Services Rendered
Intelligent Technologies And Design (ITD) decided to exhibit their design and engineering services at the GlassBuild America 2015 trade show. Because the company was founded recently, the only marketing materials ITD had was a basic website www.itd.systems. To exhibit at a trade show, a company needs much more than that: print brochures, presentations, and a system for communicating with the trade show attendees.
ITD hired us to create all those materials. The challenge was to complete the project in less than 2 weeks without having any content.
Challenge accepted! In cooperation with two partner companies, YabadooIT and dDesign, we put our digital strategy, information architecture, copywriting, and design skills to work and finished the project on time.
Results And Successes
ITD was impressed with our work. They didn't require a single change in any of the materials we envisioned, laid out, wrote, and designed.
It took our teams less than 2 weeks to:
- create our client's value proposition
- write all the content required for marketing materials,
- organize a professional photo shoot at their premises,
- create a visually stunning presentation,
- our partners YabadooIT and dDesign wrote and designed a print + PDF brochure which the client would be handing out to trade show attendees,
- create and write an email newsletter to communicate with prospects,
- update client's existing website with new marketing materials,
- educate and train the client to use the new materials in the most effective way.
ITD invested only 4 hours in creating content for this project. That's how long it took their subject matter expert to sit with us in a pleasant 4-hour interview that we organized to extract content.
Company Name:
Intelligent Technologies And Design
Website:
Industry:
Design and engineering
About the Client:
ITD Systems is an independent building envelope design, engineering, and consulting studio.
The brochure and the presentation you made for us raised our awareness about our own success and empowered us with increased self-confidence in our work. At the trade show we achieved what we came for: we demonstrated our unique advantages, made positive impressions on the people we talked to, and returned home with new business opportunities.
Goran Tesic, project manager at ITD
Full ITD Case Study: From Zero Content to Making Positive Impressions on Customers
ITD, an Experienced Design, Engineering, and Consulting Studio, Decided to Exhibit at an Important Trade Show
Intelligent Technologies And Design would soon be flying from Croatia to Atlanta, USA to exhibit at the GlassBuild America 2015 trade show. They are an existing client and they asked us to help them create marketing materials they could use to present themselves in the best way possible. This trade show was ITD's chance to get more U.S. customers.
ITD Needed Stunning Marketing Materials to Attract Attention
The client's main goal was to return from the trade show with a large number of potential clients, but how do they do that?
By standing out from everyone else, by:
- emphasizing ITD's strong unique value proposition,
- being visually impressive, with unique, relevant and persuasive content which grabs attention in only a couple of minutes (ITD estimated they would have no more than 5-15 minutes to present their services).
The client agreed to create a brochure and a presentation for live one-on-one presenting on a tablet.
The Challenge: No Content And Little Time
We were dealing with these issues:
- The client had very little time to spare on collaborating with us on the project. They were busy getting ready for the trade show, their most knowledgeable expert had to travel out of town, and the rest of their team was busy working on client projects.
- ITD had very little content. We would have to create everything from scratch.
- Before project start, we first had to define a crystal clear, strong unique value proposition.
- Our team didn't know enough about their business to create stunning trade show materials.
- Our teams had only 2 weeks to complete the project and figure out how to tackle these challenges.
To Create Content, We Decided to Interview Experts
At this point, we knew what the client's business goal was: to return home with as many leads as possible.
And we knew that the client needed 4 marketing materials: 1) a print brochure, 2) a digital presentation, 3) an updated website, and 4) a system for emailing leads.
The next step was to figure out how those marketing materials would attract enough attention to achieve the business goal.
Defining Our Client's Unique Selling Proposition
In Logit we developed something we call "The B2B Website Project Guide". It's a 100-page book with dozens and dozens of smart questions we ask our clients to get an accurate profile of their businesses.
We used that book to develop our client's unique selling proposition (USP). A USP is a statement which clearly defines how a company solves its customers' painful problems in a unique way, compared to all the other players on the market, using words that the customers recognize as valuable.
In one four-hour interview ITD's USP became clear. ITD has enough experience to deliver custom projects very fast at a very competitive price. The combination of those three benefits makes ITD appealing enough for their U.S. customers to pay attention.
We recorded and transcribed the 4-hour interview with Mr. Goran Tesic, ITD's project manager and ITD's most knowledgeable subject matter expert.
The Resulting 10-Minute Presentation Helped ITD Tell Their Story
ITD intended to show the presentation on a tablet to one prospect at a time. When you have a lot of things to tell and show in only 10 minutes, and you don't want to sound like everybody else, how do you stand out with content?
We turned the presentation into a dynamic 10-minute case study and used the story format to:
- portray a new company as unique and the smartest choice
- tell the story of how ITD delivered one successful custom project
- increase the value of the type of service ITD provides
- stand out with interesting, factual, persuasive language free of hype and boring self-promotion
Here's The Final Presentation We Created Starting With Zero Content
- View the presentation live: https://prezi.com/c-9idpb-ydup/itdsystems/ (Prezi.com, 49 slides)
- Download the presentation (PDF, 49 pages, 53 MB)
On the Surface, It's Just a Presentation, But When You Look Closer...
...it's many intentionally made marketing decisions packed in an animated sequence of 49 slides:
- ITD's message is crystal clear: We do custom work fast at a very competitive price.
- No long, boring innuendos: the presenter arrives at the juiciest part of the presentation within 1 minute. We know this is so because we rehearsed the presentation prior to delivering it to ITD.
- The presentation is designed to help ITD's customers remember ITD and quickly connect it visually with other marketing materials. Those are actual ITD's marketing materials and an actual ITD's shop drawing on the presentation cover.
- We made sure the presentation works well in all situations, no matter whether it's presented live, being viewed on a TV or viewed online months after the trade show is over. This way we ensured that ITD's investment in our work brings results for a long time to come.
- We finished the presentation in a way that opens up the conversation, and that conversation leads to getting targeted leads.
Our client's needs were our priority, so we also made sure that:
- the presentation was technically easy to use
- they weren't boring their prospects with unsubstantiated hype. We presented ITD in such a way that their content proves how knowledgeable and experienced they are without saying this explicitly.
We also organized a photo shoot at ITD's premises. We just couldn't stomach using stock photos: if ITD was to stand out, we needed to show real people. We brought in a professional photographer to take the photos of ITD team members and included the best images in the materials.
This Worked Because ITD Trusted Us With Important Decisions
Some of those decisions were:
- defining a unique selling proposition
- structuring marketing materials
- setting the tone, voice, and style of the content
- which calls to action to use in materials, and why
- design
- choice of tools (we used prezi.com for this presentation)
- solving technical issues, such as the ability to present without an internet connection.
Because our hands weren't tied, we were able to save ITD a tremendous amount of time: they invested only 4 hours in content creation. Our decade-long experience in watching clients cope with content creation tells us that projects of similar scope take months on average.
The client was impressed with our work which inspired them, increased their self-confidence, and helped make a positive impression on their prospects.