Alan Gray’s company, Scottish Procurement Services (SPS), sources quality sheep and cattle from the Borders, Peeblesshire, Lothians and Northumberland for sale across the UK. Alan Gray is a livestock specialist, having worked for nearly 20 years as a Principal Auctioneer at Reston Market. When the market closed in 2001 during the Foot and Mouth Epidemic, Alan Gray founded SPS to provide a personal service to farmers wishing to buy and sell stock.

Problem

SPS had an existing site which had never performed. It was, in the words of Alan Gray, ‘static’. Tom Donaldson of IRUN Scottish Borders had been Alan Gray’s business mentor for two years and in 2008, Alan approached Tom asking him to put their relationship on a commercial footing to help him develop an Internet Marketing Strategy, which included a new website.

Solution

Tom Donaldson’s brief was to develop a new website to help with lead generation. The new site boasts some impressive images of livestock, and the layout and site content was developed between both Tom and Alan.

The new SPS website features two case studies written by the IRUN copywriting team. For these, Alan’s clients were interviewed and the case studies written up for inclusion on the site. Alan described this as an easy process which was done professionally. He said his clients were impressed with the service and the resulting copy.

Result

The SPS website only went live late in 2008, so it is very early days. Alan feels they now have the basis of a good site, which will help attract new business. Tom Donaldson is working on the site’s optimisation to help its search engine ranking. Like any investment in marketing, a website has to generate a return on investment and work is continuing to ensure this is the case.

Looking to the future, SPS is likely to be targeting the European market. If this develops, a translated copy of the website will be developed to help penetrate the market. In time, both Tom Donaldson and Alan Gray will be working to further develop the SPS website to help it achieve the goal of generating new business.