Replacement Brush Tables
“After Marketing Metal produced our video last summer, we had the best end-of-year yet! They were great to work with and helpful in answering all of our questions. We’ve been able to stay consistent with our LinkedIn posts and blogging with their direction too.”
– Jeff Fettig / Senior Sales Engineer
Jeff Fettig and Greg Gach started Replacement Brush Tables (RBT) nearly a decade ago after identifying a need for domestic brush table products for sheet metal fabricators to reduce machine downtime and surface quality issues. Many of these plants have multiple punching, stamping, and bending machines running 2-3 shifts in multiple facilities 365 days a year, so the panels wear out often and need to be purchased regularly.
RBT had also begun selling brush panels for workstations and material handling areas to keep the sheet metal surface from getting scratched. In these cases, the panels last a lifetime because they’re in a much lower-impact environment which makes them a great investment. They’d been selling to job shops as well but had a harder time reaching that audience. In addition, they had a few opportunities bubbling up to sell higher volumes to the OEMs at lower margins. Another area for growth was in northern Mexico which is taking business from China, especially with Jeff's Spanish language skills.
By personally and knowledgeably taking phone calls and orders, Jeff and Greg had positioned RBT as THE go-to resource to get brush FAST. Another major differentiator is that they provide an easy-to-navigate catalog of all the different panel layouts for each machine and can custom design panels to fit each application. Investing heavily in website optimization, they were getting most of their leads through search, but competition had been creeping up from suppliers like Grainger and McMaster Carr and panel copycats.
Jeff and Greg had seen the difference their service made in the lives–and bottom lines–of their customers and were determined to grow their impact and to 5x their revenue in the next few years. But with competition creeping in, they wanted to establish themselves as the go-to experts so that fabricators would immediately think of “the brush people” whenever they needed new panels.
RBT came to Marketing Metal for help creating video content that they could show on Linkedin and at trade shows to educate prospects and get the word out about their services. Their biggest challenge was reaching the right prospects at the right times and getting them to trust aftermarket parts from a somewhat unknown company for their million-dollar machines instead of sourcing them from well-known overseas machine OEMs despite their bloated communication channels and long lead times.
While RBT had envisioned an animated video, the Marketing Metal team recommended filming a series of interviews and footage of the product being used on location at a customer’s facility to create a better connection with their audience. We supplemented what we shot with purchased stock footage along with a few simple animations and website screen captures to produce a visually compelling solutions overview video.
Having Jeff and Greg talk about the problems they solve and why they care positions them as experts and humanizes the experience, highlighting the personal touch that sets them apart. Interviewing the maintenance supervisor and sheet metal technician at Challenge Tool and Manufacturing, we captured different perspectives of the difficulties they faced before RBT came into the picture and how their day-to-day had improved since. We made sure to film a lot of interaction between the RBT team and the personnel on the shop floor to again showcase their hands-on approach. We also used a super high-definition camera lens to add unique angles for a visually stunning final piece.
From there, we edited together a few shorter clips for RBT to share on Linkedin. To further help RBT grow its audience and increase engagement on the platform, we advised a shift in content strategy from a product-centric approach to one that emphasized the problems RBT solved for customers. This repositioning would help to communicate RBT's role as a critical problem solver in the industry, focusing on real-world scenarios where their expertise and products prevented production delays and quality issues, thus resonating more deeply with maintenance technicians and plant managers.
Additionally, we shot new professional headshots for them and enhanced their personal Linkedin headlines and bios as well as their company page descriptions. We also encouraged them to be more proactive in networking on the platform, connecting with industry players, sharing insightful content, and engaging in meaningful conversations to increase visibility and solidify their expertise and position as the go-to experts for brush table solutions.
Behind the Scenes at Challenge Tool & Manufacturing
Not only did we capture amazing footage of RBT interacting with their customer, Challenge Tool & Manufacturing, we also had a lot of fun! It was essential to capture the stories of the humans who benefit from working with Replacement Brush Tables and showcase the expertise and dedication of the team.
Speaking with RBT roughly 5 months after launching their video project, Jeff and Greg were happy to report that the work we had done was paying off. Sales were up and they were successfully using the content we had developed together, focusing on the problems they solve, personalizing their brand, and expanding their network. RBT had made strides in establishing themselves as industry leaders in direct-to-customer brush table solutions.
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