Marketing for Engineering Firms

Industry and Onboarding Videos

We started working with Rani Engineering in Minneapolis on their social media strategy. This veteran-owned, civil engineering firm has a positive reputation in the state for highway, transit, rail and water resources projects. They also have one very busy marketing professional.

She handles frequent proposals and the firm’s communications needs, but she also wants to be strategic about lead generation and nurturing. Recruitment is also a priority. Like we said, she’s busy.

Collaborating with our team has become a natural extension of her strategy.

Video Strategies for AEC Marketing

One of the firm’s marketing goals was to showcase their brand in a series of videos. They wanted the videos to be flexible for multiple uses: a lobby video for visitors and project partners, an employee onboarding video for internal use and a series of market/industry videos for prospecting.

They wanted their leadership team featured as well as their key market leaders. Highlighting projects and the brand of Rani Engineering was very important to distinguish their services approach and culture.

When we interviewed the leaders, we didn’t want to hear about “quality solutions” or their care for the team. Really. We wanted to help them differentiate through their personalities, their history and their personal approach to core values like collaboration and integrity. This is a seriously smart, but also fun group of people who like each other. In that respect, we wanted to capture the personality of their culture.

Video Editing Lessons Learned

A lot of AEC marketing videos focus on the projects, and we did that, too. But we wanted a natural flow between project images and a geographic sense of place that is recognizable as Minnesota. We also needed smooth transitions between each featured leader.

It was a complex task to include 10 different leaders in videos that were 4 minutes or less…and keep it interesting! So the video editing process was the largest piece of our strategy. To prepare, we developed questions and scheduled interviews on site with these busy leaders. We also grabbed some B roll in the mostly hybrid (empty?) office. .

Fortunately for us and Rani, they had just installed their new, beautiful sign on the outside of their headquarters building. It provided a nice sense of place for the onboarding and lobby videos.

We did need some tricks up our sleeve to complete the onboarding video with a voiceover from Rani’s CEO Steve Carleton. Did we mention that all of this work was around the holiday break year-end? So we jumped on a video call and re-interviewed him with some scripted questions to fit the onboarding video’s story flow.

We also found some stock Twin Cities video footage that allowed us to showcase the area briefly without an expensive drone set-up.

Adding a branded intro and outro to the videos, custom captions and appropriate musical selections brought the videos to life.

As a final value-add, we assembled a blooper reel to use for fun on Rani’s social media channels.

And the Results?

Rani Engineering announced their video project at a town hall at the beginning of the new year. The leadership team was delighted when they saw smiles and enjoyment, pride and laughter among the team while watching leaders talk about Rani’s history and culture. Nailed it!

All in all, the hard work by Ingenuity and Rani’s team was worth the successful outcome, and Rani Engineering can use these evergreen videos for proposals, recruitment, social media, their website and more.

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