“Thanks to our partnership with Cognition, we can now measure the return on our marketing budget and point at customers that we never had before. Our visibility has increased and our order book significantly improved."
David Buckley, Owner and retired Managing Director of Sparc Systems Limited
About Sparc Systems
Sparc systems has delivered check-weighers, X-ray, label inspection, bespoke weighing systems and industry-leading products and service to the high-risk food industry for over 40 years.
As a result, they are uniquely placed to push the boundaries of innovation, delivering world-class systems and pinpoint accuracy to the bakery and protein sectors.
Challenge
"Sparc Systems had come a long way with our products. We had a highly focused range and a good reputation for innovation and quality but, for a forty year old company, we were largely unknown even in our home market.
“We had next to zero marketing collateral, no in-house marketing knowledge and worse – a Managing Director (me) who did not believe that the marketing spend we were contemplating was worth the investment." [David Buckley]
Solution
“Cognition listened attentively to my pessimism and then went on to completely change my viewpoint and, it’s fair to say, that of the whole company.
Cognition integrated themselves into our business and, together, we set about implementing our marketing strategy. Along with improved sales and marketing collateral, we built a strong digital presence via social media platforms and quickly improved our visibility.
It took about six months of a steep learning curve, setting up the inbound marketing processes. Then it all sort of happened at once. We had reached the critical mass of visibility and information. We started getting enquiries from larger national and international companies – none of which had shown any interest before." [David Buckley]
Results
"Within two years of our first meeting with the Cognition team we had:
- Doubled our turnover
- Created an international brand
- Increased our export revenue from next to nothing to more than 50% of turnover
“After analysing our business and gaining a thorough understanding of our products and customers, Cognition helped us develop our own marketing strategy while patiently explaining the whole process to the pessimist in the room (again, me).
“We started to reap the rewards of having a robust inbound marketing system, which – coupled with the use of HubSpot – allowed us to respond to the increased activity and measure our performance.
“Cognition then showed us how to use the marketing and CRM data that we had collected to proactively promote new products and develop new markets. The team also helped us identify and exploit international markets by providing us with accurate and insightful business intelligence – allowing us to focus our activities in the areas likely to provide the best returns." [David Buckley]
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