Client Growth Story: Harnessing Humor for a Huge Lead Conversion Win

Imagine creating engaging copy that converts large amounts of leads—for automatic control valves manufactured for the global water industry. Not. Easy.

But it is possible with a little wit, a lot of expertise and an understanding of the voice that will resonate with engineers—who also happen to be humans with a great sense of humor.

Here we take a look at how Singer Valve, a global manufacturer of automatic water control valves, used inbound marketing methodologies and content marketing best practices to achieve a 52 percent landing page submission rate and other impressive lead conversion stats for big growth in 2015.

Defining the Challenges

Before partnering with Kuno Creative, Singer Valve was seeing success, but experienced a few challenges:

• While automatic water control valves are necessary and important in modern society, discussing them in an engaging and entertaining manner (to solicit leads) was proving difficult.
• The Kuno content team discovered (through multiple meetings and interviews) that while the subject matter is highly technical in nature, the Singer Valve team has an entertaining and infectious spirit. Unfortunately, this charm and identity wasn’t evident in the brand’s current resources.
• Singer Valve is already well respected as an industry leader, but we knew displaying the brand’s signature humor would sharpen the company’s competitive edge. Our ultimate goal was to echo the brand’s unique, authentic personality—combined with concise, punchy, easy-to-read language—in all new campaigns and revive current resources.

Setting a Strategy

For our Q3 campaign, we took a different approach. Rather than sharing eBooks or more traditional pieces of content, we chose to share what we referred to internally as “Cool Tools.” Specifically, our initial offer and each piece of content shared via lead nurturing thereafter was something our buyer personas (water management professionals and civil engineers) could use on the job to make their lives easier and help them excel at work.

The other piece of strategy in our plan was to take advantage of our audience’s sense of humor and willingness to engage with personality-infused content. Through our buyer persona research, we learned that our audience is generally an amiable group that is open to a more humorous, lively communication style. We took advantage of that in our copywriting, crafting energetic, fun messages that kept our audience engaged and made them more likely to open and click on our emails.

The entire campaign consisted of four emails, spaced a week apart, that all shared a usable interactive tool (except for the final email, which encouraged readers to contact a Singer Valve rep).

Our primary gated content offer for this campaign was titled, “A Visual Guide to Troubleshooting Your Valves.” This eBook shared flowcharts water management professionals could use to troubleshoot different issues with their valves. We put an innovative spin on it by rewriting the flowcharts in our trademark brand voice to make them fun to read. Our graphic design team chose a modern, infographic-style design that added to the appeal of the charts.

In subsequent emails, we shared the following interactive tools:

• “The Control Valve Service Matrix,” a custom spreadsheet to help water management professionals determine when their valves required maintenance
• “Metro H2O,” Singer Valve’s custom interactive app with game-like features that lets water management pros “play” with Singer’s products in the context of a real city

Results Flow In

The campaign ran from Oct. 22, 2015 through Dec. 28, 2015. During this time, we launched the following assets and saw the corresponding results:

• 4 emails
  • 13,956 sent
  • 3,518 opened
  • 569 visits
• 7 CTAs
  • 31,502 views
  • 1,770 clicks
  • 76 submissions
• 2 blog posts
  • 35 views
• 1 landing page (The Visual Guide to Troubleshooting Your Valves)
  • 817 views
  • 423 submissions (52 percent view-to-submission)
  • 74 contacts (17 percent submission-to-contact)

A Happy Ending

Singer Valve is already a leader in the water management industry, and its products are used globally. We were able to connect with prospects in a way Singer Valve’s competitors haven’t—by capturing and sharing the brand’s special humor and wit, and using simple language and succinct copy. We kept the emails and landing page free of salesy, product-centric copy and instead focused on helpful content as well as the value Singer Valve is known to provide.

Our last email in the campaign, which encouraged readers to “Find a Rep,” received 44 click-throughs. That’s 44 customers as a direct result of an inbound marketing campaign rooted in the best of content marketing.