Hi everyone and welcome to the Client Spotlight Podcast with Macraes. I’m your host, Katherine Seymour, and today we have a very special guest, Andrew White, President of Comptus, a leading manufacturer of environmental and industrial sensors instruments.
Comptus has been providing reliable, high-quality solutions for measuring wind, temperature, and environmental conditions for over 30 years. We’ll hear about Comptus’ journey, the challenges they’ve faced, and how working with Macraes has helped them increase visibility and grow their business. Let’s dive in.
Andrew, could you start by introducing yourself and sharing a bit about your role with Comptus?
Hello, Catherine. Thank you again. So as president of the company, my partner and I bought the firm back in 2012. I’m the operating manager. I do the business, financials, the marketing, the sales, the customer service. And he works on the primarily the product development and production and shipping and that side of it. So we evenly balance our duties, but I’m generally the front facing person of the business.
Fantastic! For those who may not know, what kind of sensor solutions does Comptus provide? And who is your typical client and who uses these products?
So we have four primary verticals, but I’ll get to that in a moment. We manufacture and sell environmental, outdoor environmental sensors for industrial and commercial applications. wind speed sensors, anemometers, wind vanes for direction, temperature, humidity, pressure, all the things you see on your daily ⁓ news and weather forecasts, but we tie them into industrial controls. So those can be renewable energy. So wind farms, we use our sensors.
Hmm?
We go into industrial parks, big buildings, cranes, offshore. We fit in wherever there’s a need to automate the function of a facility in response to the weather.
Fantastic. If you had to sum up what comptis is in one sentence, what would it be?
We are confidence. Confidence that a facility is going to be under control during adverse weather conditions particularly, and also that the information the operator or the provider needs to know is going to be accurate and clear.
Fantastic. What prompted you to start looking for digital marketing partner in the first place?
when
the company, the prior owner did no marketing. And we were realizing we needed to actually get ourselves out there. We spoke with some of our distributors for co-op advertising, but we also realized our shingle is really a digital shingle today. So when we reached out and I think back then it was Owen Media, right, Macraes, we spoke with them and they were able to provide help with building a website for us, as well as actually to provide some analytics
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to help us understand what kind of outreach we were getting and what kind of response we were getting, which was important to help drive our marketing activities.
You had many options when choosing a digital marketing agency. What made McCree stand out when you were deciding who to work with?
You’re right, there are many options. So one of the things we wanted to make sure of when we bought the company, the prior owner had used an individual who had built a very complicated and bespoke website, which was going to be very difficult to manage. So we were looking for a provider that could actually help us with a very common platform for a website so that if anything happened, it would be easy enough to do some edits and repairs and maintenance to the site. And that was available from a craze.
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So
that was one of our big decision factors there. Plus they were able to provide ongoing support. Having the prior owners single person web designer, if he had gone down, the site would have down. So we wanted to make sure we had a full team behind us.
Yeah.
Fantastic. Can you walk us through the work Macraes has done with Forcomptus, whether it’s SEO, content development, or other digital strategies?
⁓ it’s evolved over time, which is kind of the fun part. In the beginning, it really was about setting up the platform, getting the website running and smooth and making it more current. ⁓ And that’s been an ongoing process. As well, when they started doing the analytics, we were able to see what particularly keywords.
and kind of work with them. were very helpful in helping us understand what we were trying to do with our keywords. So that was very helpful because then we could see again, we’re a B2B business. So a lot of our business goes through distributors and resellers. So we don’t have lot of visibility other than, you know, to be able to see what those distributors are trying to do with our products. So there was the platform, there was the basic analytics, and then it came to the marketing side. And that started with
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We did some clicking as some click bait, sorry about that. We tried to do some advertising that would actually show some activity coming to our site. As well, we wanted to make sure we understood what the response was, what was working, what wasn’t. So that’s big part of it.
How would you describe the communication and the overall working relationship with the McCready’s team?
not overwhelming, which is really great. As a small business owner, I can reach out and get a response very quickly.
