Marketing support for engineering teams

Project Overview

Rochdale based engineering company, Salt Separation Services, approached me to acquire marketing support for their engineering team. They wanted to increase brand awareness, improve their online visibility, enhance their social media presence and up-skill their team.

From engineering beginnings

Without a dedicated marketing department, the commercially focused engineering team were charged with the responsibility of looking after the companies marketing content. Such was the technical nature of the content, this made perfect sense, but the problem was that the engineers weren’t marketers, so they needed someone that was able to provide marketing support for engineering teams to help them bridge the gap.

Marketing mentoring

Salt Sep employed a marketing associate that was studying a business and marketing degree but who welcomed the opportunity for real world experience in her study breaks. With my guidance we went through the discovery phase together and outlined a strategy and marketing plan to work with. We then reverted to a bi-weekly marketing meeting with the wider team to focus on implementing the plan.

Website Design

Engineering website development

One of the stumbling blocks of the plan was the teams inability to make the necessary changes to the website that they needed in order to improve its performance. A business case was put forward by the team in support of me redesigning and building the website on a new, more accessible platform that gave the team the control they needed.

Salt sep website

Social media template design

I designed branded templates for their social media content and provided the team with training in Canva and LinkedIn so that there was a consistent approach to delivery.

Marketing mentoring

Coordination of the engineering team

I used Asana to allow me to manage the teams’ progress, allocate tasks and provide structure to the workload. Soon the team were generating one technical blog per month and writing months of social media content in advance allowing them to publish consistently. Check out their blog here:

SEO training & support

I provided training on best practice SEO principles which allowed them to optimise their website, the new articles they were writing and start to see progress in the search engines.

The Results

The team has generated an increase in LinkedIn followers, an improvement in SEO, ranking for more keywords, received a website enquiry off the back of that for a project that was worth £250K and the growth in confidence demonstrated by their marketing associate was remarked upon by the company’s Commercial Director.

Feedback from the marketing associate

“Before working with Gillian, I had no confidence in my marketing ability at all, I felt like I was really out of my depth. However, thanks to Gillian’s mentoring, I have a lot more confidence in my marketing abilities.

I’ve learnt so much and also understand just how much actually goes into everything. Since working with Gillian I have learnt how to create social media content, create email marketing campaigns, create website content and optimise the website for SEO.

I found our accountability sessions really helpful in keeping us on track with our marketing activity and assisting us with any challenges.

Gillian helped to take us from a place where we had inconsistent social media and website content, a poorly optimised website and very little/no other marketing activity going on and she completely turned us around.

Personally speaking, this support has been really impactful, helping me massively with my uni work and improving my skills on a general level.

Gillian’s marketing support has helped Salt Sep to grow their online presence, and I have had numerous comments from people inside and outside of the business, saying how much they love what we are producing.

Without hesitation I would recommend Gillian to anyone, she is amazing at what she does, and her expertise and support is unmatched!”

Feedback from the team leader

“As a Chemical Engineer, I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into. With no prior experience I didn’t know the first thing about marketing. Now, I feel confident in talking through our strategy, what we have done to date and what we are doing in the future.

After working with Gillian, I understand the importance of consistent posting on LinkedIn, driving traffic to the website, what SEO is and how we improve it.

After each session we had, I felt like progress was being made and that even the small steps counted towards the bigger goal. We definitely achieved what we wanted to achieve which was to improve our social media presence and since re-launching our website, we have made it more user-friendly and easier for us to work with.

Personally speaking Gillian has helped to develop my confidence and understanding of the importance of branding, marketing and overall consistency of our approach. I now know how important these are to expand our footprint and brand awareness.

When we began, we were not being found on the first page for any of our keyword searches and now we are ranking for them. Our followers have increased significantly and our organic traffic is vastly improved. The impressions of our posts have gone from around 3K to 10K+.

If I could say anything to someone thinking of working with Gillian, in the words of Nike, Just Do It.”