• 09
  • October

Bridgit Hits the Refresh Button on Messaging

Here’s another thing I learned: customers love Bridgit’s product. I heard story after story, supported by testimonials and Net Promoter Score surveys, that showed just how devoted Bridgit’s customers are to their solution. I don’t think companies realize just how rare and powerful this scenario is…at least not until they experience the opposite end of the spectrum and need to compete against a much-loved incumbent.

Elsewhere on this site, we’ve summarized this project in a success story; this post takes you behind the scenes to see how the project was delivered.

Background

As part of getting organized after arriving at Bridgit in June, and while concurrently planning for an upcoming major product update, Nicole DeNoble – the new Director of Marketing – saw an opportunity for a refresh. Faced with aggressive timelines driven by the pending launch, she reached out to Cromulent Marketing.

Nicole and I worked side-by-side at Sandvine for thirteen years, leading the Marketing Communications team and Product Marketing team, respectively, so we knew exactly how to work with each other and got started immediately.

Building a Strong Foundation

After a quick chat, we settled on two pieces of output for this project:

  • Messaging Guide to clearly define Bridgit’s messaging and to serve as a source of truth for all marketing communications
  • A brochure to show off their extremely user-friendly product

The brochure would fill a significant gap in Bridgit’s content portfolio by providing a single document to explain the company’s products, and the Messaging Guide would let Nicole and her team update website content, tweak ongoing digital campaigns, and generally ensure that all marketing communications pushed a clear, consistent message.

Cromulent was responsible for entire Messaging Guide and for the content of the brochure; the brochure’s design would be handled by Bridgit’s in-house designer.

I asked each the same handful of open questions, and madly typed as the respective conversations flowed…

A couple of days later, I popped down to Smile Tiger Coffee and met up for quick chats with Bridgit’s two co-founders, the Chief Revenue Officer, and the head of Product Management. I asked each the same handful of open questions, and madly typed as the respective conversations flowed (note to self: get a microphone!).

Listening and Learning

Before this project, all I really knew about Bridgit was that they’re a local company, and their product is a construction management app. Well, I suppose that’s not quite true – from a marketing peer-to-peer a few years ago, I knew the very legit story of their unglamourous first office space; it’s fair to say that this story generated in me a genuine respect for the founding crew.

Anyway, with that limited familiarity, I was eager to learn more.

Perhaps I’ll throw in a little aside here: for any project, I will research the hell out of the market, the company, customers, technologies, etc., but I don’t like doing that until after the initial conversations. Why? I want to go into these discovery chats with an open mind. A vague background familiarity and an ability to process information on the fly gives me what I need to ask probing questions and dive more deeply, but it doesn’t run the risk of me coming in with a foregone conclusion and then jumping into confirmation bias-mode. That is: I want to learn and to discover, rather than just convince myself that I’m right.

For this conversation, I had a handful of questions:

  • Can you tell me about Bridgit? What’s the Bridgit origin story?
  • What do you sell?
  • Who are your customers? How do you reach them? What do your customers say about you? What benefits do your customers experience?
  • Who are your competitors? What makes you unique or different?
  • In as few words as possible, why should a potential customer choose Bridgit?
  • Anything else?

That’s it.

Those questions might not seem like much, but I filled fourteen typed pages with almost 5,000 words of notes. These answers give me a very thorough sense of the company’s own ideas about itself, get me started on understanding customer motivations, and give me a crash course in the product. This information serves as the scaffolding or skeleton as I execute more research and develop messaging.

Those questions might not seem like much, but I filled fourteen typed pages with almost 5,000 words of notes. The beauty of asking such open questions is that I’m not steering the answers; every interviewee has the opportunity to say what she or he thinks is important. Sure, I probe a bit more deeply here and there (for instance, I got into product and customer details a bit more with the Product Manager), but the conversations flowed very naturally and were by no means an inquisition.

Moreover, by asking four people the same questions, I can diagnose immediately if there are any dangerous inconsistencies or contradictions (there weren’t!).

These answers give me a very thorough sense of the company’s own ideas about itself, get me started on understanding customer motivations, and give me a crash course in the product. This information serves as the scaffolding or skeleton as I execute more research and develop messaging.

Some Important Take-Aways

The first thing that struck me was how genuine and authentic everyone was (and I know that those are both buzzwords nowadays): the passion was evident, there was no posturing, no telling me what they thought I wanted to hear, etc…just very open, honest, conversations that provided what I needed to get started.

