The challenge
With many distributors in a crowded European market, Distrelec was looking for a way of gaining mindshare. Having undertaken a corporate name change, something was required that pulled customers, old and new, back to the rebranded Distrelec website. The initial campaign was to focus on robotics and automation. The goal was to communicate the range of products on offer and to position the distributor as expert in these fields.
What we did
Publitek’s recommended strategy was to create a guide to the history, technology and trends in this space. The guide was to encompass around ten chapters, including informed narrative, technical diagrams and engaging images. Case studies and current developments should be incorporated, demonstrating that Distrelec and its customer service team had their fingers on the pulse.
The end product, “A Guide to Robotics and Automation”, would be hosted on a dedicated portal, available for download in a range of European languages. This core content would then be repurposed into technical articles and blog posts. To encourage downloads of the guide, visitors would be offered a 10% discount on product purchases.
The project started by defining topics for each of the guide’s chapters. Close briefings between Publitek and Distrelec ensured that the content would match the distributor’s strategic marketing goals. The potential content was compared with the technical product offering and future line-card development.
Utilising its wealth of engineering resource, a clear brief was sent to Publitek’s subject experts, allowing them to deliver content of the desired style, depth, tone and length. To ensure that the individual chapters functioned as a complete document, a project manager was assigned. Here the responsibility covered everything from reviewing of text, sourcing of diagrams and images, as well as layout. This all had to follow the corporate style guidelines of Distrelec.
With the guide complete and launched, the team set about repurposing the content for trade media. Working together with product managers, and reflecting upon the topics covered by the guide, article ideas were developed that incorporated engineering challenges while highlighting products in the Distrelec programme that could be used to resolve them.
To raise awareness of the existence of the guide, blog post topics were created around the topics covered in the guide. Shorter in length and technically less deep than an article for the industrial press, these posts are ideal for inclusion in social media, a channel that Distrelec regularly uses to draw in traffic to their site.
At all times, the client was in control of the process, signing off on concepts, imagery and text before it is published.
Results
The response from employees within Distrelec has been universally positive. Customer-facing technical staff say that the guide helps to underscore the company’s commitment to its target market and its technical prowess in this space.
Similar activities Publitek has undertaken with other clients shows that this approach is highly effective in raising awareness of product and service offering. Direct email promotion that links to a known source of quality, highly technical content achieve open rates of around 30%. This is way above the industry average.
When undertaken as part of a planned and sustained campaign, such activities develop trust in a supplier. This leads to those suppliers gaining mindshare, being first to be considered when a product or solution needs to be sourced.