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       Bringing a new product or process to market is never easy, but Decorative Pavement Marking Company of Plymouth, Minnesota has successfully created a niche for itself and its pavement marking products through innovative use of video, controlled use of at least one social media platform, and good old-fashioned tours.
       The decorative pavement marking company was founded in 2004 by President Lanet Johnson and Vice President Randy Johnson as a division of their successful asphalt paving company, The Original Driveway Design, which also offers the original stamped asphalt, Streetprint, through Integrated Paving Concepts (IPC). Driveway Design was founded in 1977. It initially focused only on driveways, but over time expanded to include other surfaces, including bike paths, park trails, and roads. Today, the Johnsons focus on driveway design, with 20 percent of their work in parking lots and 80 percent in driveways. Randy Johnson said they are working hard to re-establish themselves in the parking lot maintenance market. When IPC introduced DuraTherm to the market, Lanet and Randy were so excited about this new decorative, durable product that was better suited for high traffic conditions that they decided to start a new company to capitalize on this new product.
       “We saw a great product for municipalities, bike paths and crosswalks, and we saw a lot of other opportunities that were a good fit for this product,” Randy said.
       Today, the six-employee company is known statewide for its creativity and innovation in the design and installation of crosswalks and other pedestrian signs. But it is not a pavement marking company.
       ”We don’t want to be in the sidewalk marking business, we want to be in the decorative pavement business,” said Lanette Johnson, president of Decorative Pavement Markings. “We want to look at and focus on the unique circumstances that governments, municipalities and shopping centers face.”
       Lanet noted that most of the decorative pavement marking companies’ work is crosswalks. They’ve also completed “safe routes to school” markings for a state project, as well as installing speed-calming medians (a 6-foot-wide decorative pavement in the middle of the road to slow traffic). In fact, when you go to their website, the first thing you see is a median installed in front of an elementary school in Minneapolis.
       Another median has been installed on Selby Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota. The city originally planned to install a traditional concrete median at the site. During the design phase, a decorative pavement marking company was hired to offer a 6-foot-wide, 2,000-foot-long decorative median.
       ”It’s a busy road with a lot of buses and a lot of on-street parking, and they were going to put a concrete median down the middle. But if they did that, residents wouldn’t be able to cross the road to get to their driveways, and people wouldn’t be able to cross the road to go to the store,” Mr Lanett said. “And it would also cause a U-turn, which they didn’t like, so they went with our design.”
       She said contractors are sometimes asked to recommend solutions or designs, as was the case with the Selby Avenue project, but in most cases these requirements are already included in the bid specifications. But first they need to educate the market about what the product is, what it can do and how long it will last.
       “We really opened up the market in Minnesota,” Lanet said. “We made connections, did demos for people we knew, and were fortunate to have Dave Holt (former director of the Minnesota Asphalt Pavement Association) help us. Dave was instrumental in getting the new product out to local consulting engineers and city, county and state agencies.”
       This is important, she says, because products need to be designed and specified for each project individually before they are put out to tender. Once the specification of the work is set, it is difficult to change, which is why it is so important to educate both the end user and the engineer when it comes to decorative pavement markings.
       Randy Johnson said another hurdle they faced was getting their products on the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) approved/qualified list. He said engineers are reluctant to list products that aren’t on the approved list because unapproved products can’t be used on state or federally funded projects. The decorative pavement marking company partnered with the MnDOT’s Division of Materials and Research to test DuraTherm at the MNRoad Test Facility, which helped complete the two-year approval process.
       The key to breaking into the decorative flooring market was finding the right people to develop a specific product, and Randy Johnson turned to LinkedIn, a platform he first discovered in the winter of 2012–13. Johnson says an IPC sales representative sent him an invite to LinkedIn, and he clicked on the link. He listed his company on LinkedIn, created a profile, and within four days, LinkedIn began showing him engineering positions and transportation talent—exactly the types of people he wanted to reach with his new business.
       He remains very selective about the companies he contacts and currently has relationships with over 390 companies that have a direct interest in decorative road marking products.
       In the winter of 2013–14, he launched his first marketing campaign through LinkedIn “because I could message people who were directly involved in transportation and landscaping.” He invited them to host a free “lunch and learn” event and provided a link to a two-minute innovative video on “how they did it,” along with other opportunities. “We don’t want to bother people, but we want to give them something that will grab their attention,” Randy said. “People are busy from spring to fall, but once you get into November through January, they’re very receptive to us coming to visit them.”
       This year, Decorative Pavement Markings, with the support of Mark Sallman, TrafficScapes representative for the Ennis-Flint region, hosted several Lunch and Learn sessions for consulting engineers and landscape designers in the Twin Cities area. “It was a great opportunity to answer a lot of questions and demonstrate the many uses of TrafficScapes,” Randy said.
       He said LinkedIn has proven itself to be an effective marketing tool for companies that don’t want to spend a lot of money on marketing. “Marketing has always been a challenge. We have limited resources, and one of the great things about LinkedIn is that it doesn’t cost anything,” he said. “Direct mail is great, but it’s expensive, and you can never be sure that your direct mail is going to the right people. LinkedIn solves both of those problems.”
       ”You see that social media users, especially young people, are very responsive. We need to take advantage of technology, and that’s what we did with LinkedIn.”
       “The idea is to use social media to make personal connections,” he said. “We wanted to connect with engineers face-to-face, and we thought we had a better chance of reaching important people through LinkedIn than by cold calling, which doesn’t bypass the middleman. The idea wasn’t to remove the personalization, but to just connect through LinkedIn so we could make personal connections.”
       LinkedIn is also effective in engaging audiences when Decorative Pavement Marking holds presentations for municipalities or property owners, he said. LinkedIn will send information to your LinkedIn connections letting them know the time and location of the presentation, and those connections will typically attend or send someone to see it.
       ”We know it’s working because when we do an effort, we notify people on LinkedIn and we see people drive up and put on orange vests just to watch the process,” he said. “They want to know how it works.”
       Randy Johnson’s work at LinkedIn helps him find the right talent, and one of the ways he trains them is through engaging videos the company sends to LinkedIn contacts.
       If you can keep the customer’s attention, training becomes easier. So they borrowed an idea from another company, The Original Driveway Design, and created a fun stop-motion video that was edited to reduce the four-plus hour process of installing a crosswalk to two minutes. “People always ask us how we do it, and we can show them how quickly and fun it is with this two-minute video,” said Randy Johnson.
       ”It’s really important to us, it helps us educate our customers better. People didn’t really understand how we did this before, but with this video, they can see how a full crosswalk is done in two minutes,” Randy said. “Then they have a lightbulb moment and they understand.”
       Original Driveway Design’s dynamic video, which condenses a driveway demolition and remodel into two and a half minutes, has been a big hit at home improvement shows. “Once people start watching the video, they stand there and wait until it gets to the right point before they leave,” Randy said. “It gives us time to engage with customers. They say if you engage them visually for three seconds, you can start a conversation with them. We do a lot more than that,” Johnson said, adding that he hopes the crosswalk video will have the same effect.