Axcend Automation

Prelude

When friend-of-RP Berty ebulliently says,“hey machan one B2B company will contact you for site content, you can do no?”, you pay attention.

About the client

Axcend operates at the intersection of manufacturing and technology, as they have for 20+ years. Think smartfactories, IoT, digital transformation, digital twinning, and generally making anything to do with manufacturing smarter. They work with engineering firms, OEMs, system integrators, and other players in the manufacturing space.

Why they came to us

The company had grown, evolved, and birthed many new services - and the erstwhile website wasn’t representing all of it well. More than that, the ethos of the company wasn’t being communicated. All in all, as Axcend was on a stage of growth, they felt the need to unify things and have a coherent brand message. Lucky for us, that the founder mentioned all this to Berty.

What we did

‍In short, we developed the brand’s positioning, built the website layout, wrote out the site content, and project-managed its design/development.

Step 1: In-depth interviews

To ensure all points of view were heard, we spoke to around 15 team members (including a client) to get their perspectives on what Axcend’s strengths and weaknesses were. This laid a pretty good foundation for us to recommend options for positioning.

Step 2: Developing the positioning

Over a series of iterations and a very collaborative process, we came up with the positioning statement that clicked for everyone:

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‍Axcend blends technology and engineering expertise to help the manufacturing ecosystem thrive today, and be ready for tomorrow’s challenges. ‍

This was elaborated out with several usecases and manifestations. We hope it serves as a bedrock for future communications.

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Step 3: Laying out the website

We quickly moved into consuming all ofAxcend’s content - existing copy on the site, case studies, PDFs, andquestionnaires - and suggested a layout for the new site basis their offerings,ambition and audience. This was more than a sitemap - it included structuraldetails of each page. This helped the team visualise the site better and makesure all use cases were taken care of.

‍Step 4: The actual writing!

We don’t need to elaborate on this. Let’s just say it involved understanding lots of technical details, taking leaps of faith, and constantly asking ChatGPT what various terms meant. So let’s just show you some lines we were pretty proud of.

Interlude: During the first visit to the Axcend office, Chuck noticed one red chair in the conference room (all the others were blue). He remarked about this, and was told that this wasn't a mistake. The company delibrately kept a chair of a different colour in the conference room to represent the voice of the client. Chuck got excited - he knew then and there that this would be a section of the website. And indeed, it was.

Step 5: Project management of website design & development

We teamed up with Markenzo Worldwide, who did a super job of bringing our words to life.

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What the project was a showcase of

Our ability to do good B2B content - abstracting it as and when needed.

Our approach of doin gseveral employee interviews first to truly get a pulse of the company.

Our ability to project manage and ensure stuff gets done. Chuck’s first job as a website test engineer came in handy!

The fact that “write copy for a site” is much more than just putting words to a Google doc.

The icing on the cake was - we managed to getthe site up in time for Axcend’s platinum sponsorship of a major automation expo.

The team

Client team: Gopal Padmanabhan, Judhisthir Patra, Harish Kumar, Uma Balakrishnan

Design & development partners: Markenzo Worldwide: Uday Rathore, Shivani Rajput

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What they said

I had a wonderful experience working with Deepak and Rough Paper. From defining our positioning and tone of voice to shaping the content for our website, Deepak was hands-on at every step, be it conducting a workshop for the team or interviewing our customers to understand why they work with us. He even helped manage the process smoothly when we collaborated with the website design and development team at Markenzo.What stood out most was Deepak’s patience and clarity—he really helped us cut through the noise and figure out exactly what we should be saying to our clients and how to say it.We’d happily recommend Deepak and the Rough Paper team for any marketing needs. We’re also excited to keep working with them!

Gopal Padmanabhan, Axcend