Bridgwater Electronics

17 March 2006

Colin Palmer, of Bridgwater Electronics in Burnham-on-Sea, originally commissioned a simple two-page website.  This attracted the attention of Land Rover in Wolverhampton and he received an order to supply them with electronic components for eighteen months.  He has since invested in online marketing and developed his website, which now attracts an average of 100,000 visitors a month.

Video Transcript

Bridgewater Electronics was formed in 1999.  My background is really electronics and electronic design, particularly automotive electronics.  We as a company, design and manufacture a range of electronic security products for the automotive industry – alarms, immobilisers, etc.  We also offer a custom designed solution so people can come to us as a company and we can provide a complete service from conceptual design through to manufacturing the product. 

What happens in our Burnham office is primary design work, but that will go from conceptual work all the way through to the manufacture of preproduction units and then when we’re happy that the project is working correctly.  We will move the product over to our manufacturing company – we use a company over in South Wales to manufacture the products for us. 

We decided to develop a website after probably about a year of trading and initially the website was fairly basic, we didn’t have a huge amount of content on the site, but pretty soon we became aware that it was quite a powerful tool.

One of our earliest website success stories was with Land Rover.  Land Rover came onto us looking for a company that could design them a product as a retrofit to replace one of their own products which had become obsolete.  The first point of contact was the website, we obviously followed it up from there, but it was a really good success story because we manufactured products for Land Rover for about a year and a half after that.  They were very pleased with what we did for them. 

After the early success of the basic website we realised just what effect a website could have, so probably within 12 months we decided to enhance the website to make the website larger, to put more content into it, and to really try and use it as a marketing tool.  It was never really intended to be a shop window, we really did want to use it to promote the products.

Our annual budget on website promotion tends to vary dramatically.   We have a minimum spend every month because we use a company to manage our site for us - a monthly fee of around £350-£400.  And then it really depends on what we’re trying to do.  If we’ve got a new range of products then we tend to inject some more money into the way that the key phrases that we put into website work and try and promote certain key phrases on a monthly basis and then maybe change it a couple of months later.  It really depends on what we’re trying to do at the time and what products we’re trying to promote.  The traffic is directly related to the content of the site and the performance of our key words and key phrases.  We do regularly monitor the activity on the site and the number of visitors.  In the early days we were a little bit disappointed because it didn’t seem to be working, but we were persuaded to continue looking at the stats and our website management company pointed out to us it does take probably about 3 months before anything happens and sure enough they were absolutely right because after about 6 months we were probably seeing the activity from being perhaps just 100 visits a month suddenly grow to 1000.  After a period of probably 12 months we were getting up to almost 10,000.  The current level of activity is in the region of 75,000 visits per month. 

I think our decision to invest in the website has been one of the most important decisions the company has ever made.  We now realise just what a powerful marketing tool it can be.  We have abandoned all other forms of advertising because the website activity generates so much business for us and its really good quality business.  When we have companies like Land Rover as an example, come onto us wanting our services, it proves what a powerful tool it can be. 

www.bridgwater-electronics.co.uk/