REFERENSES & CASE, SEO | READING TIME: 4 MINUTER | 11 SEPTEMBER
Thought Leadership Through B2B Marketing
68% increase in organic traffic.
Increase of contact requests via website contact forms: +23%.
The right marketing creates competitive advantages and a temporary monopoly on Google. Move your “zero to one” by creating a foundation that enables growth. Realize the value of being customer-oriented, invest long-term, become data-driven. The below case dives into how the B2B digital marketing journey looked for the service company Tüv Nord.
About TÜV NORD
TÜV NORD is a B2B service company in the inspection and certification industry. The global company was founded in 1869, and have their headquarters in Hanover, Germany. The group has over 10,000 employees across 70 countries globally.
The Problem
Following a reduction in sales within their nuclear power business vertical, Tüv Nord Scandinavia decided in 2015 to initiate a three-year strategic marketing focus in order to increase sales. The goal was clear: meet and fix a downward trend by generating new business. Another important KPI was brand awareness, mainly in the Swedish market.
“The goal was clear: meet and fix a downward trend by generating new business.”
The strategy to increase sales was developed to make use of existing demand from both potential and existing customers: a so-called Pull Marketing approach. The certifications industry is highly knowledge-intensive, making the vision of thought leadership (“Wikipedia of our industry”) both possible and an interesting way to attract new customers, partners, and coworkers.
The Solution
Below, we outline and explain Tüv Nord Scandinavia’s three-year journey together with GO MO Group. Initially, we present how a temporary search engine monopoly can look. One of the goals of the collaboration was to “own” key topics and become a thought leader. Below are some examples of how this was achieved.
Keyword: PED
Yearly Search Volume: 8640
Current Client Ranking: 0 Position (Answer box)
Keyword: Riskmatris
Yearly Search Volume: 2520
Current Client Ranking: 1
Three fundamentals for temporary monopoly:
- The marketing manager and decision-makers need to understand why marketing is fundamental to reaching one’s growth targets and facing the competition. Create trust and make sure that there is enough knowledge of marketing in the organization.
- Invest in marketing in the long term. Continual and iterative marketing activities will bring better results than “one-offs”.
- Continually report the real impact of your marketing investment (ROMI: Return on Marketing Investment). By focusing on the real business impact, you can begin to close the gap between marketing and sales.
The results
The three-year digital transformation laid the foundation for a strong digital position. Thanks to a focus on measurability and data-driven decision-making, we have numbers to showcase the results.
Year 1, from a brand new website to impactful improvements:
- Increase of incoming leads from the website: +800%
- Increase in organic traffic: +175%
- Increase in unique visitors: +100%
Year 2, strong development and continued investments:
- Increase of incoming leads from the website: +845%
- Increase in organic traffic: +34%
- Increase in unique visitors: +38%
“Together with Henrik Anderberg and GO MO, TÜV NORD Scandinavia AB has developed a marketing and sales strategy for our operations. Together, we have implemented, used and evaluated the strategy over a three-year period. The chosen digital market orientation has shown good impact, one of them is becoming a strengthened brand, and has led to many business opportunities.”
Anders Egerbo, VD för TÜV NORD 2001 – 2018
Year 3, profitable digital marketing without internal marketing department:
- Increase of incoming leads from the website: +23%
- Increase in organic traffic: +68%
- Vital keywords ranking on position 1: 23%
- Vital keywords ranking on page 1: 83%
Summary
A service company in a knowledge-intensive industry proved to have great opportunities to improve its competitiveness by applying a data-driven digital strategy. The competitive advantages from achieving the status of thought leader not only mean a strong position against existing competitors and create barriers of entry for new would-be entrees. It also creates “hidden” assets for the company. Tüv Nord could leave with three key assets:
- A self-reinforcing brand that is continually exposed on search engines, which creates moats for both direct and indirect competitors on Google.
- A “marketing department” that works day and night without any employees. Google does not rest and is available to generate leads whenever potential clients search for information.
- Thought leadership within their niche.
