Design

Building

The problem with a near-miss is that it&#8217;s still a miss. Getting your market positioning almost right isn&#8217;t good enough. We can help you position your company exactly where you want it to be, maximizing lead generation and improving lead quality.

Sell exactly what you want, to exactly the right audience

B2B brand strategy

The perfect tagline for property staffing group

When we started working with Royale Company, they lacked direction. Although everyone agreed that they were a property staffing company, stakeholders could not agree on their precise positioning. Residential or commercial? Urban or rural? They needed strategic clarity, and they needed messaging that supported their position.

Want clients to notice you? Speak their language!

Royale Company&#8217;s biggest challenge was a lack of clarity. Each person involved in the company had a different idea about where they were today, and where they&#8217;d be tomorrow. What they needed was a clear direction, and a strong message to support that direction.

Challenge

We consulted directly with Royale&#8217;s leadership, discussing the benefits and drawbacks of various market positions and identifying their areas of strength. In the end, we determined their service category was &#8220;highrise staffing services specialized in premium hospitality&#8221;. From there, we re-wrote the contents of their website and marketing materials, introducing the tagline &#8220;Premium People For Your Property.&#8221;

Solution

<ul>
<li>66% organic traffic increase after introducing relevant, positioned website content</li>
<li>254% increase in form conversions since repositioning</li>
<li>35% average time-on-page increase, signaling improved content relevance</li>
</ul>

Results

Marketing

Paid Search

Manufacturing

You may be wondering why we&#8217;re featuring a campaign that never launched as a case study. Sometimes, cool ideas get left on the cutting room floor due to lack of client buy-in, insufficient budget, or general lack of alignment. That doesn&#8217;t mean the idea was bad! It just wasn&#8217;t a fit for that client at that time. We love it when marketing gets weird, cool, kooky, and crazy. If you have an outside-the-box idea you&#8217;d like to explore, get in touch with us today!

Bold campaigns for bold clients

B2B product marketing

Creative LinkedIn ad campaign for thermoforming

Some industries are inherently cool. Others, not so much. Thermoformed plastic packaging falls into the latter category. It&#8217;s useful, it&#8217;s important, and it&#8217;s all around us. But it isn&#8217;t fun and exciting! We wanted to change that with a fun campaign leveraging one of the most recognized action franchises of all time: The Terminator.

From boring to badass: selling high-tech packaging machinery in a novel way

Our client wanted to explore new ways to market their latest product, an advanced thermoforming machine. The product benefits included faster run times, less human involvement required, and more usable surface area per sheet than leading competitors. The client felt that while the machine was good, it wasn&#8217;t unique&#8211;nor was it a great leap forward from previous models. The campaign would need to rely on branding, messaging, and emotional connection rather than simply expressing product benefits.

We took the time to evaluate our client&#8217;s purchasing audience, finding it was largely composed of technically proficient middle-aged men with engineering backgrounds. Then, we brainstormed a variety of possible campaign directions before arriving on our favourite: &#8220;The Thermonator&#8221;. The idea was to create a retro microsite mimicking an 80s arcade style. Featuring pixel graphics reminiscent of early Terminator video games, the campaign would express product benefits in the structure of the first movie&#8217;s tagline: This machine is powerful, versatile and indestructible. It can&#8217;t be reasoned with. It can&#8217;t be bargained with. It feels no pity. No remorse. No pain. No fear. It will have only one purpose: to form plastic packaging with extreme efficiency. This machine will be called&#8230;The Thermonator.
This campaign intended to steer around the &#8220;boring&#8221; product benefits and speak to the average purchaser&#8217;s likely nostalgia for a beloved sci-fi franchise. The goal was to support the microsite with a branded LinkedIn campaign, using its unique look and voice to entice users to click.

The result was&#8230; a rejected campaign! Unfortunately, despite our passion for this particular project, we were unable to get it cleared by the client.

Website

Professional Services

&#8220;BlackBean demonstrated an understanding of who we are and what we are trying to achieve and how our website is a tool to do that. They showed us information we didn&#8217;t know, suggested things to include and to remove from the new site, and made it very user friendly for us working on the back end as well as for our clients using the new site. &#8221; D. Walls, Communications Manager

UI/UX-First Website Design

industrial website design

Building the right website for the job using UX excellency.

