THE PROJECT

Outer Armor by Commercial Sewing

Marketing strategies that you can get on board with

Since 1967, Commercial Sewing has been manufacturing canvas products for the marine and power sports industries. They specialize in custom covers for boats, personal watercraft, and other recreational vehicles for Original Equipment Manufacturers, distributors, and dealers. Striving to design and build durable, water repellent products that withstand the toughest conditions, Commercial Sewing was ready to protect their brand and bring it to the next level—introducing Outer Armor!

BRANDING/LOGO DESIGN

All hands on deck.

Commercial Sewing traditionally sold directly to Original Equipment Manufacturers, but they were ready to take the plunge and create a consumer facing brand so consumers could ask for their products by name. One major obstacle, their name was not synonymous with their products.

Ryan Marketing took the ropes and eventually Outer Armor was created. A perfect description of Commercial Sewing’s products, but memorable, recognizable, and capable of evoking the feeling of protection and strength from consumers.

New name, no problem but let’s build a brand to match. Ryan Marketing designed a fresh, new brand for Outer Armor that would be worthy of consumer attention. Just look at the logo, captivating and modern! Brand guidelines included the composition, design, and general look-and-feel were distributed so Outer Armor would not be misrepresented.

Very few companies—26%—have brand guidelines that are easy for employees to find.^*

^{*Source: LucidPress.com}

WEBSITE DESIGN

Smooth Sailing

To ensure brand consistency, it was time to overhaul Outer Armor’s website.

The new website needed to be sleek, modern and more than anything, appeal to consumers. Ryan Marketing set out to design a website that had a user-first design. This involved a redesign, reorganization and creating new pages and content that did not exist before (blogs, photo galleries full of lifestyle images and an events page). This website now passes with flying colors!

Check it out

EMAIL MARKETING

Time to make some waves

Pushing relevant information to the right channels is important (we don’t want it to get lost at sea). Ryan Marketing creates Outer Armor’s email blast to be formatted with B2B best practices—working off of segmented lists, providing personalized content and always includings catalogs and ordering information.

TRADITIONAL MARKETING

Ads that reel you in

Each year, Ryan Marketing is tasked with designing new Master Creative for Outer Armor. This creative is translated into both traditional and non-traditional marketing.

For traditional marketing, media space is secured for Outer Armor in trade publications, convention/trade show materials and buyer’s guides. Our favorite hook, line and sinker on an ad is a great tagline.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Casting the bait to end-users

Like we said before, Outer Armor does not sell directly to consumers, but they are of course, the end users. Ryan Marketing created a full social media strategy to strengthen brand awareness with consumers in a way that speaks to them.

Lifestyle images are used that can be seen as aspirational and exciting. Split campaigns, a/b testing and multimedia content were used to find what content consumers wanted to see and interact with.

50% of people follow 1 to 4 brands on social media, 26% follow 5 to 9 brands, 22% follow 10 or more brands, and 3% follow no brands.

PHOTO/VIDEO

A well-stocked tackle box

All the traps are set and now it was time to make sure Outer Armor was prepared to continue their momentum.

With an expanding product line and new audience to capture, Ryan Marketing worked with Outer Armor to expand their current library of photography and videography. You have to admit, seeing an action shot of a boat driving into a sunset is captivating.