basis to keep in line with my business and its growth and the different clients that I see coming in and the different ideas that I have.

Robbin has been my go-to person, and at this point I know that she will continue to be my go-to person.