Never more than a day, but oftentimes within an hour. But again, this isn’t something that requires instantaneous response, but Macraes is very responsive. Also, what we see is that they will do a quarterly report with us or a review of where our performance is, what’s going on, make suggestions. So I basically have a marketing support team through Macraes as an extension of my business. I can’t do it all, so it’s very helpful.
Fantastic. What are some tangible results you’ve seen since partnering with us? For example, increased search rankings, more traffic to your website, or just new leads?
It’s been primarily just what we try and do because our…
reseller and distributor partners do a lot of our advertising ⁓ through their website. They do their own advertising. It’s more about building brand awareness and brand recognition. So we work a fair amount on the blogs and that’s been a great journey. In the beginning it wasn’t as easy today. AI makes it really, really helpful and we can find the right message. And over time the messages have become more tuned to how I present our products, which is really kind of
I
Right.
So that’s a big part of it.
What’s the biggest single win for confidence as a result of working with Macraes?
Well, one of the things that we’ve done is we’ve focused on international sales and I think by having a broad
very accessible website with significant social media and blog postings. Our visibility is greater. We’ve grown our international market from when we bought the business in 2012, it was about 7 % of revenue. Today it’s pretty steadily over 50%. So we reach a lot of different countries in the world, including Canada. it’s about, for small businesses, you have to maintain a presence and you have to be visible.
Wow.
you
Thank
I think
for us, of the big wins.
For sure. Is there anything you think we could have done differently or areas improvement?
you know, to be honest with you, I’m not, I’m not, I really wasn’t thinking of that. I think that the customer service is excellent. The backend, which is doing the website maintenance is excellent. I don’t, again, I don’t understand enough about digital marketing to be able to say, they could be doing this better or that better. ⁓ so I think that what I, the one area where I think we could have built more of a,
activity around is the paid advertising. And I don’t, ⁓ but you didn’t push that on us. I’ve kind of, again, because a lot of our advertising goes through B2B through our distribution and resellers. It didn’t feel necessary, but I think that would be a significant enhancement for us going forward.
Right.
Makes sense, makes sense. What would you say is another manufacturing or industrial company that’s thinking about, what would you say to another manufacturing company or industrial company thinking of working with McCrease?
on.
But it all depends on the level of knowledge of digital marketing on behalf of whoever that client is. I think they want to make sure if they have questions, they want to make sure they understand what they need to find out and learn. It’s a partnership. So you want to make sure you’re open minded and willing to listen to what Macraes is offering you as opposed to just being this is what I want and it’s not a cookie cutter, particularly B2B.
Yeah.
Yeah.
⁓ Industrial manufacturing, commercial, it’s more subtle than that. So being a true partner and being engaged with your digital marketing firm is really important for making sure that you get the most out of your dollar.
Fantastic. Well, Andrew, thank you so much for sharing your story with us on our podcast. And your insights are incredibly valuable. We truly appreciate it. We’re excited to keep up the momentum and keep your website forth in line for your potential clients. Thanks for everyone listening and staying tuned to more digital stories on Macraes.
Great,
thank you again, Katherine. Have a good day.
Thank
Recently had the chance to sit down for the Client Spotlight Podcast from MacRAE'S, and wanted to share our journey at Comptus—how we transformed our digital presence and the incredible growth we've seen in international markets as a result.
Andrew White here, President of Comptus, a leading manufacturer of environmental and industrial sensors. We create technology that helps companies monitor everything from air quality to industrial processes. It's specialized work, and for years, relied heavily on traditional methods to connect with potential customers.
Comptus has been providing reliable, high-quality solutions for measuring wind, temperature, and environmental conditions for over 30 years. As Andrew explains his role: "As president of the company, my partner and I bought the firm back in 2012. I'm the operating manager. I do the business, financials, the marketing, the sales, the customer service."
Contact us to explore how we can help your business grow.
