Type: Case Study

Our Work

Plastic Distribution and Fabrication Company

About Cope Plastics

Industry: Plastic Distribution and Fabrication

The Transformation: Revitalized Branding and Digital Presence

Cope Plastics, one of the largest plastic distribution & fabrication companies in the country partnered with goBRANDgo! to redefine its market presence through new messaging, branding, and the launch of a new website. These foundational enhancements were designed to not only modernize the company’s brand to accurately represent the sophistication of their operations but also to optimize its digital footprint in a competitive landscape. Following this launch, the focus shifted towards maximizing the effectiveness of Cope Plastics’ full-funnel marketing program through improved data collection and analysis.

Results

An increase in web sessions of 19%, and that leads increased to 58% and sales-qualified leads were up 67%

New Customers

Reactivated New Customers Generated from Web Forms

The Challenge: Leveraging Data to Fuel Growth

Despite these advancements, the challenge of collecting and making meaningful insights of marketing data remained. Antidotally we knew the refreshed brand and website were making an impact but we set out on a mission to provide tools for their internal marketing team to help prioritize strategic activities and support the sales team on a more integrated level than was traditionally possible. This couldn’t mean stopping at the increased website traffic and engagement. It meant truly understanding their customers’ digital buying journey, what strategies were making the most impact and how marketing conversions translated to sales conversations and ultimately closed won business.

The Solution: Customized Marketing Dashboard by goBRANDgo!

To bridge the gap between marketing efforts and sales outcomes, goBRANDgo! developed a bespoke marketing dashboard. This tool was tailored to foster seamless collaboration between the sales and marketing teams, ensuring alignment towards common goals and enabling strategic, data-driven decisions.

Working closely with Cope Plastics, we pinpointed essential metrics and streamlined the reporting process. Like many manufacturers a sophisticated tech stack is not always readily available to provide the data sets in the exact way to achieve meaningful insights . The solution needed to be a mix of easy to access data – like Google Analytics, the integration of website data, and spreadsheets fed from internal systems. The result was a user-friendly digital data visualization dashboard that provided real-time insights into marketing activity from top of the funnel through conversion to active and won sales pipeline.

The Impact: Data-Driven Success and Enhanced ROI

The introduction of the marketing dashboard signified a turning point for Cope Plastics. Armed with detailed insights and a clear understanding of marketing performance, the company could strategically allocate resources, resulting in a marked increase in ROI and the achievement of marketing and sales objectives.

Notable achievements included:

Comprehensive Sales Insights: The dashboard illuminated the journey from initial engagement to qualified lead, highlighting the impact of various marketing efforts.
Optimized Online Engagement: Detailed analysis of website traffic and content effectiveness allowed for targeted improvements, enhancing lead generation capabilities.
Campaign Performance Analysis: The success of targeted marketing initiatives, including email, paid search, and social media campaigns, was meticulously tracked, informing future strategy with actionable data.
An increase in web sales of 67% and profits of 71% YOY

The collaborative effort to centralize and leverage marketing data not only streamlined Cope Plastics’ approach to lead generation but also established a scalable model for achieving growth objectives efficiently and effectively.

In web sales

Profits YOY

This knowledge set presents immediate insights into not just where to spend, but how and when to spend. We never thought we’d have a tool like this with our resources.

– Marketing Manager

Our Work

Sodick Rebrand: Advancement by Design

Sodick, Inc. is a global manufacturer of EDM and additive manufacturing machine tools, known in the sector for delivering the highest possible precision for parts that require fine detailing and the tightest tolerances. They partnered with us to refresh their brand presence in the US market.

With a brand identity that did not truly represent the innovation and advancement inside the company, we embarked on the project with the goal of making a splash at the influential IMTS 2022 trade show. Another key initiative of the partnership was to improve the website experience with valuable content that highlighted not only Sodick’s machines but also its full line of EDM consumables.

