Case Study: BERCO

From Anonymity to Profitability

How a Two-Phase Marketing Strategy Delivered Significant ROI and Growth for a Commercial Beverage Equipment Repair Company

The Challenge

A Strategic Crossroads

At the start of 2025, BERCO - a commercial beverage equipment repair company - was facing a defining moment. The business had just lost its largest account and, at the same time, was working to grow into new territory. Those two facts pulled in opposite directions: growth required new customers to replace the lost revenue, but BERCO had no way to find them. There was zero brand awareness in the markets it needed to enter, no dedicated sales team to build new relationships, and no marketing funnel in place to generate leads. This wasn't simply a growth problem. It was a viability problem, and it needed to be solved quickly and on almost no budget.

The Approach

A Two-Phase Marketing Intervention

Hinda Miller, Founder and Principal of Dark Horse Works, has led BERCO's marketing strategy since March 2025, in an engagement that continues today. When she first started working with them, the company had no budget set aside for broad awareness campaigns, so she built a surgical, ROI-focused plan around two phases, each designed to solve a specific piece of the problem rather than attempting a single broad push.

Phase 1: Building the Digital Foundation

A company without a professional, modern website is effectively invisible to the customers searching for it - a prospective customer who can't find or validate a business online will typically move on to a competitor who is easier to find, regardless of the quality of the work behind the scenes. Hinda's first priority was building BERCO a true digital home base: a new website written and structured to be SEO, AEO, and GEO optimized, meaning it was built to perform in traditional search engines, AI-generated answer results, and location-based search alike. This gave BERCO a single, credible destination that could serve as the essential first point of validation for any potential customer, clearly communicating BERCO's services and value proposition. Launched at the end of March 2025, it became the central destination for all marketing traffic that followed - the foundation everything else in the strategy was built on.

Phase 2: Precision-Targeted Lead Generation

A new website solves the validation problem, but it doesn't solve the discovery problem - people still have to find it. With no sales team to build new relationships, marketing had to generate the leads directly, and it needed to do so as efficiently as possible given the budget available. Hinda selected geofencing on the Meta platform as the tactic: a form of location-based digital advertising that places ads in front of people physically present within a defined geographic area. By geofencing the industry's most important trade shows, BERCO was able to digitally “walk the floor” of those events - placing targeted ads directly in the feeds of thousands of high-intent conference attendees, the exact audience most likely to need BERCO's services, for a fraction of the cost of exhibiting at those same shows.

The Results

A Data-Driven Success Story

The two phases worked in concert to produce results that changed BERCO's business trajectory over that six-month period. The website gave visitors somewhere credible to land, and the geofencing campaign made sure the right people arrived there.

Geofence Campaign Performance: The hyper-targeted campaign reached over 29,800 industry professionals and generated more than 167,000 impressions - not unfocused noise, but the critical first touchpoint that built brand familiarity within a concentrated group of ideal buyers, priming them to seek out BERCO's website once they encountered it.

Website Traffic and Engagement: Traffic was immediate and highly engaged from launch. The site's click-through rate (CTR) - the percentage of people who see the site in search results and actually click through - consistently performed at or above the 2-5% B2B industry benchmark, peaking at an exceptionally strong 4.13% in July. A high CTR is a direct signal that the messaging and value proposition are resonating with the audience seeing them, not just reaching them.

Launch Month Growth: Clicks jumped by 213 and impressions grew by more than 6,000 in the month following the new site's launch, with CTR nearly doubling - clear evidence of a highly successful launch.

Sustained Momentum: After a seasonal dip in June, the site rebounded sharply, with July posting the year's best CTR (4.13%) and August delivering the highest monthly click volume (260) - showing the results weren't a one-time spike but a trend that kept building.

Search Visibility: A Google search for commercial beverage equipment repair companies in the southeastern U.S. returned BERCO first in both organic and AI-generated search results. A broader national search also surfaced BERCO prominently in Google's AI-generated response, confirming the SEO/AEO optimization work was doing its job beyond just the paid campaign.

The Business Impact

A Paradigm Shift

According to BERCO's General Manager, the results were historic. For a company with no dedicated sales team and no prior outbound sales model to speak of, the shift wasn't incremental - it was foundational. For the first time, the phone began ringing with inbound inquiries from potential customers, replacing a business development approach that had relied entirely on existing relationships with a sustainable, scalable inbound lead generation engine that kept producing results well after the initial campaign ended.

Why This Matters For Your Business

BERCO didn't have a large budget, a sales team, or brand recognition. What it had was a clear plan, executed with discipline: a website built to convert and a lead generation strategy targeted at exactly the right audience, at a fraction of what it would have cost to reach that same audience through traditional trade show exhibiting. That's the same approach Hinda brings to every Dark Horse Works engagement - senior-level marketing strategy, scoped to what a business actually needs and can afford, built to produce results that show up on the bottom line.

Date Published: August 20, 2026