Every company needs an evocative website along with adequate promotion. This even applies to an industry such as ship-building, repair, and naval engineering. Our client needed to develop their online marketing potential through a new website, advertising, and sufficient social media support. With our help, they were able to maximise impressions, obtain new leads, and significantly decrease CPM for all their campaigns.

This website design and social media case study illustrates the steps we took to achieve these results, discussing:

• Ad strategy.
• Website and funnel strategy.
• Data analysis and audience segmentation.
• Using lookalike audiences.

Client Outlook

The client was a well-renowned ship repair, construction, and shipbuilding multinational that primarily operates in Europe. The main regions they operate in include Lithuania, Sweden, and the Scandinavian region. Their work revolves around naval engineering and construction with a specific focus on welding. The company’s work is B2B and they operate on an industrial scale with active projects all over Europe.

As a growing business, they needed to enhance their digital marketing so that they could attract clients and promote their services. To this end, they needed social media, web design, and digital strategy among other services. This required an overhaul of their existing website and a reexamination of their social media presence.

Website Design & Creation

As a company operating across multiple different European regions, they needed a website with 4 different languages. This was also appropriate for their growing scope in the coming years. Our team set out to work on the various elements and produce mock-ups of the new site along with plans for how to streamline the client acquisition and lead funnel.

The website would also serve as their recruiting platform since they were looking to grow exponentially. Our design strategy emphasised these needs by putting extra care into the contact page and careers section. The accessible new style of the website would help focus on the company’s successes and services with as few clicks to the information as possible, allowing for prospects to quickly move from the necessary company background straight to the relevant communication portals or job section.

We followed the same pattern for the English, Russian, Lithuanian, and Swedish versions of the site. These would play an additional role in the advertising phase as those campaigns would also be multilingual in nature.

Social Media Promotion

The other side of the coin for this project was an effective social media campaign. As usual, we began with an audit and then drew up a plan of action. The company’s existing content was functional but, with the industry that they were operating in, social media can be difficult. After all, not many people are clamouring to tune in for the content that a ship-building company provides.

They primarily wanted to focus on Facebook and LinkedIn for branding purposes. Both platforms would help create more presence and attract new recruits.

To help both these aims, we managed to personalise their content and drive better engagement. The company provided us with fun details or side-projects their employees had. Such stories helped humanize the company a fair bit and made them stand out from others or simply draw a bit more attention their way.

We also had them tag their project partners to help with cross-promotion. This worked fairly well and allowed the company to show off their growth and scope while adding useful hashtags and developing a new brand voice. This voice was professional for the business posts on LinkedIn but also informal for more lively posts like employee introductions and side-projects.

Social Media Ads & Lead Funnel Optimization

While we did post creative content, the real recipe for social media success was the promotion and advertising strategy. The client tasked our team with increasing both leads and online hiring efficiency. With these goals, we took a different approach than their usual style.

We utilized direct Facebook messaging and LinkedIn posts for effective outreach. To achieve this, we used multiple types of email copy for different segments and tested them. With the most effective messages identified, we set out to optimize landing pages and create a solid conversion funnel. This was in tandem with the web design.

With the website created, we were able to link them to the appropriate portals and judge the analytics to optimize further. This was primarily via tracking the forms on the website and sorting them into target groups and personas. This form of segmentation relied on the common interests of those arriving on the pages and whether certain social media users liked their Facebook page.

For further social media and Google ads, we used multiple synonyms for company operations or job roles to access any possible permutation of searches that we could think of. Another factor was pushing the ads in multiple languages to suit the new scope of work the client was aiming for. Therefore, the same ads and multiple synonyms had to be tested in multiple languages.

These could be further segmented into 6 countries of choice for optimal messaging. With the use of lookalike audience analysis, we made the ads far more effective and the numbers began rolling in.

Results

Our website services and social media ads have garnered a lot of impressions so far. We continue to work with the client, so the results are still shifting. However, some highlights are definitely worth noting.

The results of the tests showcase millions of impressions, very low cost-per-result, and a fairly low overall amount spent. In essence, the client now had a far lower cost-per-impression with far greater reach. Similarly, the impressions were not getting lost at the same rate either (due to the website and landing page optimization).

Similar results can be noted with the geographic segmentation of the target group. As one can see, the latest active campaigns have the lowest cost per result with far higher reach. While the Russian language ad group was getting lower impressions, we managed to find the keywords that would cost less to help make the most of the budget.

With these new operational strategies in place, we continue to make improve the company’s processes. The social media strategy is unique in that very few companies within this sector are attempting it. This gave our client a competitive advantage, especially considering the geographical areas they compete in.

The major takeaway from this case is that certain industries may be very technical (such as engineering) but they can have a lower tendency of testing digital marketing processes. That’s where we come in and help them find the best way to exploit their specific niche.