Case Study – Entrainment Consulting

This case study is about the successful launch of Entrainment Consulting, a brand new engineering firm that designs electronic systems for the high-end residential market.

The question I always start with is "Why?" Not the what or the how, but why you do what you do. Entrainment is passionate about designing systems that work for the homeowner.

Entrainment is founded by an individual with decades of experience designing highly complicated systems for really big houses.  A 10,000 square foot home is about their starting point. Every project will have 10 - 50 miles of wire. Add dozens of computer systems that all need to talk to each other, and these projects can get complex real quick.  And, just for fun, the home owners are multi-billionaires that usually are not techno-gadget people. 

The name Entrainment is used in many different scientific fields. Loosely, the word means to synchronize wave forms into one unified wave. Entrainment Consulting is all about synchronizing human factors with technology, creating a single wave form based on how people live in the home. 

We developed a brand statement and focus for Entrainment Consulting and then drove the messaging.

 My scope for this project started out with just business development and customer acquisition. However, I dug deep into the brand, the marketing, and the messaging. The website is the marketing front end for Entrainment and we put significant effort into building a great starting point.

There are some realities about customer acquisition that drove Entrainment's website.

• The customer is the homeowner. While Entrainment can work for the Low Voltage Contractor, Architect, Builder, or Interior Designer; the ideal business relationship is to be on the homeowner's team and work directly for them.
• There is an important B2B relationship with Architects, Interior Designers, and General Contractors.
• Sales calls will be very focused on the Orange County and LA County B2B development.
• There are maybe 50 potential B2B relationships that will need to be earned.
• The website has the goal of reinforcing the outreach effort.
• A consumer has a low probability of searching for a service like Entrainment, but the B2B relationships will tell their clients to hire Entrainment. When the homeowner goes to the website, it must reinforce their goals and needs.

These customer acquisition goals drove the website functionality.

A big challenge is to find the ultimate benefit of any product or service. In this case the ultimate benefit is a system that is designed for the way people live. The human factors for living in a very large home drive the technology, not vice-versa.

We worked on language and imagery to support the human factors and people first. Most technology oriented companies want to try every whiz bang thing they can find. However, this really is putting the cart before the horse. Our focus was to set the tone that Entrainment starts with the homeowner, and then design the system. You will be hard pressed to find much technical jargon on the website.

The website's development was driven by the brand, functional requirements, and the mechanics of internet marketing.

• Brand
  • The brand, message, and story telling had to happen first and foremost. Entrainment needs to explain the name and the brand's Why.
  • We also had the challenge of helping the consumer and B2B partners understand that a design service like Entrainment is needed on large projects.
  • Our story telling has the challenge of staying at a high level in a benefit-oriented language. We used readability scores to help keep the copy at a high level.
• Functional Requirements
  • Getting someone to stay on a website is hard. You have 10 - 120 seconds to entice someone to stay on your site. I think this is generous because the tests were done in isolation without competition like text messaging, emails, phone calls, people coming in your office, and all the other stuff going on. Our solution was a simple message, "Do the right things". The visual shows technology, but the design draws your eye to the message.
• Back-end
  • I build all my client's sites on Wordpress as their Content Management System (CMS). Gone are the days of depending on a "webmaster" to run a site. To make this process even easier, I have a preferred theme, plugins, security, and back-ups already selected. In a week, we had a site running and published it a week or so after that. This is an important process for most small companies because they will get bogged down on design, wordsmithing, layouts, and graphics and never publish the site.

The next steps are:

• Begin the business development outreach
• Do some PR
• Offer article content to magazines
• Write our own blogs
• Explore adding social media

Since Entrainment is focused on a very small group, business development is the most crucial next step. We have built a target list and prioritized it. We will profile the targets in great detail, and we will begin knocking on doors. We have some interesting approaches to knocking on doors. Stand by for that case study report on what worked and what didn't.