Next, Bridgit has a really engaging origin story. As I mentioned above, I knew a little bit about the circumstances of how they got started, but I learned that the complete truth is much larger. Many companies get started because a founder has a cool piece of tech, or encountered a problem and believes there’s a unique solution; in Bridgit’s case, the co-founders (Mallorie Brodie and Lauren Lake, who both had backgrounds in construction) knew they wanted to bring technology to the industry, but instead of just pulling together a bunch of tech in hopes of finding a problem or successfully forcing it on people, they visited literally hundreds of construction sites and – can you believe it! – learned from the market! They had hours and hours of primary research completed before they began to narrow down what solution they’d actually set out to build. What a cool story.

The origin story itself won’t close any deals, but it’s a supporting point in a larger message

OK, another aside: a cool origin story by itself doesn’t matter. Like, no one cares about your origin once they’re comparing products side-by-side. So why was I excited about Bridgit’s, beyond the narrative aesthetic alone? Because it shows a devotion to finding and solving real-world problems! The origin story itself won’t close any deals, but it’s a supporting point in a larger message about a point solution that addresses a specific set of problems that are common on construction sites.

I heard story after story, supported by testimonials and Net Promoter Score surveys, that showed just how devoted Bridgit’s customers were to their solution.

Here’s another thing I learned: customers love Bridgit’s product. I heard story after story, supported by testimonials and Net Promoter Score surveys, that showed just how devoted Bridgit’s customers are to their solution. I don’t think companies realize just how rare and powerful this scenario is…at least not until they experience the opposite end of the spectrum and need to compete against a much-loved incumbent.

Why do customers love the product? Because it works and is easy to use. Additionally, Bridgit’s solutions are very visual, which is another powerful characteristic that we’d need to utilize.

Unfortunately, I wouldn’t have really gotten any of that from Bridgit’s existing material. And I don’t say that as a criticism – I know better than most people how challenging it can be to craft a message and to produce great content – but simply as an observation.

So, to sum up: Bridgit has a terrific origin story that speaks to their genuine commitment to address industry problems; they have a devoted and passionate customer base willing to speak up on their behalf; and they’ve got an effective, visual, demonstrable product.

What they needed was messaging that clearly and convincingly conveys a value proposition for the construction industry, and content that gets the message across and leverages all those great factors already in their favour.

Turning the Gears

I took away my reams of notes and hunkered down for a little while to do more research into the construction industry, to learn about challenges facing developers and contractors, to become familiar with Bridgit’s competitors, and so on.

After synthesizing, analyzing, and other zings, I prepared the Messaging Guide. This document provided completely new messaging for Bridgit, showed how to relate the messaging to different target customers, included an exposition of the market challenges that Bridgit was helping customers to overcome, included all the usual stuff like taglines, boilerplates, and the like, specified the origin story, and carefully captured product positioning that related features to real-world customer problems.

Nicole and her Demand Generation Marketing Specialist immediately leveraged the guide to tweak web content, on-site signage, and digital campaigns, and shared it internally for anyone who wanted to learn the official outbound message.

Next, I pulled together content for a brochure; this very lightly formatted Word document was passed to Bridgit’s in-house designer, who did a bang-up job turning it into a really wonderful piece of content that practically earned a standing ovation from the sales team.

Success Factors

I mean, there wasn’t anything special going on here, but if I had to list things out…

Bridgit both recognized the need for a message and content refresh, and was committed to getting it done; they also had no qualms about bringing in an outside agency to speed things up and to overcome a skills gap. The appetite was there to get things done, and the project had high priority, so it was able to move forward very quickly.

Plus, Nicole and I have a great working rapport, so the lines of communication were always open. I trusted her to handle any internal things (e.g., managing reviews, getting information, etc.) and she trusted that Cromulent would do a great job.

And, cheesy though it may seem, I had great ‘material’ with which to work: having an authentic origin, a visual product, and a devoted customer base definitely makes things easier, because I can focus on crafting a message that showcases things that are already great.

I had great ‘material’ with which to work: having an authentic origin, a visual product, and a devoted customer base definitely makes things easier, because I can focus on crafting a message that showcases things that are already great.

In Closing…

What can I say? Projects like this one (and yes, all the others) are why I started Cromulent Marketing: I got to help out a local company while learning about an unfamiliar industry and meeting some great people.

My thanks to Nicole for opening the door for Cromulent, and thanks to the folks at Bridgit for trusting Cromulent to fill some crucial needs!

Header/Featured image credit: Bridgit

And, because it’s an amazingly designed and engineered toy, here’s a video of a mostly working Big Loader!

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