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PacBlue Printing

PacBlue Printing (PacBlue) is one of Western Canada’s largest printing companies, providing innovative printing solutions to companies of all sizes. In an effort to reposition themselves from a reprographics company to a digital printing company, they approached Hot Tomali to redesign and develop their website—making it more user-friendly and more reflective of PacBlue’s reputation for providing high-quality printing solutions.

Solution

Hot Tomali identified potential shortcomings with communicating PacBlue’s old brand identity. PacBlue’s old brand assets were out of date. They had not been changed in 15 years and they did not support PacBlue’s high-quality image. Hot Tomali set out to redefine and develop PacBlue’s brand—one that was more memorable and reflected PacBlue’s commitment to high-quality solutions.

Hot Tomali’s creative journey with PacBlue’s brand began with their logo. Realizing the need for PacBlue to articulate their digital services, Hot Tomali created a custom digital style font for the company name, bookeending the wordmark with cropmarks. The style of the logo allowed it to be reduced to an iconic symbol—just a “P” between the two crop marks. PacBlue’s colour palette was also updated to contain more modern and vibrant colours. Hot Tomali finished this process by providing a brand style guide so that their new brand assets could be used consistently.

PacBlue’s new brand identity translates beautifully across all marketing materials: business cards, posters, advertisements, and its website, which acts as an appealing platform for showcasing PacBlue’s exemplary print work. Following with the “Content is King” mantra, PacBlue’s new website also features much richer and more engaging content than their previous site, such as enhanced imagery; information on PacBlue’s culture; dynamic news; a blog; product and how-to feeds; and their unique “scan of the week” feature that demonstrates the capabilities of their powerful cruse scanner: it allows viewers to see an extremely close-up view of an object and guess what it is, prior to it being revealed.

In addition to the rebrand, PacBlue also sought to reconnect with advertising agencies, which had become disinterested in PacBlue over the years. Hot Tomali realized the need to wow the agencies with something unexpected that could re-engage them and provide an introduction to the new branding. With large-format printing a PacBlue specialty, and with the new branding completed, it was the perfect opportunity to do a business card drop-off with a twist.

Results

Since the launch of their website on April 1, 2009, PacBlue has observed the following:

• Total visits to the website have increased by 57.51%
• Total unique visitors to the site have increased by 85.42%
• Organic search engine traffic visits are 14.95%
• Organic search engine traffic bounce rate has decreased by 5.35% (indicates an increase in more qualified traffic)
• Internal sales staff are much more proactive at using the website as a sales tool
• Reinvigorated agency interest in PacBlue, getting back in the loop and top of mind for large format jobs

www.pacblueprinting.com