Overview
Protech Composites is a carbon fiber manufacturer that partners with innovative companies — from well-known brands like Boeing, NASA, and MIT to start-ups like xCraft and C3 Powersports — to deliver exceptional products.
Before engaging with Decoder, Protech Composites focused most of their marketing efforts on consumers. However, with 90%+ of their revenue coming from business-to-business sales, the path toward growth would require a significant shift.
With a clear idea of their ideal customers in mind, they came to Decoder to revamp their branding and digital presence to attract more high-volume, high-margin partners.
Industry
Manufacturing
Services
Customer research, branding, web design, copywriting, e-commerce development
Location
Vancouver, WA
Background
Protech’s sales and marketing problems stemmed from focusing on the wrong audience. Their site spoke about why to use carbon fiber and in what applications, but not about Protech’s extensive custom capabilities or how they are reinventing what it means to be a supplier — which are far more important to the businesses that supply 90%+ of their revenue.
Likewise, marketing efforts were largely driving e-commerce sales, which generated a high volume of transactions, but low revenue and profit margins.
Strategy
Market Research
Understanding what Protech’s big business-to-business customers cared about revealed exactly what messaging and marketing would be successful: demonstrating their versatility, reliability, fast turnaround times, and customer service orientation.
Rebranding & Site Redesign
Using those insights, we developed a new brand positioning and design direction aligned with their most profitable market segment (engineers and procurement staff at large manufacturing businesses). At the same time, we completely rethought and rewrote their messaging and content to be laser-targeted to those audiences’ needs and concerns.
E-Commerce
Having identified custom orders as the biggest revenue generators, we also intentionally decided to de-emphasize the online shopping experience — focusing on leveraging it as a way of showing off products and capabilities rather than a direct sales tool.
Results
While small e-commerce orders dropped off as expected, B2B leads jumped 65% and average order value grew 200%. The result was not only more leads, but also higher lead quality and big ticket sales.