<div class="markdown-body pb-20">
Skills Centre is an employment and career services agency operating out of British Columbia’s rugged West Kootenay region. As the largest provider of employment services in the region, thousands of people rely on Skills Centre services to upgrade job skills, find work, and access community resources. Skills Centre engaged with BlackBean in 2021 to rebuild their website in order to better serve their organizational objectives.
</div>

High performing website for career readiness service

<div class="markdown-body pb-20">
The previous Skills Centre website presented a unique UI/UX challenge. The website received tons of organic search traffic and high engagement from its many visitors, but not the right kind of engagement. Users arrived on the popular regional job board, leaving before exploring Skills Centre’s training and employment services. These services are Skills Centre’s core mandate, but remained underutilized by its prospective clients.
</div>

Our solution was to ‘go with the flow’. Skills Centre successfully attracts dozens of viewers per day to its website, largely through its presence in Google for search terms like ‘kootenay job board’ and ‘jobs near Trail BC’. Instead of trying to deflect users from the path of least resistance, we leaned into the job board. We developed a tagging system to highlight relevant Skills Centre services for each job. Is the user looking at a job that requires first aid certification? They’ll see a call-to-action to register for first aid training through Skills Centre.
The Skills Centre job board was rebuilt to distribute traffic to relevant services. This technique supports Skills Centre’s strengths in terms of user acquisition. The goal was to align with the wants and needs of their audience, adding value instead of imposing a different experience.

<div class="markdown-body pb-20">
Before rebuilding the website, over 85% of website traffic visited the job board and went no further. On the new website, 43% of users engage with content other than the job board on their visit. Content engagement improved substantially. Users spend an average of over three minutes on-page on the new website, compared to just 1:29 on the previous version. Average search position and overall search volume also increased due to improved website quality and SEO. As percentage of traffic share, search traffic has increased from 45% to 60% since launching the new website.
</div>
Too many websites get built as though they&#8217;re works of art. A website is an information tool. UI/UX is the science of making that information accessible and enjoyable to navigate for your target audience. We can help you build a high-performing marketing website using the science of great user interface design.

Strategy

&#8220;The work BlackBean has done for us looks great. It&#8217;s really neat, it&#8217;s professional, and it&#8217;s creative.&#8221; &#8211; General Manager, VEGA Instruments Canada Ltd.

Testimonial

B2B manufacturing marketing

Massive marketing optimization effort for manufacturer

VEGA Instruments is a German-based manufacturer of industrial smart sensors. We worked with their Canadian division to clarify their product offering, better support their sales team, and develop better marketing visibility for their team.

Top-to-bottom marketing cleanup

VEGA Canada faced several marketing challenges. First, their data lacked integrity. Many records in their CRM were inaccurate, poorly segmented, or incomplete. Their sales team felt unsupported by marketing, and their marketing materials were often clumsily translated from German.

We worked with members of VEGA&#8217;s team from leadership to admin and support to build out better processes, clean up their CRM data, segment their customers into accurate and meaningful lists, and provide superior sales resources to close more deals.

<ul>
<li>CRM: Audit, review, tiering and optimization to generate and measure true marketing efforts and results</li>
<li>Sales: Playbook for sales team, sales enablement and meeting handbooks to bridge the gap with marketing and ensure optimal flow of information to increase revenue.</li>
<li>Brand: Awareness increased through sellers&#8217; vehicule branding, personable videos, and innovative trade show design.</li>
</ul>

B2B manufacturing marketing

Massive marketing optimization effort for manufacturer

Everything about German sensor manufacturer VEGA says "accuracy", except their marketing. Struggling with clunky marketing software and unclear sales materials, we worked with VEGA to dig them out of a marketing mess.

Top-to-bottom marketing cleanup

Challenge

Solution

Result

Testimonial

See Results in Action

The perfect tagline for property staffing group

Creative LinkedIn ad campaign for thermoforming

Building the right website for the job using UX excellency.

Ready for bolt-on marketing performance?

Let’s make your marketing a powerful growth tool!

Signup Successful!

B2B manufacturing marketing

Massive marketing optimization effort for manufacturer

Everything about German sensor manufacturer VEGA says "accuracy", except their marketing. Struggling with clunky marketing software and unclear sales materials, we worked with VEGA to dig them out of a marketing mess.

Top-to-bottom marketing cleanup

Challenge

Solution

Result

Testimonial

See Results in Action

The perfect tagline for property staffing group

Creative LinkedIn ad campaign for thermoforming

Building the right website for the job using UX excellency.

Thanks! Don’t want to wait?

Ready for bolt-on marketing performance?

Let’s make your marketing a powerful growth tool!