Compelling content delivers sales leads
Like many specialist businesses, Wheelabrator’s stories of innovation and imagination are complex and technical. Through a structured content programme, we captured and shared those stories with an international audience – engaging customers and delivering sales leads.
Challenge
Wheelabrator is a global surface preparation company, offering sophisticated equipment, parts and services for a host of sectors and applications, from aerospace to architecture. Its engineers are solving fiendish technical puzzles every day.
The number of stories is infinite, but it’s not always easy to get them – with hurdles such as customer approval and pending patent applications.
Our task was to develop a mechanism that would constantly find, assess and prepare content to engage a global technical audience – ideally for various uses, not just PR.
Activity
We developed a content production programme that would be powered by a new, monthly global Wheelabrator e-newsletter. This would provide a flexible home for stories of all sizes and work in tandem with global PR activity.
To keep time-poor technical audiences engaged, content has to be of editorial quality. So we worked hard to find stories from across Wheelabrator’s global network, turning them into appealing content that would illustrate complex technical detail in entertaining ways, without oversimplifying.
We used a wide range of formats to succinctly explain complex features and benefits – including press releases, blog content, tweets, infographics, whitepapers and web copy.
Results
In the first 9 months the newsletter programme generated 18 direct sales leads for large equipment investments or engineering projects. It also prompted media enquiries.
Click-through-to-open rates (CTOR) are used to assess the performance of stories, by geography and language, leading to above-average effectiveness of the newsletter in reaching its audience (CTOR of up to 37%).
The campaign also delivers average week-on-week uplifts of 32% in unique visits to Wheelabrator’s global website, drives content production for PR and social media activity, and boosts internal knowledge sharing across Wheelabrator locations.
Direct sales leads
CTOR
Increase of unique visits to the site
The Intelligent Conversation team have a unique grasp of our world – and the machines and people in it. They are turning our work into compelling stories and getting them out to the right people. We’re getting specific machine enquiries on the back of stories.
Vanessa Ashworth, VP Marketing Communications