THE PROBLEM
As a company, Stratus has been around officially for less than 24 months. But the national brand implementation and facility services company has a lineage few in that arena can match. Founded in 1953, MC Group of Mentor, Ohio, served as a leading provider of signage, repair & maintenance and energy solutions across North America. For nearly a century, ICON of Rolling Meadows, Illinois offered sign manufacturing, repair, and refresh & remodel services to customers nationwide. The 2019 merger took two big players in their respective field and made them a giant.
But it also came with likewise-sized problems. Stratus now had hundreds of employees across dozens states, and two huge groups of marketing, sales and service teams to align on the same page. And while getting everyone lined up and pulling in the same direction, Stratus also had to establish its new brand identity after shedding the presence built over decades by its two parent companies.
Stratus came to NgageContent organize, build and then implement the plan to make it happen. Stratus needed new marketing infrastructure, a new inbound marketing website, consistency across the board, and the ongoing support and content creation processes to make sure the momentum created from the merger never lagged.
THE SOLUTION
Once Stratus had finalized its new brand identity — language, tone, logo, colors, etc. — the NgageContent team went to work on everything else. The first task was developing an inbound lead-generation website that not only promoted the new brand but also seamlessly picked up the mantle left from the two previous companies.
We utilized SEO research to ensure the new site and all its pages could get a jump on generating the right kind of traffic, and our graphic design team fleshed out the vision for the site with modern stylized, bold, and efficient work that also served to give a cohesive fulcrum for Stratus’ new marketing efforts. All of which helped Stratus employ a scalable web-based marketing hub quickly.
NgageContent helped Stratus build a new marketing infrastructure and guided its two separate marketing teams into a more unified unit working through a full HubSpot implementation to aid in targeted email campaigns and automation. Our content team was able to help Stratus quickly get its content marketing plans up to speed with crafted blogs that would drive up organic traffic to the website quickly, and highlight what the company could offer. Our detailed reporting on every step of the process provided valuable feedback and information on context and direction for goals and action points for the new venture.
It was a project that tapped into every area of expertise and every service NgageContent offers. And our efforts have continued well after the initial website launch with ongoing content and CRO services, digital ad campaign support, monthly HubSpot consultations and support, website maintenance, monthly reporting, and high-level MQL-to-SQL strategy.
THE RESULT
With a new website in place, aligned marketing strategies and a commitment to the practices to make those work, Stratus enjoyed a strong opening quarter in terms of establishing a new cohesive identity after unveiling the new site in December 2020.
By the end of just its third month, the new Stratus site was generating more organic search traffic than the combined numbers of its two parent predecessors. Stratus is also already seeing higher domain authority and higher home page authority than in either of its previous incarnations.