Deliverable: Logos

Our Work

Lawline

Heavy leather-bound books and Ionic columns may at one time have represented what it means to be a successful attorney, but today’s law professionals have evolved along with the modern world. Lawline is an online continuing legal education (CLE) provider with a robust library of content that helps attorneys stay ahead of the curve and practice at the top of their specializations. We worked with Lawline to create a new logo that conveys the passion for learning that connects its team and the customers they serve, using a flame-inspired shape that we then extrapolated to serve as a recognizable visual motif for the brand.

Objective

To update the company image and bring it in alignment with its focus on digital CLE that attorneys can access on their terms, any time, from anywhere

Our Work

Architecting Future Growth

Positioning a Locally-Based Engineering Firm to Compete on a National Level

David Mason & Associates is an architectural and engineering firm that focuses on designing and improving the essential infrastructure that makes our everyday lives possible. The firm was founded in 1989 in St. Louis, MO, offering architecture, civil engineering, and surveying services. Since its founding, it has expanded its expertise in structural engineering along with serving aviation, transportation, parks & recreation, power & utility, and municipal markets. David Mason & Associates has four regional offices in St. Louis, MO, Chicago, IL, and Philadelphia, PA.

Looking Toward Expansion

David Mason & Associates had established a solid reputation in their local markets over the past nearly 30 years by completing thousands of prestigious projects. As the next generation of leadership in the company prepared to take the helm, they approached goBRANDgo! for guidance on how David Mason & Associates could best position itself for growth. In the initial research phase, it was clear that the firm had amazing potential to become a major national player in its industry, but an outdated brand and website was standing in the way. So, goBRANDgo! set out to create an updated logo, brand identity, and website that would reflect the company’s prestige and expertise, as well as help propel David Mason & Associates to national prominence.

Thoughtful Execution

At goBRANDgo!, we employ a defined process of discovery when we are engaged in rebranding and website efforts. In our research, we discovered that David Mason & Associates was commonly known as “DMA” in the engineering community and industries they serve. In developing the new company logo, we created a mark that blended the company initials and engineered structures, with the goal of creating something that could eventually stand alone and would be instantly recognizable within the field. We also wanted to respect the proud history of the company while creating something simple and clean that would convey modernity and structure.

In the website, the grid imagery present in the original logo was used as a design element throughout in order to visually communicate expertise in engineering. The color palette was updated, and the new site leveraged white space to show purpose-driven and clean as design values. The sitemap was reorganized to appeal to each of their target markets and make it easy to access information.

In copy, David Mason & Associates’ engineering expertise was clear—however, with heavy use of industry verbiage, the value proposition of the company was lost on the reader. By simplifying the language and clearly communicating to each industry served, the company’s goal of improving essential infrastructure was pulled through as a theme of the entire site.

Finally, the website was mapped out and built in a way that guided the user down a series of defined paths based on personas developed by goBRANDgo!. Thanks to this mindful restructuring, the new website functioned in a way that fueled the growth of the business, instead of being a placeholder online.

Revealing DMA’s Competitive Clout

To mark the unveiling of the new company branding and website, David Mason & Associates hosted a launch party for all employees across St. Louis, Chicago, and Philadelphia. The celebration created buzz and energy among David Mason & Associates’ internal team, bolstering its already high morale and motivating team members to advocate for the business to potential clients and new talent. In addition, new leads began to stream through the website via contact forms, and David Mason & Associates received several multi-million dollar requests for proposals through the new online form.

David Mason & Associates also received recognition at the STL SMPS Marketing Excellence Awards in June 2018, an annual event that recognizes outstanding achievement in marketing communications by professional service firms in the design and building industry. David Mason & Associates was recognized with an Award of Excellence for its refreshed corporate identity, an Award of Merit for the newly launched website, and was named overall Best in Show by the panel of judges.

Through the rebranding efforts for David Mason & Associates, goBRANDgo! helped remove barriers to growth. By updating the look and feel of the brand, the innovation and expertise that were obvious to the company’s past clients and its team members were revealed to the outside world. Now, David Mason & Associates is receiving the attention it deserves from a wider, national market, and is continuing to accelerate revenue growth each year.

“goBRANDgo! did an exceptional job at developing a focused approach to our Brand Refresh which aligned with our strategic focus. From website content to sales and presentation collateral, the GoBrandGo team was professional and responsive to our needs. Ultimately, they made an intimidating process fun and collaborative.”

-Taylor Mason, Principal at David Mason & Associates

Our Work

A Brand Electrified

About Holt Electrical Supplies

INDUSTRY: Full-line electrical distribution

Founded in 1960 in a drugstore basement, HOLT has grown into a regional powerhouse with seven locations and over 200,000 square feet of distribution space.

