Building a Website and Social Media Presence for Discerning Professionals

The Gist

Titan Chemicals is a brand owned by Shrader Canada Limited, a well-established Canadian chemical solutions company. Titan supports many companies with its range of OEM approved products, and its emphasis on quality makes it a leading choice among service professionals in a variety of industries (automotive, marine, heavy duty, snowmobile etc.).

The Challenge

Titan had long-lived with a splash page for a website and needed to get its digital presence rolling. To stand out in the cluttered (and often visually unappealing) B2B manufacturing space, and to gain credibility from smartphone-savvy technicians, a gutsy website had to support the brand’s bold personality and social media debut.

The Job

We brought in the design-driven team at PB+J to help bring to life the vision of a powerful, bold hero brand. Design modifications helped to align logos and colour palettes with a brand guideline to give the website a distinctive look and feel. The grit and truth behind Titan’s presence in the shop or garage were further illustrated with powerful photography and style effects.

Like Shrader, a key objective of this website build was to bring the power of a user-friendly website to the internal team in order to maintain the site going forward. So we built on Square Space’s easy to use platform, leveraging its strengths of design, SEO and mobile responsiveness. As the brand grows and evolves, the site is structured to support its vast array of products.

Results

Titan made its website debut prior to appearing at the AAPEX/SEMA tradeshow in Las Vegas, NV, and has experienced steady month-over-month growth in traffic, with exceptional performance increases anywhere from 100-300%. The site was accompanied by the set-up of social media accounts across a variety of channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, G+). While the Shrader line of business is rooted in the anonymity of a private label partner to its customers, the Titan brand was able to more easily convey its position in the industry as a branded product offering.

During the AAPEX tradeshow, a survey was conducted at the Shrader/Titan booth to poll industry attendees about their travel habits and preferences. We also live-Tweeted and Instagrammed from the bountiful seminars and presentations put on by AAPEX (and the subsequent Canadian International Auto Show), thereby starting to build a presence from a net-0 audience through timely RTs, Likes, and Shares. With B2B companies, particularly in mature industries that lag behind in digital and visual communication, Titan was able to share meaningful, visual content at the ground level.

The data analyzed from the survey was translated into an infographic and disseminated over Titan’s blog and social media properties, and served as a very distinct way to stand out from competitors by leveraging cheeky facts and tidbits. This asset achieved above-average engagement metrics over social media, particularly via Twitter’s featured media card.

A HubSpot article around the nature of visual communication states that content with relevant images is found to get more 94% eyeballs, so a clever infographic or share-worthy photo offers great material to inspire your audience.

In Closing

Establishing a net-new online profile is challenging for any brand or individual. We followed our tried and tested process to set up each platform and research audience markets to identify relevant content. By also creating original, shareable content we were able to find great success on visual channels like Instagram and Pinterest. Any successful entry into digital requires the one-two punch social media (organic and sponsored) and a user-friendly website experience to reward your audience. By interpreting audience behaviour across different platforms, we were able to observe characteristics for each channel.

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