Sodick Verbal Identity: Spending Words Wisely

GBG conducted in-depth brand research and developed the “Advancement by Design” tagline to convey Sodick’s spirit of pioneering innovation with purpose, and then crafted Sodick’s brand voice to align with that ethos. The copy style utilizes crisp, minimal language, and its strategic brevity focuses the messaging on Sodick’s core differentiators without unnecessary embellishments. The writing aims to convey pragmatism and purposefulness in describing manufacturing advancements in the context of how they solve customer problems and help them achieve their goals.

Sodick Visual Identity: Cinematic, Yet Minimal

The streamlined verbal identity complements the sleek visual branding for a cohesive and consistent brand experience. Sodick’s visual identity centers on a minimal yet cinematic aesthetic to let the advanced technology shine. The color palette strategically incorporates a new Sodick green gradient to show energy and forward motion. This lively green pops against dark-mode photography. The strategic use of color and composition in the visual identity brings the essence of “advancement by design” to life.

The Debut and Beyond

The sleek, technology-forward Sodick rebrand was a hit at IMTS 2022. Web traffic and social engagement increased as the new website rolled out additional features and content over time. The sales team eagerly participated in case studies and testimonials to share the brand story. With a consistent identity matching the advanced machinery, Sodick’s refreshed brand continues to gain traction with its manufacturing audience.

Our Work

Multilanguage Website for Global Heat Treatment Manufacturer

About the Client

INDUSTRY: Expertly engineered vacuum and atmosphere furnaces

This client is a global manufacturer of heat treatment furnaces, industrial vacuum furnaces, atmosphere furnaces, and supervisory controls for thermal processing markets. Some of these markets include aerospace, automotive, medical, and commercial heat treaters with their customer bases being primarily in the U.S., Germany, and Asia.

Results

Created a new website with a fresh and modern feel with an enhanced user experience and specialized translation for global customers.

User Increase

Session Increase

The Project

Combining, Streamlining, and Enhancing UX

A key objective of this project was to merge six separate websites into a single global site that could be translated into many languages so that customers in any market across the world could access the same enhanced experience and content. The consolidation of six sites into one also meant that the client’s marketing team could streamline its website update process — only having to make updates in one place instead of across six different sites.

As a category leader in heat treatment technology, the new website needed to showcase its products in a way that did justice to their quality and innovation. We worked with a 3D rendering artist to bring furnace schematics to life that demonstrated the complexity and scale of the client’s engineering capabilities.

Finally, the site needed a restructuring of its sitemap to simplify user paths and drive more conversions. We worked with the client to create intuitive user journeys, ensuring that each session would be guided toward a particular goal. We also stripped back the amount of content on the site to reduce the opportunity for translation errors and create a modern, sleek experience across all copy and visuals.

The Rebrand

In conjunction with the website design and build, we took the opportunity to assist this client in a branding refresh that would support their growth into the future.

Working with the client’s red and white palette, we introduced a tertiary dark navy blue to bring warmth, depth, and dimension. Red, white, and blue can often feel very “USA” if designers aren’t careful, but this combination was paired with light grayscale elements and deployed strategically so that the colors play well together in any market.

Evoking the client’s custom engineering capabilities and strong German influence, we selected a new premium typeface for headlines and headers to be used across the site: Halvar Breitschrift. This typeface was created by a German artist and delivers both gravitas and easy readability for both online and print applications. We even took the type a step further by creating a few custom ligatures that gave the font an even more customized feel.

Nothing Lost In Translation

Multilanguage functionality was a key feature of the new site. One of our objectives was to prevent unintentional errors that can sometimes occur when using automated translations for highly technical terms.

On the new site, we implemented advanced translation software that can understand idioms and expressions, ensuring that the copy rendered truly makes sense to users, no matter what their language.

New User Increase

Request Forms Submitted Increa

Sites merged into one

Results

Since the launch of the new site, the client continues to see a growing increase in users, traffic, page views, and conversions.

“We wanted to create a website with a new age, modern feel for customers globally.”

Global Manufacturer of Heat Treatment Furnaces and Thermal Processing Solutions

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

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