Results

Refreshed branding and a cohesive go-to-market messaging celebrating the “middle man”

Increase in Website Users

Increase in Website Sessions

A Brand Electrified

HOLT has always done things a little bit differently than their competitors in the industry. In a sea of giant competitors with about as much of a personal touch as Amazon.com, HOLT has managed to grow and go the extra mile to help their customers win.

We met Ryan Holtzman (CEO) and Shane McCorkle (VP of Business Development) at a leadership training event, and in getting to know them, it became clear that HOLT’s brand image wasn’t doing justice to the passion and capabilities of the company. And with more and more potential customers in the industry buying products directly from manufacturers, we needed to demonstrate the value of a distributor—a middle man—that cares about its customers.

Not only did we want to take Ryan and Shane out for beers immediately, but we wanted to help their business even more—we knew that our team could help refresh HOLT’s brand and get the message out with a marketing and communications strategy to match.

Shedding Light on HOLT’s Competitive Advantage

Our goal was to capture and communicate the energy that HOLT’s team and customers knew and turn it into a results-generating asset. We began by constructing the strategic building blocks of HOLT’s brand platform—conducting research on their competitors, interviewing customers, and learning their business inside and out. While the fuller picture was coming together, we dove right into tactical deliverables like press releases and promotional communications.

Logo, Visual Identity, & Brand Voice Overhaul

With a firm grip on HOLT’s value proposition, target audience, and brand personality, we created a new logo that conveyed the energy of the company and signaled the launch of a new phase of growth. We then developed an entirely new visual system and brand voice that did what Ryan, Shane, and the whole organization had done so well from the beginning—cut the B.S. and make a real difference.

Website Launch

A keystone of the new brand launch was a completely new website, featuring more robust services and careers sections and the HOLT Toolbox—a collection of resources including a new blog, videos, and more.

Ongoing Content Strategy & Email Marketing

We also launched a regular company email newsletter that keeps subscribers informed of new product promotions, learning content, and industry news, in addition to activating social media channels to broaden HOLT’s reach. Finally, our team consistently supports HOLT’s sales outreach efforts with highly targeted email campaigns to engage various customer segments.

Measures of Success

At every level, team members at HOLT have embraced the new brand by proudly sporting new swag and speaking the language of the middle man who cuts the B.S. The HOLT website has garnered significantly more attention since the refresh, more than doubling organic traffic and total website sessions. HOLT has also seen terrific results in attracting qualified candidates for career opportunities in the company. Prior to the new website launch, the company had faced challenges in garnering applications for open positions. Since launch, Ryan and his team have told us that they now struggle to keep up with the interest!

Increase in Facebook Impressions

Increase in Organic Traffic

“They’re adaptable. There’s been a lot of changes…and they’ve kept up with it. goBRANDgo! not only keeps up…they stay out in front of it.”

Ryan Holtzman, CEO at HOLT Electrical Supply

Our Work

HOLT Electrical Supplies

The passion and energy of this full-line electrical distributor is unmatched anywhere in their area. We infused the brand identity with the same swagger, confidence, and dedication to customers success that has kept HOLT thriving since 1960.

Objective

To create a bold brand that reflected the fierce dedication HOLT shows to their customers and the community they serve

Shedding Light on HOLT’s Competitive Advantage

Our goal was to capture and communicate the energy that HOLT’s team and customers knew and turn it into a results-generating asset. we began by constructing the strategic building blicks of HOLT’s brand platform-conducting research on their competitors, interviewing customers, and learning their business inside and out. While the fuller picture was coming together , we dover right into tactical deliverables like press releases and promotional communications.

Our goal was to capture and communicate the energy that HOLT’s team and customers knew and turn it into a results-generating asset.

Our Work

Datagineering a Brand on the Web and Beyond

ABOUT THE CLIENT

INDUSTRY: Thermal Processing

Paulo is the nation’s largest privately-held commercial thermal processing company, with six locations across North America providing heat treatment, brazing, and metal finishing services to the world’s most innovative manufacturers.

Results

An updated brand and website that reflects Paulo’s rich history of problem-solving and thermal processing solutions

Increase in Users

Increase in pages per session

Datagineering a Brand on the Web and Beyond

Founded over 75 years ago as a storefront in St. Louis, Paulo is the nation’s largest privately-held commercial thermal processing company, with six locations across North America providing heat treatment, brazing, and metal finishing services to the world’s most innovative manufacturers.

