Hrdlička is a well-established Czech family-owned company that has been involved in geodesy in context for more than 30 years. The marketing department was created in 2006 to support the business and was tasked with creating promotional materials, advertising items, and presentations about surveying services. All of this was used not only in business meetings but also at various events and conferences. Until 2010 it was purely off-line marketing support.
It was not until the next 4 years that marketing started to look at the online presence with the creation of the first web application UtilityReport - a mass submission of requests for comments on the existence of networks. A new brand, and identity with design, content, website, and other materials needed for business sales were created. MAWIS, the "gateway to the world of geodata," was also created in 2011, with new Hrdlička web services added over time.
Marketing is a dynamically evolving discipline using modern technology. It is the same as hardware and software, where there is a so-called half-life after which upgrades must be made to bring everything up to date. This also happened around 2015 with Hrdlička's identity and MAWIS services. The materials had become outdated and were not competitive, so they proceeded to professionalize in branding (brand), corporate identity (CI), graphic identity (GI), and related offline and online promotions to further help maximize sales by sales reps.
The next change and stage come in the "pre-Covidian" the year 2019. The global and Czech economy is thriving and business or sales are moving online in droves to so-called E-commerce. The digital age is here and new requirements for marketing to start selling licenses for products and services in the Internet environment are emerging. We have therefore built a brand new MAWIS 2.0 portal, implemented a payment gateway, prepared UtilityReport service packages (licenses), and started to create a new customer journey in the relatively conservative construction sector, where we largely target the technical community, designers, construction companies and technical infrastructure managers.
There is often a perception that investment in marketing is unnecessary in the surveying and geoinformatics industry. Everything works on company reputation, direct business contacts, and years of proven recommendation. This is largely true, but in the case of selling "cheap" web service licenses, with the size of a medium-sized business, it is no longer financially worthwhile for sales reps to run after "small" jobs and squeeze through more black paint jobs. We had to look at the situation from a different angle and decided to build digital marketing that would "support" itself by selling products and services or making money for itself. This goal is not easy to accomplish without the right direction and practical experience. That's why we started working with BOOTIQ.
Identifying a customer journey when marketing personas cannot be pinpointed soon proved to be a challenging task. Because the path to the target audience does not lead directly, it is challenging to explain all the benefits of the service to them through a single marketing channel. For this reason, we decided to focus on multiple areas of digital marketing - online, PPC, social, and traditional media, as well as email marketing. In addition, we still needed to teach customers how to order and purchase licenses for our services online. The BOOTIQ team helped us to optimize our marketing strategy. Within a year and a half, we found the optimal path and managed to reach the set goal of 1,000 users, representing a turning point in the profitability of the UtilityReport service.
To learn more about working with BOOTIQ, read the testimonial on the website: Hrdlička - BOOTIQ.
Mgr. Lukáš Opat
