PSA Consulting Project Details

When competitors have a stronger voice in the market, it can lead to quiet-achieving B2B companies being left behind. Make sure prospective clients know your success stories!

Voice
Brand
Proof

BUILDING A BRAND TO INFORM CLIENTS AND ATTRACT TALENT

PSA Consulting enjoyed significant organic growth in town and transport planning and traffic engineering for almost two decades.

Word of mouth drove the company’s success. Company directors and associates predominantly built personal connections and executed the work – leading to clients knowing individuals and not the company as a collective.

Now a medium-sized business, PSA was concerned that this approach made building the brand more difficult and was limiting growth. Competitors were also actively promoting themselves, and PSA was not included in tenders. This suggested that the market lacked awareness of PSA and its full suite of services.

PSA turned to Vie Marketing, in collaboration with MindMoB, to refresh its brand and promote its services across the public and private sectors. The pair would achieve this by developing the company’s and team’s profiles, while also attracting a talented workforce with the right culture to help deliver a diversified portfolio of work.

BUSINESS CHALLENGES

PSA was quietly succeeding without ever promoting itself. Meanwhile, competitors were becoming active in marketing and showcasing their projects.

PSA had a diverse and talented team, larger departments in certain service lines and the capacity to rival the major consultants – which no one knew about.

PSA clients often only engaged in one service area, unaware that there were many complementary services that they may have been interested in.

PSA had an impressive portfolio of completed projects across government and the private sector that, again, went completely unpromoted.

MARKETING CHALLENGES

PSA’s diverse service offering has multiple target audiences across different industries. Some services as relevant to one sector but not to others.

For example:

Policy development for land use planning is relevant for local councils, but not property developers
Parking designs for residential buildings is relevant for property developers, but not local councils

The company needed to both:

Present itself and its services as a comprehensive solution that covers the whole planning, approvals and engineering process.

Target certain audiences with specific interconnected services that are relevant to their sector’s process and requirements.

OBJECTIVES

Create contemporary branding and communications that resonate with potential clients and employees.

Communicate PSA’s complex capabilities in a way that’s clear and easy for partners and clients to understand.

Educate clients on PSA’s individual and complementary service offerings to cross-promote where applicable.

Elevate PSA as an employer of choice to attract candidates with both the right skillset and cultural fit.

Showcase the breadth and expertise of the PSA team to build trust beyond individual directors and associates.

Share PSA’s depth of projects to demonstrate their experience and provide proof of success across sectors.

APPROACH

Analyse the situation

Many B2B marketers make the fatal mistake of not truly understanding their client’s business and their clients’ customers.

Everything hinges on a business’ products or services solving the end user’s pain points. If you don’t know what those are, any value propositions, messaging and branding will make zero impact because they simply won’t be relevant.

We worked with the PSA leadership team to collect critical information and gain a clear understanding of how to direct their marketing:

Held a workshop with PSA’s leadership and team to understand their business, clients, competitors, people and services.

Conducted client and team interviews to capture the perception of PSA in the market and validate points of difference.

Ran a brand think tank to challenge the team – to determine what makes PSA different and understand why it exists.

Develop the brand

PSA tended to default to common descriptors for what made them different – “quality work”, “trustworthy” and “service-focused” – but we worked with them to delve into more specific and tangible differences.

Based on all the information collected from stakeholders, we laid the foundation for PSA’s new brand and positioning statements. After cross-referencing with what clients stated as their pain points, four areas of excellence emerged:

Big business capabilities with small business style service

Ability to work with clients to support or challenge ideas with frank feedback

Clear and simple communication built on superior understanding

A culture that keeps clients and staff coming back

Research indicated that PSA had clear advantages. By extracting specific cases and explaining why PSA’s approach was different, we were able to craft compelling branding that spoke directly to the target audiences.

Combined PSA’s persona with examples of success to develop communications that addressed client pain points.

Elevated PSA’s brand and incorporated the narrative “connecting communities and creating better places”.

Modernised PSA’s brand visuals and cleaned up legacy elements to entice the next generation of talent and partners.

Solve the service dilemma

To address the challenges of communicating PSA’s complex service offering, we developed a holistic Service Graphic. Aligned with the brand design, it quickly and effectively gives clients an overview of all PSA services.

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We adapted the Service Graphic into individual and complementary graphics to help clients fully understand the service and determine what other services could be of interest. These graphics were then implemented across the website and social posts.

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To support end-user decision-making and build additional awareness of complementary services, we created in-depth ‘playbooks’ for each service line. These would be presented to clients only interested in specific services.

Each contains a full breakdown of capabilities, key statistics, relevant team members, successful projects in that area and related services. These would also be built into individual pages on the website.

Develop a delivery mechanism: The website

Working with PSA, we designed and developed a new website that would help deliver on their marketing objectives. It:

Helps build the brand with positioning statements that highlight the pain points PSA solves.

Updates the brand to be more contemporary and attractive to clients and potential employees.

Includes testimonials from the client survey to validate PSA’s points of difference.

Features a dedicated ‘People’ page to highlight everyone in the business – not just the directors.

Showcases key projects each PSA team member has worked on, separated into individual services.

Includes a page of all related services, with sub-pages that go deeper into PSA’s individual services.

Incorporates a ‘Join us’ page with staff testimonials and job listings that can be applied to directly.

Has website tracking, monitoring and analytics set up for engagement and leads.

Mapping PSA’s complementary services and quickly explaining their vast capabilities across multiple planning and engineering stages was vital to respecting their audiences’ time and helping them understand the full picture of what PSA can do.

Promote a new direction

Once the website was live and all channels had been updated to reflect the new brand and positioning, we moved to the promotional stage. PSA received guidelines and best practice advice for LinkedIn, the primary social channel for their target market.

We also briefed the team on their role in the plan and worked with them to create weekly content to post on the company LinkedIn page and for employees to share – highlighting projects, people, services, culture and what makes PSA unique.

OUTCOMES

Within just one month of the new website launch, PSA received:

Enquiries from several quality candidates to work at PSA

Two very high–value client leads through the website

Positive feedback from clients on updated branding material, clearer services and new positioning statements

An increase in social media presence by over 300%, with 42,000+ LinkedIn impressions and interactions

“Vie Marketing and MindMoB provided expert advice and support and delivered what was in the brief. They provided support and guidance and pushed us for a better result. Overall, a good to excellent service that delivered what we needed”.

– Malcolm Griffin, Managing Director at PSA Consulting

Today, PSA’s ‘why’ is inspiring, ‘how’ it’s different is laid out clearly and ‘what’ it does couldn’t be easier for busy prospects to understand.