Our Work
Datagineering a Brand on the Web and Beyond
ABOUT THE CLIENT
INDUSTRY: Thermal Processing
Paulo is the nation’s largest privately-held commercial thermal processing company, with six locations across North America providing heat treatment, brazing, and metal finishing services to the world’s most innovative manufacturers.
Results
An updated brand and website that reflects Paulo’s rich history of problem-solving and thermal processing solutions
Increase in Users
Increase in pages per session
Datagineering a Brand on the Web and Beyond
Founded over 75 years ago as a storefront in St. Louis, Paulo is the nation’s largest privately-held commercial thermal processing company, with six locations across North America providing heat treatment, brazing, and metal finishing services to the world’s most innovative manufacturers.
What sets Paulo apart from other heat treaters is its large in-house team of metallurgists and engineers, along with a proprietary business system that takes the human error and guesswork out of thermal processing. Through automation and robust process data, Paulo’s datagineering approach delivers the most repeatable, reliable results for the safety-critical parts people rely on every day. From Grandpa’s titanium hip, to your kids’ car seat buckles, to hot section components in commercial jets, no matter where you are, you’re likely never far away from a part Paulo has touched.
Leveling Up
Paulo’s website had come a long way since it initially launched in the late 1990s, with the company gaining traction through organic search with high-value technical content. With this solid foundation in place, it was time to evolve both the brand and the user experience on the website to reflect Paulo’s cutting-edge capabilities and drive conversions.
We first approached the modernization of Paulo’s brand by introducing a new tagline: Datagineering At Work. Datagineering is the intersection of the best people, systems, and equipment to resolve the challenges and mitigate the risks of thermal processing.
With this concept at the heart of the brand, we began working on the visuals. An important element that we introduced to convey the engineering and scientific prowess of Paulo was a broad set of custom schematics showing furnaces and complex parts along with precise, intriciate iconography. We also brightened up the color palette, replacing beige with clean white and introducing a tertiary blue hue that, used strategically, lends a technology-forward feel and evokes the sense of temperature control that is central to Paulo’s services.
With the brand elements in place, we then turned our attention to enhancing the website.
An Ease of Translation
Mega Menu
Paulo’s large array of capabilities makes it a one-stop-shop for its thermal processing customers, helping them simplify their supply chain and streamline vendor partnerships. The previous site menu required the user to hover over multiple nested menus to view all capabilities. To showcase this wide range of services and enhance the user experience, we created a new “mega menu” that organized all the services into a single view. With the new menu, users can get a sense of everything that Paulo offers all at once.
Augmented and SEO-Optimized Content
Paulo had already built a good foundation for ranking in organic search with keyword-focused content on many pages of the site, but we set out to close the gaps in content across every service offering, industry, and value-added capability.
We conducted interviews with Paulo experts across the country from the engineering, metallurgy, and sales departments to gather the information we needed to write all of the content we felt Paulo needed to provide a robust resource for its users. From how railroad fasteners are tested for quality to what’s next in additive manufacturing, we learned a ton through this process that helped spark more ideas for future content.
To further boost search rankings, we researched the keywords and phrases that users search for when looking for services that Paulo offers and strategically placed them throughout the content on the site. We also included contextual links to other pages on the site at every opportunity, helping users and search engines find relevant content.
In addition to a robust internal linking structure, we also implemented a tagging system that links similar content to serve users additional content they might be interested in. Each page is tagged with descriptors for processes, markets, parts, locations, and materials, and the site automatically serves relevant articles in a widget on each page.
Increase in page view
Increase in AVG. session duration
Results
Since the website launch, users, sessions, and pageviews are all trending upward for Paulo. According to a 2021 study, the average time users spend on a page across all industries is only 54 seconds. Paulo’s website is clocking it at an average time on page of over two minutes, which is a sign that users are finding the content valuable and are taking more time to absorb it.
Our content efforts have also been resonating with our audience, with Paulo’s email newsletter performing well above industry benchmarks. Sent monthly, the newsletter incorporates technical articles, Metallurgy Minute videos, and other related content. As of the first quarter of 2022, Paulo’s open rate was 34.9 percent, while the average for B2B communications is 15.1 percent. Click to open rates were 53.5 percent, while the B2B average is just 10.5 percent. Overall engagement with Paulo’s social media posts is also up nearly six percent.
We are grateful for our partnership with Paulo and the opportunity to help a business that is so critical to the safety of people everywhere. You can learn more about Paulo and see datagineering at work on the company’s website and LinkedIn page.