Twenty searches a month

Perception measured by proxy, which has to be said first

No customer was surveyed. Perception here is inferred from four kinds of signal: search volume for digital terms, volume and reach of published articles, on site behaviour from the division analytics, and social engagement against two competitors.

That is a legitimate way to read a market position and it is not the same as asking anybody. The conclusion that digital perception is poor is what the online signals identify, not a measured perception score, and the page says so for the same reason the analysis did.

Four internal sales interviews were run alongside, and they produced the finding that mattered most.

Nobody is searching, and the page nobody reaches

The five keywords the division site actually ranks for are all vessel and industry terms. Not one of them contains a digital, autonomous, software or intelligence word. The site ranks first for its own name.

Site traffic is healthy. 77,400 users in the year, 65,692 of them new, with organic search the dominant source. The digital solutions page is where that traffic stops. Visitors spend an average of one minute thirty nine on the main division page and twenty one seconds on the digital page, under a quarter of the dwell time, and the digital page ranks eighteenth by pageviews on a site where a talks and webinar page ranks eleventh.

The reason is structural rather than editorial. Click through between the company own properties runs at 0.1 per cent from group to division, 0.27 per cent from division to its digital page, and 0.09 per cent from the group digital brand to its marine equivalent. The pages exist. There is almost no path to them.

Reach, and what the leading competitor does differently

Against the nearest competitor the division generated roughly a sixth of the media reach, 116 million against 613 million on the monitoring platform used. Both are platform estimates of potential audience exposure rather than readership.

Volume explains part of it. The competitor published 1,174 articles in the year against the client 650. But the sharper difference is in what kind of article gets the reach. Of the client top hundred articles by reach, 77 per cent were press releases. Of the competitor top fifty, 56 per cent were translations into other languages, with Chinese, German, Spanish and Vietnamese named as its strongest markets after English.

The client reach is almost entirely English and almost entirely self published. The competitor reach is other people republishing it in other languages.

The finding the analytics could not have produced

Four internal sales interviews surfaced something no amount of content fixes. Sales people said they are not always able to answer customers demanding questions about the digital solutions, and that they find it hard to get sourcing and pricing information for them.

The consequence is rational rather than lazy. Faced with a customer question they cannot answer on a product whose price they cannot find, they sell the thing they know instead. The digital portfolio is not being under sold because the market does not want it. It is being under sold because the people in front of the customer cannot service the conversation.

A second interview finding cut across the whole strategy. Digital demand follows hardware position. Where the company does not compete on the equipment in a vessel segment, selling digital into that segment is difficult, and customers want digital attached to the products they already buy rather than sold standalone.

Four issues, ranked, and the cheapest one is second

The recommendations were ranked by impact. First, reach: publish more, publish in other languages, and get named in the coverage of autonomous vessels and machine intelligence, which draws the most reach for all three companies studied.

Second, and it is the one that costs least and was ranked above the website work: train the sales teams on the digital portfolio, and make pricing and sourcing information findable so they can answer the question in the room.

Third, restructure the site so the digital offering sits higher and is linked from the product pages rather than buried behind a click through nobody makes. Fourth, seed digital vocabulary into the product pages, accepting that with twenty searches a month the perception has to be changed by what visitors see once they arrive, not by what they type before they get there.

There is no measured result in this work. Nothing was re-measured after any change, and the analytics readings here are a starting state supplied by the client rather than an improvement produced by the project.