Afton Chemical

Challenge

To provide its existing and potential clients a highly personalized digital experience, Afton Chemical, a global chemical additives company, decided to consolidate multiple regional websites into one global website. Doing so would not be easy: There are only a few hundred large-scale buyers of fuel additives in the world, and regions have unique chemical needs and regulations. A one-size-fits-all approach would not be effective. For guidance and technical support, Afton reached out to Padilla for help to come up with a comprehensive digital strategy that would provide the right thought leadership and product information to the right audience at the right time.

Insight

Padilla conducted research to understand the needs of Afton’s different target audiences and to develop an effective thought leadership strategy for delivering insightful content to buyers across all five of its small business units. From the research, we gained a clear understanding of divergent content and resource needs across Afton’s stakeholder groups that the site would serve. And we learned we needed to build one global site that could recognize visitors and serve up content appropriate to their needs.

Idea

Our insight led us down the path of generating a website customization engine. To power the content that fuels the engine, Padilla used persona research to develop a comprehensive thought leadership strategy that now fuels the website. A content calendar was created for each of Afton’s five small business units, and content was further segmented by region and persona. Research also helped identify technology platforms, translations tools, marketing automation and other technologies that power aftonchemical.com, and provide insights to Afton’s digital team.

Solution

Like Amazon.com suggesting compatible products at checkout, we helped Afton build a website that delivers an online experience rich with insightful content relevant to each visitor. It features engaging content, including interactive charts, graphs, videos and online chats. And the site delivers a unified experience on a global digital platform that broadens audience reach.

Results

The success of the site launch is observable in Afton’s 2016 website metrics: • Increased annual visits from top 300 customers by 31 percent • Increased annual visits from top 60 OEM customers by 470 percent • Exceeded 2:00 average time on site by 22 percent • Exceeded 2,000 monthly visitors from BICA by 11.35 percent