Koroberi

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the brand manager for a lift manufacturer. We manufacture lift trucks, forklifts, and all types of material handling solutions. We are a global company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Koroberi?

We were going through a dark period of our marketing for one of our brands and were very anxious to work with a company to reinvigorate this area. We wanted to explode back onto the scene in terms of being a power brand.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We worked with Koroberi on two main elements: public relations and making sure that we are well represented in our trade publications and media placements, particularly in trade publications. We have been super thrilled with their work. They have definitely helped us achieve greatness.

They do content creation for public relations by writing press releases, product features, leadership-related pieces, case studies, and white papers; it makes up the majority of our content. We work very collaboratively to make sure that they’re aligned with our goals, marketing, risks, and legal concerns. Every company has them, and we work very closely with them on that. In terms of the media and ad placements, we very much needed to have a collaborative agency that could work with our creative agency. Koroberi does not design or create our ads, but they work with our internal team and creative agency.

What is the team composition?

We worked with 4-5 people. Two people really focus on the PR aspects and two people work on media buying and account management. There are a couple of other people who just help with the account management aspects.

How did you come to work with Koroberi?

I guess you could call it a referral. We had actually used them as our creative agency for one of our brands over nine years ago. We stopped working with them due to some organizational changes (didn’t part on bad terms); we had a different direction that we were heading in for how we structured our marketing. We kept in touch and liked the people there.

They are a small agency, and they keep their people because they are very good at what they do; they’re very specialized in material handling. The same people that we worked with all those years ago are still there and we’ve been able to reconnect. Our other brand had already gone back to Koroberi based on the experience we had nine years ago, and we were able to quickly follow suit.

How much have you invested in them?

Including our media buys, we are somewhere in the $300,000 range.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in November of 2019, and they helped us do our 2020 media planning. We are still working together.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We track our monthly media impressions — not paid media impressions but our public relations impressions, and we do a buzz report on our competitors as well. In terms of impressions from our media, we blow the competition away. Usually, they’re anywhere from one million to three million impressions, and sometimes we’ve had more than 30 article placements within a month within trade publications and targeted industry publications. They do phenomenal PR work.

In terms of our media buys, as I mentioned, we had been going through a dark phase where we weren’t doing much. Since we came back starting January 2020, we’ve averaged at least one million impressions from the paid media perspective per month on a very conservative budget.

We love how we’ve been able to track where the media leads we generated and follow them throughout the organization, all the way down the customer journey into the sales funnel. Now, we’re talking about ROI for our marketing efforts. It’s really exciting.

How did Koroberi perform from a project management standpoint?

They are excellent — always accessible — and we have regular meetings. As I mentioned, they also collaborate with our other agency partners, which is a critical must-have for us.

They are able to work on projects and manage our projects with multiple involved vendors; that’s one of their strong suits. We never feel like they have dropped the ball or missed a deadline.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The best part is certainly the expertise that they bring particular to our industry. It is a very specific industry, and they know it like the back of their hands. They always bring fresh and new ideas to help us improve and grow. It’s a joy to work with them as people, and It’s very nice to have consistency from an agency perspective. We work with the same people and build relationships and a knowledge base. That way, you don’t have to worry about having a junior account person join every six months and training them. We are working with the top people in their organization.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

This would be an interesting thing for someone to know if they were considering working with them. Unlike many agencies, their preference is not as a retainer. They bill by the hours they work on certain projects, and they do know how to stay within budgeted amounts. It isn’t like we have a monthly retainer where we pay and we’re not sure what it all entails. They send very detailed invoices and only charge for the work that they do, rather than a bulk of hours.