Technical Engineering Group employs 36 staff and is based in Mullingar. The company recently received approval for a new 2,800 square metre premises to cater for an increase in demand for its products. Thanks to continued growth the firm has spent the last few years establishing sales offices in France, Germany, Poland and the UK.
John Hunt came on board in 2003 as managing director. Over the last few years he has overseen the company's expansion abroad and more recently has supervised the launch of a new website and a client extranet. Hunt says he and his team are engineers first and foremost, so the company hired a third-party marketing firm to help bolster its online presence.
Engineers, not marketeers
The company recently launched a revamped website which is optimised for search engines, designed to facilitate communication with existing clients, and clearly explains exactly what the SME does. These were areas that Hunt believes the new site needed to focus on. "The [previous] website was full of technical information and lots and lots of instructions. The format was poor," he says.
The firm hired web consultancy AMAS to create and build the new site. The consultancy started by analysing who the engineering firm's customers were and asking a few why they hired the SME. "It boiled down to reliability and customer service," says Hunt. "Our clients are relying on us for process critical parts. If they don't have the parts, or the parts are wrong, their production line stops."
Based on this feedback, AMAS came up with a tagline for the new website - 'Precision you can trust' - and used this tagline alongside the company's name as keywords to optimise the site for search engines.
The consultancy also made sure that the site was integrated with a client extranet. This extranet is currently being upgraded to allow existing customers to re-order parts. Hunt explains that these are all things his company would not have been able to do in-house. "We are all engineers and we think like engineers. But now if we want to get customers we have to market ourselves, and that is a different set of skills," he says.
The website provides customers with a number of ways to contact the company, and the firm's addresses are all linked to Google Maps. The SME also uses Google Analytics to analyse what site visitors look at and as a way of garnering feedback that can be used to fine-tune the site. "We want feedback," says Hunt. "Thirty percent of visitors leave the website immediately. The average time they spend on it is just over four minutes."
Interestingly, the SME decided against a Google Adwords marketing campaign, as its target market is very specific and focused. "We didn't find Google Adwords necessary. We know who our target market is: it is a very limited number of people in the pharmaceutical industry and the aviation industry," says Hunt.
This decision hasn't held the SME back either. It recently received an order from a new client in Australia, a deal which Hunt attributes to the website.
Social networking
Technical Engineering Group uses a number of other online marketing strategies. Recently it developed a new system that feed tablets onto the packaging line. The company plans to video this feeder in action and to put the footage up on YouTube for potential customers to watch.
The company has also established itself on business networking site LinkedIn, where it has made connections with several potential clients.
The SME also has a news section on its website with an RSS feed that web users can subscribe to. A staff member with a marketing background has responsibility for writing bulletins for this section. Complementing this strategy is a newsletter that's sent via email to interested parties.
"The [RSS] news bulletins provide information about which people in the industry we met and what we have accomplished. It keeps our profile up, whether its news about attending exhibitions or that we won a particular contract," says Hunt.
Sharing information
Apart from e-marketing tools, the company depends on a range of IT products and services for the smooth running of its business. Staff have access to broadband-enabled PCs and rely on Blackberrys to communicate when on the road.
The company also uses Microsoft Sharepoint, which allows staff members to access and share project information from any location. "We have a policy of distributing information, particularly technical information, as widely as possible because different people and different areas need to know what is required," says Hunt.
The SME does not have an in-house IT department and instead relies on a contractor who manages the company's systems remotely. The company saw the benefit of this recently when their contractor was able to access a Poland-based staff member's laptop from Mullingar to fix a technical issue. "A few years ago we wouldn't have been able to do that. It makes life much easier when you have got such support," says Hunt.
The company backs up its systems every night and completes a permanent back-up, which is stored off-site, once a month. "Our design people do that. They put the tape in the server and we have a sign-off. An automatic email goes around to a number of people saying back-up was successful on the server," says Hunt.
Apart from the in-house back-ups, Technical Engineering Group has found that using third parties for a range of services enables it to focus on its core strategy: growing the business.
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