When it comes to brand recognition and industry clout, Herculite is in a league of its own. With over 60 years experience as a leader in the awning, healthcare, marine, performance, graphic and tent/structure fabric space, this textile manufacturing company knows a thing or two about delivering unparalleled quality and exceptional service.
When Herculite first approached Salted Stone about bolstering their content creation efforts, their team had been employing a moderately successful inbound marketing program for a few years. Existing blog posts offered high-quality writing, but the posting schedule was inconsistent and there was no overarching strategy behind the articles.
“We initially tried to build content internally with little success,“ explains Craig Zola, Vice President Marketing and Distribution at Herculite. “Then, we outsourced the blog work to freelance research journalists for slightly better results, but their work always required editing and rewriting.”
Enter Jason Feller, Salted Stone’s Lead Strategist, and Jose Han, Technical Marketing Manager...
Jason and Jose teamed up to create a search engine optimized content plan, using a combination of cutting edge tools and strategy experience to assess popular keywords and develop blog posts and content offerings around them. Every month, Salted Stone and Herculite collaborate to design and execute a new campaign based on one of Herculite’s five product categories.
Salted Stone also coordinates with Herculite’s in-house authors to write and edit regularly published blog posts. We also deliver one content offering: a downloadable guide or eBook, focused on educating Herculite’s audience about the key details that set their textiles apart in every category.
Understanding the particular details of Herculite's business verticals certainly posed a challenge, and learning to tailor content to specific buyer personas presented a considerable learning curve. However, these hurdles were no match for Feller’s exceptional research skills and Han's technical marketing prowess. Today the team is exceptionally well-versed in product and company specifics, able to write about everything from waterproof awning textiles to medical mattress fabrics.
“Since the Salted Stone team was challenged with learning our markets, the content has been solid with little to no reviewing or editing necessary.”
“With five vertical businesses, it was important to look at each individually and develop the personas that we were trying to reach. Working with the Salted Stone team was methodical and relatively painless” explains Zola, “We were able to develop effective marketing strategies that are still in play today.”
Content marketing is an ongoing process, and the Salted Stone team develops more effective strategies every campaign. “We present our data on a monthly basis, reviewing the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and performance metrics for blogs and content offerings”, explains Feller. “The numbers aren’t always where we want them to be, but we use every performance benchmark to adjust our strategy going forward.”
Providing readers with educational content is extremely important, but the secondary purpose of hosting an active blog and resource center is to drive up visitor engagement, website traffic and trigger actions (like form filling and eBook downloading). Since working with Salted Stone to revamp their content marketing efforts, the domain authority of Herculite’s website has increased considerably.
Today, Herculite has 750 keywords in the top 50 positions (that’s the first five pages!) listed on Google for these topics. Blog posts written in the first quarter of 2017 helped move Herculite’s Healthcare Fabrics product page up to the #1 spot on Google search, contributing to an increase of almost 25% in organic traffic in the first three months of 2017 vs. 2016.
Herculite’s “Antimicrobial Fabrics in the Medical Textiles Industry” blog post was listed as a ‘Featured Snippet’ at the top of Google’s search results page. This programmatically occurring snippet, identified as ”containing a likely answer to the user's question”, provides maximum visibility for this search query, yielding a significant organic traffic increase.
“Many of the blog posts that we’ve authored have risen in the search engine rankings, and with optimized product and landing pages, organic traffic has begun trending up as well” said Jose Han, who works to identify long tail keywords and match blog posts with appropriate CTA’s, enabling visitors to learn more.
“I was looking for an agency that I could consider our marketing department,” said Zola. “I was hoping that Salted Stone would bring fresh marketing ideas to our meetings and require little supervision, and they have met my expectations and continually meet our lead generation goals. Zola went on to discuss the relationship established between organizations.
“The communication has been solid from the beginning. Weekly update and strategy meetings are never postponed or missed and the monthly marketing reports are analytical and comprehensive.”