What sets Paulo apart from other heat treaters is its large in-house team of metallurgists and engineers, along with a proprietary business system that takes the human error and guesswork out of thermal processing. Through automation and robust process data, Paulo’s datagineering approach delivers the most repeatable, reliable results for the safety-critical parts people rely on every day. From Grandpa’s titanium hip, to your kids’ car seat buckles, to hot section components in commercial jets, no matter where you are, you’re likely never far away from a part Paulo has touched.

Leveling Up

Paulo’s website had come a long way since it initially launched in the late 1990s, with the company gaining traction through organic search with high-value technical content. With this solid foundation in place, it was time to evolve both the brand and the user experience on the website to reflect Paulo’s cutting-edge capabilities and drive conversions.

We first approached the modernization of Paulo’s brand by introducing a new tagline: Datagineering At Work. Datagineering is the intersection of the best people, systems, and equipment to resolve the challenges and mitigate the risks of thermal processing.

With this concept at the heart of the brand, we began working on the visuals. An important element that we introduced to convey the engineering and scientific prowess of Paulo was a broad set of custom schematics showing furnaces and complex parts along with precise, intriciate iconography. We also brightened up the color palette, replacing beige with clean white and introducing a tertiary blue hue that, used strategically, lends a technology-forward feel and evokes the sense of temperature control that is central to Paulo’s services.

With the brand elements in place, we then turned our attention to enhancing the website.

An Ease of Translation

Mega Menu

Paulo’s large array of capabilities makes it a one-stop-shop for its thermal processing customers, helping them simplify their supply chain and streamline vendor partnerships. The previous site menu required the user to hover over multiple nested menus to view all capabilities. To showcase this wide range of services and enhance the user experience, we created a new “mega menu” that organized all the services into a single view. With the new menu, users can get a sense of everything that Paulo offers all at once.

Augmented and SEO-Optimized Content

Paulo had already built a good foundation for ranking in organic search with keyword-focused content on many pages of the site, but we set out to close the gaps in content across every service offering, industry, and value-added capability.

We conducted interviews with Paulo experts across the country from the engineering, metallurgy, and sales departments to gather the information we needed to write all of the content we felt Paulo needed to provide a robust resource for its users. From how railroad fasteners are tested for quality to what’s next in additive manufacturing, we learned a ton through this process that helped spark more ideas for future content.

To further boost search rankings, we researched the keywords and phrases that users search for when looking for services that Paulo offers and strategically placed them throughout the content on the site. We also included contextual links to other pages on the site at every opportunity, helping users and search engines find relevant content.

In addition to a robust internal linking structure, we also implemented a tagging system that links similar content to serve users additional content they might be interested in. Each page is tagged with descriptors for processes, markets, parts, locations, and materials, and the site automatically serves relevant articles in a widget on each page.

Increase in page view

Increase in AVG. session duration

Results

Since the website launch, users, sessions, and pageviews are all trending upward for Paulo. According to a 2021 study, the average time users spend on a page across all industries is only 54 seconds. Paulo’s website is clocking it at an average time on page of over two minutes, which is a sign that users are finding the content valuable and are taking more time to absorb it.

Our content efforts have also been resonating with our audience, with Paulo’s email newsletter performing well above industry benchmarks. Sent monthly, the newsletter incorporates technical articles, Metallurgy Minute videos, and other related content. As of the first quarter of 2022, Paulo’s open rate was 34.9 percent, while the average for B2B communications is 15.1 percent. Click to open rates were 53.5 percent, while the B2B average is just 10.5 percent. Overall engagement with Paulo’s social media posts is also up nearly six percent.

We are grateful for our partnership with Paulo and the opportunity to help a business that is so critical to the safety of people everywhere. You can learn more about Paulo and see datagineering at work on the company’s website and LinkedIn page.

“We worked with the nation’s largest privately-held thermal processing company to refine their brand and launch a robust new website.”

Paulo Heat Treating

Our Work

QFlow Systems

QFlow Systems is a software company that not only provides enterprise content and records management solutions for public and private sector companies, but they also build and implement business process workflows that make work simple for end users. There’s nothing easy about building software, but QFlow Systems makes digitizing processes and complying with strict records management guidelines feel effortless for their customers. To reflect this unique ability, we provided QFlow with a logo refresh, updated brand messaging, and a modernized visual system that helps them stand apart among its competitors.

