TRIO Flatmount

A product that sells without a brand is selling on borrowed time. Roughly 70% of TRIO's customers had never heard of the brand before they bought — they arrived off a search, compared boxes, and picked one. That works beautifully until competitors show up, and then it's the whole problem: nothing about TRIO was memorable enough to be chosen on purpose. So we built the foundation the product had outgrown — a full Growth Platform: customer personas grounded in survey and interview data, a buyer's-journey map, a sales-funnel model, a message map, market analysis and positioning, a visual brand guide, and a voice-and-tone guide. TRIO's voice came out of that work as three pillars — Steady, Conversant, Catalytic. The client's own term for the finished guide was their "North Star": every page, ad, article, and creator brief downstream of it argues the same way.

We replaced four contradictory dashboards with one number. The triangulation model reconciles Shopify, GA4, Fairing, Google Ads, and Meta monthly, and it's the reason every budget increase from February onward was a calculation rather than a guess. It also surfaced channels the platforms couldn't see at all — word-of-mouth, YouTube, and AI assistants only exist in self-reported survey data. That last point stopped being academic fast: post-purchase survey responses showed creators and YouTube driving roughly 21.6% of reported discovery, and those buyers almost always completed the purchase through a Google ad or an organic result. Under last-click, every one of those sales was paid search's trophy. Creators were making demand and search was collecting it — an argument for funding both rather than defending one. Alongside it we built a forecast-versus-actuals model on both a net-new and gross basis, so performance is measured against the plan TRIO actually bought.

We rebuilt the storefront around how people actually shop for a mount. The old site opened on a full-bleed hero and a "select your antenna" row — handsome, but it asked first-time visitors to figure out which of four mounts fit their dish and vehicle before seeing a price. Our process is fixed: keyword and persona research first, captured in a content MAP; then a full high-fidelity mockup; then a content brief; then we build it in Shopify ourselves. The new homepage went live November 12, 2025, leading with the job to be done — a mount-finder grid showing every model with price, rating, and finish; then durability proof; then the accessories that complete a build. Underneath: a top nav rebuilt by use case and vehicle type, a routed "choose your own adventure" flow, PDPs rewritten highest-traffic-first, add-to-cart logic that requires an attachment, a faceted PLP, monthly technical batches (crawl, indexing, internal linking, H1s, broken links), Merchant Center extended into Canada, and heat mapping in early so the next change gets argued from behavior.

We took full account ownership and scaled spend only as fast as the economics allowed. Budget moved from roughly $20K/month in February to $30K in March, $40K in May, and $45K in June — each step gated on the prior month's CPA, not on optimism. We restructured the whole account: paused wasteful targeting, repaired conversion tracking, pulled high-converting keywords out of PMAX into dedicated Search campaigns for control, and split campaigns to separate new-customer cost from retargeting. Cohort analysis showed two distinct buyers — 66% convert within 24 hours, 17% take twelve days or more — so we ran two directions at once: urgency for the fast decision-makers, technical proof for the researchers still comparing mounts a week later. Volume beat the goal every month from March through June while CPA fell: 227 conversions at $117 in March, 310 at $96 in April, 403 at $98 in May, and 496 at $92 in June — TRIO's best month on record.

We wrote for the searches buyers actually run before a $300 purchase — installation guides, surface-by-surface how-tos, and product comparisons, published on a cadence that built topical depth rather than volume. Boating articles recovered lost rankings for mini-mount terms; a Starlink Roam guide generated nearly 20,000 impressions on its own; an RV article A/B test settled which page should own the intent. We also built search-led video: a TRIO-versus-OEM pole-mount comparison shot in a deliberately plain, credible style, published to answer a query rather than to chase views. It now surfaces in Google AI Overviews, and 43% of its views arrive from Google Search.

Domain authority was the constraint, so we went after it directly. Competitors were winning transactional keywords on the strength of their backlink profiles, not their pages. We ran original data campaigns pitched to national and industry press — pivoting the angle when a TRIO-specific dataset failed to land and a broader, more shareable one did — and we deliberately pursued high-relevance, low-authority niche sites like Starlink installers, where topical fit outweighs the metric. The program also opened inbound doors, including product reviews and Q&As in the RV and tech press.

We built a creator pipeline where the audience already owns the problem. Van life first, then deliberately outward into marine, hunting and off-road, and construction and fleet — matching TRIO's expanding retail and dealer footprint. Creators receive product with affiliate links; the point isn't affiliate conversion, it's showing a real mount at real highway speed to people who'd otherwise improvise one. The signal that it's working shows up where it should: named creators started appearing in TRIO's post-purchase survey responses as the reason people bought.