The company did not have any formal marketing or communications programs in place. Competitors’ web sites were far superior, with full, interactive product displays. NEWP’s senior management decided it was time to invest and update its brand to better reflect the company’s leadership position in the Point of Purchase (POP) retail merchandising industry.
NEWP also did not have formal internal communications program across its three factories and recognized the need for better and more consistent communication to all employees. They wanted to celebrate the company’s accomplishments, answer ongoing questions, and ensure that all employees were working towards a common goal. In addition, NEWP management did not feel they had a true pulse on how best to communicate with the diverse employee base where English is not their first language. They wanted to better understand their employees and to increase morale.
In addition, NEWP had never leveraged its loyal customer base to drive more revenue. The company had great success with a wide variety of retail brands but their “stories” of how NEWP’s display solutions helped them increase sales have never been used as sales tools for the NEWP sales team.
The company turned to Red Javelin to assist with all of these efforts.
Red Javelin designed a program using a number of tactics that is being implemented in two phases. Phase 1 has been completed and encompassed a full re-branding effort along with putting basic internal communications, social media, and customer success programs in place. Phase 2 develops programmatic communications programs for lead generation and raising brand awareness.
Phase 1: Competitive Audit: Red Javelin started this process by conducting a competitive branding audit of NEWP’s top five competitors. The team analyzed company and product positioning, brand messaging, and looked closely at each competitor’s language and communications channels.
Brand Message: The first step was to create a Messaging Blueprint, which serves as a roadmap for all future communications. Taking in to consideration the competitive landscape, the Red Javelin team developed differentiated and defensible messaging that reflected NEWP's core values and differentiators that resonated in NEWP’s market.
Aligning Marketing and Sales: Red Javelin worked with the sales team to create a unified sales deck that utilized the new brand message and presented it at the quarterly sales meeting.
Modern Logo: Once the messaging was established, we began the re=branding effort to reflect the new positioning. Red Javelin collaborated with our web agency partner 3 Media Web to rebrand New England Wire Products look and feel with a new logo and an updated branding guide for web, print and media. The company had significant brand recognition in their industry but wanted a modern look and feel that was still synergistic with their current logo.
New Website: Red Javelin worked closely with 3 Media Web to create a responsive Wordpress website that offers a modern, flexible, responsive design and uses updated photos, images, and messaging that enhances the company’s overall brand image. The new site highlights current customer projects and showcases products to position NEWP as an innovative manufacturing company.
New features of the website include a sleek UI design that easily guides the user through highlighted services and offerings up-front and center on the homepage. The homepage also includes a featured products photo carousel, a customer success case study, customer logos and an easy call-to action for more information regarding their products and services.
Another major site improvement was putting more emphases on the career and about pages to tell more of a story about the company, its history and culture to attract new talent.
Developed on the Wordpress platform, the website includes an easy-to-use backend management system that allows the NEWP to easily update customer projects, product photos, customer logos, photo galleries and blog posts. The site is designed to be SEO friendly, meaning it meets Google Page Speed requirements, is responsive on all devices, uses clean-code, includes page meta-information search engines can easily read and display, has a simple navigation hierarchy along with easy to read content.
To keep the site fast and running smoothly, 3MediaWeb’s support and hosting agreement includes maintaining the site’s integrity, security and software updates along with assisting NEWP with training and updates.
Internal Communications - To improve internal communications, Red Javelin planned and facilitated two employee focus groups to determine whether there are any problems with employees’ perception of NEWP and gather enough information to put suitable action plans in place. As a result of our findings, we created a bimonthly newsletter that has helped the company communicate across several geographic locations to reach manufacturing employees that did not have easy access to email. The newsletter highlighted different employees and sales accomplishments to raise corporate visibility and help employees get to know each other better regardless of their location or language. Many of NEWP’s employees speak English as a second language so the newsletter was translated into different languages to ensure that all employees could easily access it.
Social Media - Red Javelin started a formalized social media program, creating new channels for NEWP on Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, following and engaging with influencers in the retail, manufacturing and POP industries. Our regular, consistent content of social tweets, posts and pictures assisted NEWP in increased impressions (11.1k impressions over a 90 day period). Instagram allowed the salespeople to easily show off their products to potential customers and allowed potential customers and employees to engage with the company.
Customer Success Program - To demonstrate some of the great results customers were having from working with NEWP, Red Javelin embarked on a customer testimonial program, interviewing customers and writing case studies for use on the company’s web site and for future marketing efforts.
Phase 2: Awards, Speaking, and Lead Generation - To start formalizing marketing programs and building its infrastructure, Red Javelin researched and created target events and awards opportunities for the company to leverage. We created a targeted press list for future PR efforts and presented at the company’s sales meeting to engage with NEWP’s salesforce and encourage the solicitation of customer endorsements for marketing efforts.
For more information on why manufacturers should consider refreshing their brand, read Industry 4.0 is a Game Changer for Marketing.