Objective

To bring the brand image in line with the cutting-edge technology in the QFlow Systems products and communicate its value proposition of making work simpler to customers

Our Work

Ingenuity Revealed: LMC Industries Website

ABOUT LMC INDUSTRIES

INDUSTRY: Contract Manufacturing

Results

Updated brand and website that accurately represents the innovation of LMC Industries

increase in page views

Increase in pages per session

Ingenuity Revealed

LMC Industries is a contract manufacturing company that produces metal stampings, plastic injection moldings, and overmolded parts for OEMs and tiered suppliers in the automotive, agricultural, medical, and consumer products industries. Founded in 1945, LMC Industries has been responsible for inventing and producing many of the products we consider commonplace today. Have you ever squirted a can of Reddi-Whip directly into your mouth at midnight in front of the refrigerator? You can thank LMC for that satisfying experience—they invented the plastic valve that makes it possible!

The Challenge

The incredible innovation that was happening inside the company’s four walls was hiding behind a website and brand that needed a shot of energy. Another challenge facing the business was the increasingly commoditized nature of metal stampings in particular and the tendency of customers to make purchasing decisions based solely on price. The brand and website needed to help LMC capture the attention of quality-driven prospective customers that were looking to solve tough manufacturing problems. As the quality standards of OEMs and tiered suppliers continue to evolve, and as industry regulations become more stringent, the technical proficiency of LMC will become increasingly more important in the markets they serve.

The Solution

After researching LMC’s competitors, interviewing several customers, and learning more about the nuts and bolts of the company’s services, we built new brand messaging and a visual identity framework. The new brand system featured customer-focused language with a conversational approach to technical subject matter and visuals that conveyed depth, energy, and precision engineering.

Once we established the brand system, we got to work planning and building the new company website. The first step we took was to establish the goals of the project.

Project Goals

Increase qualified website traffic and generate qualified marketing leads
Position LMC as an expert in designing for manufacturability
Create an editable site that is expandable over time
Optimize On-Site SEO to generate more organic traffic
Position LMC Industries as a sought-after place of employment

When building the sitemap, we created a structure that would allow room for growth for future capabilities that LMC may offer in the future while making it easy for users to find content relevant to their needs. We designed the landing and archive pages in a way that would allow us to run digital campaigns showcasing several sets of related services together.

To build effective content and showcase LMC’s services, we also spent some time at their facility interviewing subject matter experts and taking photographs. We spent a whole day talking with team members in leadership, human resources, quality, production, and engineering to build on our existing knowledge of the business—and our content team was able to execute the full site’s worth of content from a single day’s worth of interviews.

To showcase the engineering prowess of LMC, we took photos of real parts that had been made in their facility to feature on the website. Having these real photographs helped us visually demonstrate the complexity of the problems that LMC is able to solve. We also captured additional imagery of LMC’s operations and team members to convey the sense of pride and dedication that is central to the company’s culture. On the site, we used custom overlays on many of the photos to reflect the signature look of the new LMC brand identity system.

Increase in session duration

Reduction in bounce rate

Driving Marketing Leads

The previous website had a generic contact form as the only means of capturing user information. When form submissions came in, they would reach a general inbox and a team member would have to forward the inquiry to the appropriate department. We implemented a Request a Quote form on the new site, allowing prospects and customers to send a quote request directly to the sales team. This helps create a better experience for prospects and customers, because sales reps can now view the requests as soon as they’re sent and respond to the customer in a timely manner.

Positioning LMC as an Expert

We built a Knowledge Center for LMC and packed it with case studies and articles that not only help educate customers, but also create organic traffic opportunities and provide content for social media posts.

Optimizing Onsite SEO

When writing content for the site, we researched which keywords are associated with LMC’s industry and competitors, then worked those keywords into the site’s content. We also made sure photos were tagged appropriately to help them show up in image searches and ultimately push more traffic to the site.

Targeting Potential Employees

LMC Industries is made up of more than machines and technology–it’s full of people who are passionate about the work they’re doing. That’s why we created a Careers section on the new site where prospective employees could learn about the company, what it’s like to work at LMC, the benefits available and open positions.

The Results

Since launch, the data tells a clear story that the updated website is doing a much better job at engaging users:

57.4% increase in page views
29.6% increase in session duration
20.7% increase in pages per session
10.5% reduction in bounce rate

The site has also generated about 10 goal completions (fancy marketer speak for leads captured) per month in the first four months since go!-live, with data trending upwards as the site gains greater visibility.

We are continuing to create SEO-optimized thought leadership content for the website by publishing articles in the Knowledge Center, which are then shared on the company’s LinkedIn channel and sent to subscribers in an email newsletter. With each piece of content, we also strengthen the internal linking across the entire site, which is another SEO best practice.

Today, LMC Industries has a digital presence that reflects the spirit of innovation and ingenuity that makes the company special. We’re proud to have been a part of positioning another American manufacturing company for growth and success.

“Building a Brand that Reflects the Energy & Innovative Spirit of LMC”

LMC Industries