Global B2B Campaign

New challenges call for New Science

Challenge

Create a compelling B2B multimedia campaign to showcase innovative and underleveraged aspects of a client’s business capabilities. MBLM worked with UL to strategically identify priority B2B stakeholders to develop the company’s first integrated B2B marketing campaign.

The campaign’s purpose was to reach a broader base of UL customers and prospects, engage them in dialogue to build more intimate relationships, help the company sell by generating qualified leads and providing communications to support sales efforts.

The campaign was content-driven, offering customers and prospects valuable information and innovation created or advanced by UL. Focusing on UL’s key strengths and competitive advantage as a safety science innovator, we designed a distinctive communication style in look and feel. We married this with UL’s unique, leading-edge thinking that resides in white papers, new standards, testing methodologies and scientific research to shape content that demonstrates the company’s considerable efforts around what we coined as “New Science.”

New Science is more than a marketing campaign. It is a manifestation of UL’s DNA as a thought leader that celebrates the groundbreaking work of UL’s scientists and engineers. The campaign leveraging was first rolled out in the U.S. in 2012, highlighting UL’s ability to make the world safer today and tomorrow to leaders across the industry.

Conceived as a modular platform, the strategy was initially focused on three themes: Fire Safety, Indoor Air Quality and Transaction Security, each working as the arms and legs of the campaign in trade and industry publications. In 2013, the campaign’s reach expanded with the addition of new content via a fourth theme called Sustainable Energy, a rollout of the campaign in China and seeding the core message of New Science with consumers through a public service announcement that was first broadcast during the 2013 National Christmas Tree Lighting in Washington D.C. In 2014, New Science was expanded again, adding a fifth theme called Workplace Health & Safety, and Brazil, a new geography.

Results

The campaign has been a huge success, revamping the company’s entire digital infrastructure and increasing traffic by 200% while creating stronger engagement and real sales leads. There are more than 14,000 subscribers, which is a large and engaged community. The first 18 months of the campaign generated over 280,000 page views on the New Science microsite, and UL’s New Science subscribers downloaded 35,741 journals, articles and infographics. The list of New Science subscribers includes Fortune 500 companies, global consulting firms, government agencies, manufacturing conglomerates and executives from a wide variety of companies around the world.

The digital campaign has received over 600,000 clicks, with an above industry average click-through rate of 0.26 percent, driven by strong results in publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Businessweek. There have also been 197,791 views of New Science videos on YouTube since the campaign’s inception.