Fast-Frame Makes Sense of the Steel Framing Industry

For the past few years, when­ever I drive through Down­town Dallas it seems like half the city is under siege with new con­struc­tion. Cranes loom over tedious steel grids on all sides of the high­ways as our fair cities’ sky­line extends fur­ther out every day. I always stare at those mas­sive projects and wonder how they can pos­si­bly coor­di­nate all that work and still come out with a build­ing that looks like the blue print. The con­struc­tion looks like absolute chaos for weeks. Then, out of nowhere, the cranes are taken down, the scaf­fold­ing is peeled off, and the glass facades are applied. What is left is an exact replica of the architect’s vision. It’s all pretty amaz­ing stuff, but its not magic rivets and fairy dust that makes it happen. Those build­ing get built prop­erly because of smart, hard work­ing guys like the team at Fast-​Frame.

Fast-​Frame is a divi­sion of Ger­dauAmeris­teel (Brazil-​based Gerdau’s first expan­sion into the United States market). They pro­vide end-​to-​end con­sult­ing and prod­uct deliv­ery for the lifes­pan of a steel frame con­struc­tion project. In Eng­lish, that means they look at your build­ing plans, figure out what you need, get you the best prices, and deliver all the stuff to you. It seems like that should be the way all com­pa­nies do things, but in their indus­try, cut­ting though the red tape and get­ting things done is a rev­o­lu­tion­ary concept.

Despite their obvi­ous advan­tages to cus­tomers, Fast-​Frame is new to the market which always cre­ates obsta­cles. With the help of their mar­ket­ing part­ner M2, they deter­mined many of the issues com­mu­ni­cat­ing their mes­sage could be solved by point­ing to a pro­fes­sional, well thought out web­site that clearly demon­strates the Fast-​Frame advan­tage to a vari­ety of poten­tial customers… and that’s where we come in.

After a little steel frame busi­ness 101 course, we iden­ti­fied a few chal­lenges and made sug­ges­tions on how Fast-​Frame could present them­selves online in a way that would get atten­tion and respect.

Estab­lish­ing Fast-​Frame as a non-​commodity provider was the first chal­lenge. At first glance, a typ­i­cal person thinks one steel beam looks just like another. It turns out, indus­try insid­ers like devel­op­ers, engi­neers, con­trac­tors, and archi­tects think exactly the same thing. In many ways they are right. One steel beam is almost just like another. How­ever, who deliv­ers the steel can make a huge dif­fer­ence. The trick for the Fast-​Frame site was to create a bit of drama right from the home­page that imme­di­ately opens view­ers up to the pos­si­bil­ity that this com­pany could be dif­fer­ent. We filled the site with strate­gic copy, case stud­ies, and pretty dia­grams explain­ing all the ways that Fast-​Frame is better. But that’s all lost if we can’t con­vince people to give us 10 sec­onds to sell the product.

The second chal­lenge was making sure each unique audi­ence finds infor­ma­tion that mat­ters to them. Most clients have a few dif­fer­ent audi­ences to speak to… Fast-​Frame has five! Our part­ner, M2 did a great job iden­ti­fy­ing those audi­ences and spelling out what makes each of them tick. We build pages that clearly estab­lished how Fast-​Frame could help each of them get their job done with less hassle and more profit. These pages then lead to common sec­tions that show ben­e­fits every­one is inter­ested in like recy­cling, sat­is­fac­tion guar­an­tees, and case studies.

When we set out to build a steel fram­ing web­site I was con­fi­dent we could clearly present their infor­ma­tion in a mean­ing­ful way, and I was sure it would look pretty good. How­ever, I must say, the Fast-​Frame site has exceeded my expec­ta­tions. My hat’s off to the rest of the Mar­ble­head team, the guys at M2, and our client for all pitch­ing to get this done right. It’s always fun when a project goes off with­out a hitch and this one was as smooth as I can ever remember.

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