In 2018, Shell’s Catalysts, Licensing, and Services businesses began operating as one entity under a single brand: Shell Catalysts and Technologies (SC&T). As the departments came together, Shell leadership knew the new organization needed a cohesive marketing department that could:
That's why Ironpaper has led initiatives in three, core areas that are fundamentally changing the way SC&T does business:
Due to SC&T’s recent restructuring, the brand lacked a cohesive identity, mission, and message. That’s why Ironpaper spent the beginning of the relationship focused on building a unified digital presence in both customer-facing assets and backend processes.
The branding challenges SC&T faced were enhanced by the fact that there was no centralized website. Instead, they had three different websites — with 350 pages between them — that needed to be merged to showcase the benefits, solutions, and values of the new brand.
HubSpot insight tags were affixed to the global site, while a subdomain was created to host SC&T-specific landing pages, for more control over messaging, content and analytics. Moreover, creative solutions were applied to better utilize Shell’s existing CMS, adding flexibility and lead infrastructure to optimize existing data gathering and analytics.
To create a more robust digital presence, Ironpaper recommended building a LinkedIn Showcase page that could reach their specific audience, generate a following, and establish SC&T as a thought leader in the energy transition space.
As we accomplished these goals, one of the most powerful tools we used was video. Interview videos with Shell’s expert team were posted to make the brand more engaging and build a connection with the customer.
Prior to their relationship with Ironpaper, Shell manually recorded leads and interactions — missing out on valuable insights and opportunities. Ironpaper integrated HubSpot functionality into the new SC&T website, bridging the gap between sales and marketing.
Since we started tracking SERPs in Agency Analytics in late 2018, SC&T is up over 4,300 total positions. Thanks to these huge strides, we’ve become a trusted voice for SC&T’s marketing leadership to rely on.
Once a digital foundation was set, Ironpaper began a series of campaigns to generate followers, increase leads, and inform the customer journey.
To understand the pain points customers experience and create high-performing paid campaigns, Ironpaper interviews subject matter experts and salespeople at Shell. Their insights form the foundation of campaigns that are constantly refined by testing ad formats, messaging, and audience parameters.
This kind of experimentation empowers lead generation initiatives to provide closed-loop reporting that can pinpoint the most successful content and messaging. Plus, it helps marketing gather intelligence on individual customers, so they can educate the sales team during the marketing-sales handoff.
SC&T sales had experimented with a basic form of account-based marketing (ABM) in the past by assigning specific, high-value prospects to different sales teams. To take these efforts to the next level, Ironpaper enhanced the existing approach with creative, ABM-driven digital marketing.
For example, SC&T sales had previously targeted a mid-cap energy enterprise that was expanding into solar, green, and renewable energy products with limited success. To help them close the deal, Ironpaper created a microsite that spoke directly to their pain points and aligned their interests with SC&T’s value proposition.
We also generated content to reinforce this messaging and used it within a LinkedIn paid campaign that targeted company stakeholders based on role. Thanks to the native LinkedIn integration tool in HubSpot, we were able to seamlessly track company-wide engagement and ROI.Since its launch, the ABM campaign has been enormously successful, resulting in significant advancement of Shell’s profile at the client. The LinkedIn campaign alone resulted in more than 112 leads at only $9.43 per lead (CPL).
To continue boosting the sales team’s effectiveness, Ironpaper began to develop a more transparent buyer’s journey that could deliver the right message at the right time thanks to greater lead intelligence.
This involved collaborating with Shell sales to define clear lead qualification criteria for every phase of the funnel. Then, Ironpaper implemented HubSpot forms with qualifying questions and progressive profiling to improve lead quality.
Ironpaper mapped custom fields from HubSpot to SC&T’s CRM to ensure that sales can benefit from the data uncovered during the marketing process. For example, Ironpaper developed a custom ‘score’ for each lead, indicating their level of sales-readiness on a scale from 1-5. This has been a game-changer in the marketing-to-sales handoff because it provides a data-backed identifier that helps the sales team modify their approach based on objective markers like website interactions, content downloads, challenge questions, and more.
While custom reporting also increased transparency, Ironpaper did have some difficulty assembling exactly what SC&T needed. At one point, the team wanted to improve data visualization with a cross-object report that incorporated information from two categories, with a variety of filters, but it was difficult to do. If this functionality were improved, different categories of information — like sales-readiness assessments and content interactions — could be easily incorporated into one report and even more valuable insights could be gained through HubSpot.
According to the SC&T team, the impact of these changes is immense. The additional visibility makes sure the 89 hand-raisers who asked to talk to a sales person in Q4 2019 are contacted by someone who has deep insights into their needs and challenges.
In addition to these quantitative results, Ironpaper also helped SC&T achieve their secondary goal: to be recognized as thought leaders throughout Shell Global – elevating their profile as an innovative business unit, and proving the value of digital marketing throughout the enterprise.
B2B Marketing and Growth Agency.
Grow your B2B business boldly. Ironpaper is a B2B marketing agency. We build growth engines for marketing and sales success. We power demand generation campaigns, ABM programs, create B2B content, strengthen sales enablement, generate qualified leads, and improve B2B marketing efforts.
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