Introduction:

Seaco Global have been a long established company and have been generating large revenues from their portfolio of clients globally for over 4 decades. Being in a mature commercial industry, they have heavily relied on traditional methods of lead generation such as  conferences, trade shows and B2B partnerships built over the long term to grow and sustain their business. They had recently started experimenting with digital marketing to help them grow large B2B relationships at scale in a manner that is not possible with traditional marketing. 

Being a large, global company, they previously entrusted a very large global consulting organisation with their global digital marketing. However after a couple of years they were confused, unaware of where and how their digital advertising Dollars were being spent, and were generally disappointed with the results generated by their agency. 

Initially our team was engaged to investigate and report on why the performance of their current digital marketing was very lacklustre. From that point we were tasked to strategise, design, implement and actively manage highly effective SEM campaigns targeted to specific geographic regions where they wanted to attract the most business from, and to help them generate high level business relationships with large companies in specific sectors.

Problems:

Through our comprehensive discovery and digital strategy process, we uncovered quite a few core problems with their global digital strategy that were leading to poor results. 

1. They were utilising too many of the wrong channels with a scattergun approach to identifying their ideal clients. They were running Google display, Google search and social media ads with no clear direction and strategy.
2. Their conversion pathways were scattered and varied around the world. Being a global company they have a USA, AU, African and European website which were all different with no real consistency.
3. Their digital budgets were misallocated and less effective channels were getting more advertising budget than the ones that were producing some results.
4. They were getting leads – but the wrong type of leads. They received the majority of their leads from B2C customers rather than mid-large B2B clients looking for long-term container supply partnerships. This was wasting their sales team’s time as they were left to deal with low quality or unqualified leads.
5. Their tracking, analytics and reporting were focusing on meaningless data rather than the direct number of qualified enquiries generated from their total online spend. 

Solutions:

To generate the results that Seaco were looking for, our team had to strategise and implement an ultra-high level campaign with global as well as local thinking. The solutions that have led to Seaco achieving their ideal outcomes have included:

1. Creating a continent specific strategy to successfully compete in the dynamic conditions and competitive climate of each region – USA, Australia, Africa.
2. In each continental region, further breaking down the strategy to compete locally with the leading businesses in each country, state and territory.
3. Consolidating the marketing budget and focusing it on a series of simple and effective SEM-only campaigns for every region.
4. Building a universal ultra high converting landing page concept for each container type which is then further personalised and adapted to the state, territory, country and continent campaigns to compete hyper locally as well as globally simultaneously.
5. Consistently managing, optimising and refining the SEM campaign and strategies with the marketing and sales teams at Seaco to ensure they are continually receiving their ideal enquiries from qualified potential customers.
6. Analysing and reporting critical insights and digestible data to their global teams to help them make better and more educated business decisions for growth based on real and actionable data derived from the marketing..

Results:

The continually growing and evolving results have been an absolute game-changer for Seaco’s sales and marketing teams around the world. To date there have been over 500 genuine B2B shipping and specialised container enquiries across the USA, Africa and Australia. The enquiries have been from their ideal target clients and their sales teams have been busy dealing with the right enquiries around the world. 

Some of the enquiries have come from some of the largest companies across their core target industries around the world and have included household names like BHP, Rio Tinto, Shell and more. 

At one point, they even sold out, globally, of their stock of certain container types but are now, thanks to new container production, able to take new orders. 

We continue to work closely with Seaco on their ever-evolving strategy and needs, and look forward to supporting their growth around the world for many more years to come.