Grow Your Brand By Leveraging Successes

By Mark V Wiley, Chief Editor, Water Online Advantage

A key component to growing a business or standing out in a crowded space is delivering on promises about your products and services. If you are able to deliver on promises, then expanding your brand to reach more customers is not as difficult as it could otherwise be. And a great way to do this is by showcasing your wins.

Like many smaller firms and start-ups, engineering consultants in water and wastewater can run the risk of doing too much too soon and prematurely depleting capital or remaining small and flatlining their ROI. For practical reasons, building your brand recognition and trust locally is a must. However, after repeated local successes and plenty of happy clients, you should feel positive about expanding your marketing reach.

Wins Over Specs

While many firms present their product or service spec brochures as the main way of getting in with new customers, this is not always the best way to make a difference. You see, each engineering firm has its expertise, its beloved product, and all of these products have spec sheets that contain way too much jargon. This can actually have the wrong effect, as the jargon could be confusing or misunderstood or plainly just go in one ear and out the other. What resonates best with prospects is providing them with content and information they are looking for or providing content that allays their fears. And the biggest fears a utility or municipality may have when looking to adopt new technologies are 1) how much does it cost, 2) will it work as advertised, and 3) will there be endless modifications to keep it working and be a money pit. Sharing success stories on the projects your firm has been involved with can help allay those fears.

Success Stories

Among the dozens of seemingly similar engineering firms with similar solutions, bidding on similar projects, a utility will likely select the firm with the lowest bid. But, if you can instead “win them over” with your successes, impress upon them your proof-of-concept wins, then they will be more likely to choose you over others even if your bid is higher.   

The more success stories you can share in your ads, in your literature, in your press kits, and at trade shows, the greater your chances are of attracting new clients. Why? Because success stories, testimonials, are your proof-of-concept that shows you were successful in doing what you said you would do, and what you sold the customer works as intended.

While very few brands become national firms, with the right brand positioning and equity, in the form of great success stories and meaningful content, you could become a multi-state go-to firm for engineering services within utilities and municipalities.

We Can Help

At Water Online, we position content portfolios and capture reader engagements across all your subject matter experts’ content, from articles to webinars to interviews. In this way, a presentation delivered by an engineer at a local event in Wisconsin can resonate and engage a utility professional in Florida.

This approach snowballs. As your content is shared online, it reaches a wider audience and births new opportunities for more presentations, conversations, and pitches.