Codex Office Solutions
Codex was founded in 1979, and has grown steadily to become one of the leading traders in office supplies in Ireland. This is a crowded market, with many companies competing for the same customers with identical or similar products. A marketing strategy needs to find unique selling points, or at least competitive advantages, to enable it to increase and hold its market share.
Office supplies is a high volume, low margin business, with very little room to differentiate between the products on offer.
Emarkable was brought in initially on a consultancy basis to assist Codex with its digital marketing strategy. It was agreed that Emarkable would use its ‘Elevate’ programme to introduce an inbound marketing methodology, and would develop the marketing automation system. The ‘Elevate’ program includes content marketing, search engine optimisation, paid advertising, social media and email marketing. This also included the Pay Per Click option.
Because Codex has a very large database of customers the initial segmentation of those customers was important, as it enabled Emarkable to develop targeted campaigns to ensure that the offers and information were sent to the right clients. Information on products that were of no interest to a client would be counter-productive, whilst an accurately directed campaign should result in sales increasing in all the different segments.
Initially, Emarkable set about developing awareness to increase Codex’s market share, by engaging with companies that were not existing clients. Emarkable set up and explained the strategy, which Codex were able to implement with the aid of an executive who had been trained and briefed by Emarkable on content management and inbound marketing with ‘SharpSpring’ as the marketing automation system.
After a considerable amount of research, together with a competitive analysis of the different suppliers in each of the segments we had identified, we rebuilt Codex’s website, and brought it up to a standard where it was competing with the best class stationery products suppliers in the business.
The main action points of the Codex campaign were the identification of potential key areas where the client can differentiate from their competitors, and the use of marketing automation in the development and nurturing of clients in a mature market. This called for a close working relationship with Codex, as the plan for business development needed to be accepted and agreed with the internal team. The employment of a new marketing executive who had been trained by Emarkable and who was therefore familiar with the ‘Elevate’ program was an important part of the strategy, as was the testing of the programme, followed by the training of the in-house team, and a period of supervision to ensure that the day to day marketing operations ran smoothly.
