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February 29, 2024

Case Study: How Building Brand Awareness Helped This Solar Company Expand Across Canada

Branding Copywriting Digital Marketing Graphic Design Marketing SEO Web Design Web Development Wordpress

 

Our copywriting and graphic design team created these custom sales brochures for Shift with holographic printing.

Shift is a leading Canadian solar company that first launched in 2011 as a small team based out of Victoria, B.C. When they first started, they aimed to provide clean energy solutions for homes, businesses, and municipalities across Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland. Now, they’ve grown into a mid-sized business, with offices across the country, expanding their mission from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic.

But back in 2019, they weren’t getting the reach they wanted, and recognized their brand awareness needed more exposure. They connected with our marketing agency to help design vehicle wrapping for their company fleet to help boost their profile outdoors.

The result was such a success that they realized brand consistency across all marketing materials could help their reach go even further. Here’s a deeper dive into how we helped Shift’s brand go the distance.

Unifying a disjointed brand identity.
Branded business cards and letterhead for Shift.
The first step to boosting brand awareness is ensuring you have a cohesive brand identity. Our graphic designers created brand standard documentation, including colour matching for print and digital mediums, rules for logo application, and typography hierarchy. To complement the brand’s visuals, our copywriters put together a narrative tone to maintain a consistent brand voice across written materials. With brand guidelines in place, we updated Shift’s business collateral, including business cards, letterheads, e-signatures, and PowerPoint template, to create a cohesive brand experience.
Rebuilding Shift’s digital presence to increase online leads.
Laptop mockup of Shift website homepage designed and developed by Array.

Your website is a marketing tool with tremendous power to drive your business goals forward – if properly designed and programmed. It all starts with understanding who you’re trying to reach and why. For Shift, we identified three primary audiences: homeowners, businesses, and government. Using the narrative tone, we crafted messaging that would resonate with each segment’s pain points and goals. We then created a content hierarchy by reevaluating how to funnel people to the services they need. With an information architecture in place, we designed and programmed a robust website with SEO-rich copy to help Shift rank higher on search engines.

The site is responsive and custom-built on WordPress, allowing Shift to add and manage content as their business evolves. Custom features include animated illustrations, project filtering, and MailChimp integration, including a branded MailChimp template Shift can update for every newsletter.

Optimizing sales funnels with social media management and supportive marketing graphics.
Shift Energy Group's Instagram profile on the left, showcasing solar energy projects and podcast highlights, and on the right, a mobile screen displaying 'The Solar PVcast' podcast episode by Shift.

Just because you’ve launched a website, doesn’t mean people will automatically come to your door. You need to make the path easy to get there. Shift already knew the benefit truck graphics would have on their marketing efforts. To increase visibility in outdoor spaces, our team also created lawn signs they could place on sites where solar installations were taking place.

To increase sales funnels online, we supported organic social media management by creating and publishing weekly posts, Stories, and Reels. We also created graphic materials, including Facebook and Instagram icons, Canva templates, and YouTube & Spotify graphics. For campaigns, our graphic designers put together campaign assets that could be used for ads and organic content.

Designing trade show material and sales assets for the road.
Shift Energy trade show booth setup with a large display screen, promotional banners, and a counter featuring the tagline 'We Power Change.'

Finding new ways to market to your audience is key to keeping your brand relevant and fresh. As Shift started expanding into new provinces, they needed sales material they could leave with prospects. Our graphic designers put together a proposal template Shift could easily update depending on the scope of each project. Our copywriters then partnered with our graphic designers to create a stunning printed brochure that uses holographic foil-printing to create dimension and persuade readers to explore Shift’s services.

With these assets in hand, Shift lined up tradeshows and conferences to expand their network. Our graphic designers created a branded backdrop, podium graphic, and stand-up banners with QR codes that direct booth visitors back to the website.

A brand that continues to power change for Canada’s future.

Shift’s transformation from a localized solar energy provider into a dominant force across Canada is a testament to the power of strategic brand awareness and meticulous execution. Our partnership started at a pivotal point, identifying the role that cohesive brand identity and strategic marketing play in scaling operations and reaching new markets.

“Since the launch of our new site, we’ve been approached by several renowned businesses across North America who’ve found us through a basic online search,” said Colyn Strong, president of Shift. “We’re extremely pleased with our investment and will continue to work with Array for all our marketing efforts!”

If you’d like support with a marketing strategy that can boost your brand with brand development and digital marketing, reach out to our team today and find out how our award-winning agency can help you.