Eight Steps to Building Your Brand

To keep our blog fresh and exciting for our readers, Envoy runs a post by a guest blogger each month. This month, we are proud to introduce Fritz Buglewicz as our guest blogger. Fritz is the executive vice president of business development at CapStone Technologies. Fritz has nearly 20 years of experience in project management, procedural analysis and business development in print-to-mail document management operations. He has worked for CapStone Technologies since 2005, and is the former owner of a successful direct mailing firm. Learn more about CapStone Technologies at http://www.captechno.com/.

CapStone Technologies, LLC, is a business engineering firm specializing in print-to-mail consulting and technology. Our approach focuses on ensuring that our clients work with the best business processes in the most suitable facilities, with the most functional technology. The result is client operations that deliver work and truly add value to customers by eliminating non-value-added functions. Did you get all that? As you can imagine, we’ve had to ask ourselves two critical questions: How do we effectively market to our clients? And how do we build a brand for bottom-line results?

Admittedly, we’ve had some success, but it has been a long road. CapStone started as a small consulting firm, primarily in Omaha, but has since branched out nationally with four distinct divisions: Business Engineering, AutoViri Robotics and Automation, iProtect Business Interruption Planning, and Advanced Technical Services, our AutoCAD division.

Our greatest challenge is that we are not easily pigeonholed into a single word or a one-sentence description. Our customers range from Fortune 100 financial institutions to mom-and-pop mail and print shops. Moreover, you may be asking, “What exactly is business engineering?”

Two years ago, we started a concerted effort to market and brand ourselves, first on our own and then with a little help. The results have been difficult to measure, either because of the slumping economy that has hit industrial investment particularly hard, or because we are missing the point. I’ll let you decide how we’ve done based on the following case study.

CapStone Branding Case Study
As I said, we were already somewhat successful in our consulting division, but then we built our first robotic solution for ValPak in St. Petersburg, Fla., a $256 million facility that is a monument to efficiency and automation. CapStone implemented the first successful application of robotics in the print-to-mail industry there. We drummed up a little attention from the press, but no one came knocking down our door.

We wanted a branding effort to create awareness and tell our story. We needed a logo, a brand name for the robotics division, press releases and collateral materials. After many failed attempts at a brand name for the robotics, we landed on AutoViri, Latin for automatic man. Now, we were ready to create that awareness through multiple channels. The following are the key steps in our integrated strategy:

1. We created the AutoViri micro site www.autoviri.com as an extension to www.captechno.com. We made significant effort for the micro site in terms of content, videos, press releases and pictures. We needed some help from an agency, but we did most of the content development ourselves, including case studies, product sheets, business case models, etc.
2. Direct mail campaigns brought traffic to the site, as well as follow-up calls. Because we are in the print-to-mail industry, you can bet we use this medium and still do. Direct mail builds credibility, it’s nonintrusive, it’s green.
3. Trade shows and trade-show seminars are also necessary. Nothing beats a face-to-face contact. I have spoken at more than a dozen trade-show seminars during the last two years.
4. Contributing articles to trade magazines is vital. CapStone has written at least a dozen in the past year.
5. We advertise in those same trade magazines.
6. Social networking on LinkedIn with a smattering of Twitter has proven effective. The social networking on LinkedIn is great; my son tells me, “Twitter is lame, Dad.” The jury is still out for us on that.
7. Face-to-face travel for warm opportunities often proves beneficial. CapStone spends considerable time searching for opportunities. Our clients are event-driven — they do not buy on impulse. A significant event must happen — such as expansion or contraction, facility construction, technology investigation, culture change, etc. — to instigate their interest. When that happens, we get on a plane and try to further the opportunity in person.
8. Strategic partnerships with other vendors to resell our services and products has been a cornerstone of our development.

There it is. An eight-point plan for developing your brand, industrial style. I’d enjoy hearing your feedback, and I’m happy to answer questions if you are interested in robotics or business engineering.

Happy Marketing!