DUZ Creative, Inc

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the Marketing Director at Epicor Software focusing on manufacturing in US/CAN and LATAM. Epicor Software provides Enterprise Resource Planning for medium-sized businesses focusing on five key industries: manufacturing, distribution, retail, automotive, and building supply.

We enable them to track and streamline their processes, connect their employees, make better decisions, and accelerate their ambitions—whether that’s growing their business, expanding their capabilities, increasing their productivity, or improving their efficiency.

For what projects/services did your company hire DUZ Creative, Inc?

Our manufacturing customers have a lot of data that they have captured in their ERP and need to leverage that data to make decisions. We sell a BI/Analytics solution that can be added to their ERP to allow customers to get insights into their data - where are their opportunities to improve their operations.

What were your goals for this project?

Overall sell Epicor Data Analytics to our current manufacturing customers. Brand awareness is a component and breaking through the digital clutter.

How did you select DUZ Creative, Inc?

I've worked with Duz since 2009 while working at Lawson Software. They are a great partner to help us tie together our brand message to the value proposition we want to communicate. The team helps us get to the heart of the problems we're trying to solve and communicate it effectively in our marketing.

Describe the scope of their work in detail.

We provide a creative brief, discuss our goals and objectives. Duz Creative always asks great questions to really understand the customers point of view.

Specific to this project, we knew many of our customers ask several questions about their data and our solution helps get answers to help them make decisions. Duz partnered with us to come up with Powerful Data concept, mailer options, design and fulfillment.

What was the team composition?

We had 3-4 Duz members in meetings and to help with overall strategy, project management building out the timelines, concepts, copywriting, design, proofs, finals and list files, and billing.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The mailing was part of an overall ABM campaign to a very targeted group of customers - 1700 contacts. We don't have a customer lead process in our CRM as our account manager work with customers and don't log opportunities against specific campaigns; however, we did see Epicor Data Analytics closed $270K in revenue aligned to these accounts.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We use Basecamp with Duz to project manage with calendars, file sharing, approvals, and communication. The calendars allow us to stay on track, know timing for review of materials and approval times. Everything is together in the project ensuring everyone has the information they need to keep the project moving forward.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Duz is amazing with branding, creative concepts and messaging. Internally we tend to be too product focused. Duz helps us get to heart of the message. Also, creativity and alignment of the copy and design is why we need an outside perspective.

Having an agency that does an amazing job with branding, adhering to our standards, and connecting all the messaging and design together is what we need and Duz delivers.

Are there any areas for improvement?

No. I continue to work with Duz as they know technology, branding, creative, messaging and design. They offer the complete package to meet our needs.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I work as a marketing manager with a photography company and I manage our yearbook work as well as our trade show and events programming as well.

What challenge were you trying to address with DUZ Creative?

We worked with them on two separate occasions, and the first was on creating an overarching strategy and design guide for our trade show booths around the country. The second was doing a similar thing with our marketing strategy, which centered a little more on targeting the pitch for our services than on designing trade booths and physical things like that.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Previously, all of our sales field organizations would do their own things in terms of boots and lead gen practices, so we had really widely varied results. DUZ Creative sat down and listened to our marketing team, listened to our creative leadership, and kind of brought together all the priorities of those different teams into a plan that we all felt proud of.

They did a lot of market research in building the final creative strategy, mostly consisting of going through all of our resources on our audience and just consolidating the information that was there. The final product was in the form of a strategic presentation that presented the most important creative concepts to utilize and clearly laid out tips and best practices for targeting those.

What is the team composition?

Our main point of contact was typically Eric (Creative Director, DUZ Creative), who helped manage a team of around 3–5 people and really lead the meetings in terms of bringing the project to life for us.

How did you come to work with DUZ Creative?

I had actually worked with Eric at a previous role and had liked the work he did there, so I reached out to him again for this.

How much have you invested with them?

In total, we invested around $30,000 in the project.  

What is the status of this engagement?

I believe we worked with them from January–May 2018.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The first time we were able to leverage a lot of their ideas in our product, it really made the process more effective and easier to get started. Even though we didn’t follow their recommendations to a T, it provided an incredibly useful baseline to get us started and have a common point that everyone could reference during the work. I don’t have any specific metrics to site, but it has definitely made our lives easier across the board.

How did DUZ Creative perform from a project management standpoint?

They held me accountable to timelines and were great about keeping the project moving. That took a lot of pressure off me in terms of making sure that work was getting done, which I really appreciated.

We mostly communicated with them through email or phone calls, and then they would come down to our office for a lot of meetings and we occasionally came up to theirs as well.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I think their ability to listen is one of their biggest assets. Sometimes we get so focused on what we think the end result should be that we lose some of the back story of how we got into the situation we’re in, and we need a team that was willing to be a little patient with us.

They were great because they knew how to push but they also know how to take a step back and really listen, which is so beneficial when you are working with outside agencies that often don’t have as much context on your business.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I don’t have any improvements for them. There were even times that they went above and beyond to help us out with side projects, so overall, I’m extremely impressed with their work.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be ready for them to ask some tough questions. I think the reason we had such great results was that they asked us really to the point, tough questions that were needed in order for us to get to the answer and the strategy that we did. Know your story, and know your direction, and then take the time to listen to their expertise when they’re done listening to you.