Colewell Automation

“The whole experience has been hands down the best experience I’ve ever had with any type of marketing company. It’s just so much fun.” –Steven Coleman, Co-Owner

Since starting Colewell Automation in 2020, Steven Coleman and Dustin Stowell have more than quadrupled the size of their business, mostly by word of mouth through past colleagues along with a lot of pavement pounding by Steve (more than he’d like to be doing).

With over 30 years of combined experience designing and building robotic industrial automation systems, Steven and Dustin have proven their unique value to customers across a variety of industries owing in part to the tight project management process Dustin leads them through. Their most successful, enjoyable projects have been those for small to mid-sized manufacturers who are often new to automation.

In the next 5 years, the dynamic duo hopes to have at least tripled their sales and workforce. But one of their biggest obstacles to growth, as with most manufacturers in the US today, is attracting and retaining the right people. They’ve had luck thus far attracting talent from their existing network, but have struggled to recruit people from outside their region that want to live “in the middle of nowhere.”

Another major challenge is helping prospects that are new to robotics overcome sticker shock and nurturing them through the average 6-month lead time. Acting as the company’s entire sales department, Steven has been stretched thin, visiting prospects and customers within a 6-hour radius in person. The only marketing he’s had to support him is a generic brochure and website that didn’t come close to reflecting their full value.

In order to help Colewell magnetize the right customers (and talent), we designed an online brand with a bold, specific message speaking directly to the pain points of their customers while showing that Colewell Automation is THE expert integrator that can alleviate them and illustrating that they’re ready to help their customers grow long into the future. By clearly presenting the benefits of their unique process and expertise, their new brand will help them attract and retain the humans who will value them, making for successful projects and relationships going forward.

“Emily and Scotty are down to earth. There’s so much energy and excitement to build something that we can then take and keep up with and not make it super complicated but make it super dramatic and entertaining and exciting. I’m very very impressed with what you guys have done.” –Steven Coleman, Co-Owner

During our initial Setup with Colewell, we picked up on the company’s valiant, tenacious personality and style, bonding over our mutual love of Marvel’s cinematic universe. It was clear that this young, scrappy team wanted to be real heroes for the growing manufacturers in their Midwest region. They understand the monumental challenges their customers are facing with the quickly dwindling labor market, supply chain disruptions, and looming recession, and want to be an impactful part of the solution.

So, to exemplify these traits throughout their brand, we used a lot of contrast, bold colors and fonts, and some subtle comic book style elements. The copy reads like an epic adventure tale highlighting the deep passion they bring to every project so that the growing Midwest manufacturing companies they want to partner with will feel seen and understood.

In order to empower Colewell to grow and evolve their marketing as their business grows and evolves, we built their new website in Squarespace so that they never have to worry about security, updates, plugins breaking, and other common WordPress issues and trained them to use it so they can continue to build their authority as a trusted integrator and increase their search engine rankings. This session was recorded so they can refer back to it anytime. 

Video is known to be one of the most powerful ways to connect with your audience, and a great picture is worth so much more than 1000 words, so we planned and executed a 4-day shoot onsite in collaboration with our partner, ENE Video Productions.

We captured beautiful photography and video footage of their team in their work-life habitat and followed Steven and Dustin to four of their nearby customers so we could interview them about their experience and film their robotic systems in action. Using these assets throughout their website and marketing showcases the true level of expertise, knowledge, and friendly support they provide.

The main piece we had envisioned for them was a Super Bowl-worthy video ad written and edited to pull at the heartstrings of customer prospects and job candidates that focused on the team’s new tagline: Challenge Accepted. Filmed with a cinematic camera and edited with fast cuts and a rock’n’roll score, the video positions Colewell as an integrator that’s determined to solve problems for customers and cares about more than just the bottom line.

In addition to the main feature, we edited a company overview video along with 4 video studies that tell real stories of how they’ve saved the day for their customers, which are now live on their YouTube channel and strategically placed throughout the website.

To get the most of that footage, we also recut the videos into shorter clips for social media that they can use on an ongoing basis to create buzz on their channels. We upgraded their social profiles with the new branding, set up a social media scheduling tool, created graphics templates using Google Slides so they can edit them internally, and gave them our Stupid Simple Content System so they can stay visible with minimal time and effort.

To help ensure their website shows up in local searches in particular, we optimized and created additional online listings using their new, consistent branding and all the right keywords, photos, videos, services, etc.

Further enabling the Colewell team to keep their marketing machine running, we played a brainstorming game while we were on site (filming it for use in their marketing videos) and gave them the tools to replicate this invaluable team-building exercise monthly or quarterly to come up with their own content ideas.

We also designed a new brochure, sales presentation, and business cards along with some awesome stickers and swag to leave with prospects and customers so they will stay top-of-mind as the heroic integrators they are.

Wish your marketing was this RAD?

Schedule a quick 15-minute call with Emily HERE to figure out how to get there. No hard sales pitch, no gimmicks, just a quick intro to see how we jive.

Learn more about our Radical process here.