The campaign that lifts the heroes of the steel industry

Kanthal's ambition to electrify steel production

Who are the heroes in any steel company? Clearly, it’s those who help reduce the company’s emissions while improving productivity and the working environment. In a campaign targeting the steel industry, we helped Kanthal showcase the many benefits that come from transitioning from fossil gas burners to electric heating elements.

The challenge

By replacing gas burners with electric elements in their heating processes, steel producers can reduce their CO2 emissions, increase productivity and efficiency, and improve the working environment for employees. However, many steel companies were skeptical and lacked knowledge about electric heating’s capabilties.

Kanthal, a world leader in industrial heating technology and resistance materials, wanted to convince the right people in the steel industry that electric heating technology is the best choice and is available today. The goal was to obtain 200 quality leads from steel manufacturers in Germany, France, Belgium, and Sweden, and secondarily from Spain, the Netherlands, and Austria, to process further through Kanthal’s marketing automation system.

Insights

Heating technology is a niche subject that interests only a handful of informed individuals within each steel company. At the same time, the potential benefits of transitioning from gas to electricity – improved sustainability, productivity, efficiency, and work environment – should be of interest to decision-makers across the steel industry.

To break through the noise, Kanthal needed to stand out and add an emotional layer to its fact-based arguments. Since an industry-wide technology change is a major investment, long-term engagement with the target audience was required.

Number of leads

LinkedIn clicks

Google Ads clicks

LinkedIn impressions

The solution

We created the campaign concept called “Be the hero” that played on the idea of being the hero of the workplace. In four films, the heroes were featured in various humorous scenarios reflecting their hero status in sustainability, efficiency, productivity, and working environment.

We also produced four “lite papers” in PDF format with more fact-based arguments about the benefits of electric heating technology, and helped Kanthal conduct a live webinar on the topic. The films, lite papers, and webinar each got their own landing page on kanthal.com with the option of downloading lite papers in exchange for providing an email address.

With help from our sister agency Trickle, we developed a well-coordinated distribution plan, where the hero films were widely distributed to capture the target audience’s interest, while lead ads for lite papers and the webinar were used for retargeting and lead generation.

Together with Kanthal and another of our sister agencies The Domain Was Taken, we simultaneously prepared several email streams with additional content for those who had provided their contact information.

LinkedIn was the main distribution channel, but in collaboration with Kanthal’s other agencies, we also added SEM and Google Ads as well as the website’s chatbot, aiming to capture additional leads. The distribution ran for a total of four months. After that, Kanthal continued to process these leads through email campaigns from their MA system.

The result

The campaign achieved its primary goal of generating 200 leads. All channels contributing, however LinkedIn accounted for half of them. By optimizing towards the lite papers that generated the most downloads, we maximized the outcome. The live webinar was a successful initiative and generated the highest number of leads as a single initiative.

As for our newly acquired leads, over 1,600 emails were sent by the end of the campaign, with an opening rate of 40 percent.

One of the secondary campaign goals included increasing awareness about the benefits of electric heating technology. Several indicators suggest that Kanthal succeeded with this goal too, as the campaign generated over half a million impressions on LinkedIn, approximately 110,000 video views of the hero films, and 16,000 link clicks from Google Ads.

"It's a bit like panning for gold. We know which companies would benefit most from electrifying their heating processes, but finding the right people to talk to takes time. With this campaign, we've captured the most important ones and can now engage with them over time."

– Patrik Johansson, Global Marketing Communications Manager

The campaign that lifts the heroes of the steel industry

Kanthal's ambition to electrify steel production

The challenge

Insights

The solution

The result

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Åsa Lovell

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