A Building Materials Business × Trelis
A multi-channel growth programme built entirely around calls and WhatsApp — for a 70+ year-old retailer with no standalone website.
Client identity anonymized for confidentiality — every figure below is real and unaltered.
Meta Ads Manager data, 10 Mar 2026 – 28 Aug 2026 · reach/impressions are campaign-level aggregates
This client doesn’t have a website. Every conversion happens on a phone call or a WhatsApp thread — so the entire digital programme had to be built as a direct-response system, not a funnel that assumes a landing page at the end.
A Building Materials Business
A building-materials retailer trading in Kerala since 1952, with no standalone website — its whole online presence is Meta plus local listings. That constraint shaped the strategy: every campaign had to end in a call or a chat, because there was no site to send traffic to.
Built the account around two hard conversion actions — calls and WhatsApp — instead of the reach/engagement metrics a no-website brand often defaults to.
Ran a flagship product line (UV marble) as its own campaign rather than folding it into general brand advertising, judged on its own cost-per-conversation.
Used the same WhatsApp infrastructure to solve a second business problem — recruitment — with role-specific campaigns for sales, accounting, factory and design roles.
Layered a broad-reach boost campaign underneath the direct-response activity purely for visibility, not conversion.
Tracked cost per call and cost per conversation separately, since a walk-in enquiry and a hiring conversation are not the same unit of value.
Kept creative rooted in the brand’s decades-long local reputation rather than generic retail messaging.
What the account actually produced
Figures below are the supplied Meta Ads export’s own totals for the full reporting window (10 Mar – 28 Aug 2026).
Five campaigns, five different jobs
Cost efficiency varies by objective by design — a phone call, a product conversation and a hiring conversation are not the same unit of value.
The lesson isn’t "no website is fine" — it’s that a retailer without one can still run a fully measurable acquisition system, as long as every campaign is built around an action that doesn’t require a page to land on.
Five operating principles behind the numbers
Optimize for calls and chats, not reach
Reach and impressions were supporting signals; calls and conversations were the decision metrics.
Give each product its own budget
UV marble ran as its own line so it could be judged on its own cost per conversation, not blended into the account average.
Extend the same tools to hiring
Recruitment used the identical WhatsApp infrastructure as customer acquisition, just with its own audiences and budgets.
Match the channel to the intent
Calls for people ready to talk now; WhatsApp for a lower-friction first step.
Compare cost per result across roles
Hiring campaigns were benchmarked against each other (₹1.91 to ₹28.11) to see which roles needed a different approach.
Let decades of local trust do the work
Creative stayed rooted in the brand’s established local reputation rather than generic retail messaging.
Scale the ₹1.91 driver/loading hiring result — it’s the cheapest conversation in the account.
Test a second product-specific line the way UV marble was tested, to find another sub-₹5 conversation route.
Push more budget into the top five call campaigns while cost per call stays under ₹20.
Add a lightweight local-discovery page so the account has one durable asset beyond Meta.
"For a local retailer without a website, digital performance works best when every campaign is mapped to the one action the customer is actually going to take next — pick up the phone, or send a message."
