The Company: Stantec

Stantec is a top-tier global design and delivery firm providing professional consulting services. They are a group of designers, engineers, scientists, and project managers, innovating at the intersection of community, creativity, and client relationships, all working together to advance the quality of life in communities across the globe. 

The Problem: How to Turn Their Website Into A Business Development Tool  

After partaking in proprietary industry research and completing a clear marketing vision statement, in 2016, Stantec knew they needed to redesign their website. Previously, Stantec’s content marketing strategy was driven by events, trade publication articles, and a blog, and they weren’t leveraging digital marketing to drive leads and connect directly with clients and potential clients. Based on their research findings, they realized their website was the main source of thought leadership for their target markets, so they knew they needed to enhance their traditional marketing efforts with a stronger digital presence. 

“We wanted to make knowledge sharing a prominent feature of our website and to use content to generate leads,” said Stefan Riches, Stantec’s Director of Content Marketing. “This meant developing a new Ideas Hub to share not just our successful blog, but new types of content, such as custom publications, webinars, videos, and more.” 

Stantec’s web design consultant was already overhauling the entire website and did not have the capacity to develop a solution for a knowledge sharing platform at an affordable cost in time to meet the launch deadline. Stantec also quickly realized any off-the-shelf solution had to work with the design for the rest of the site.

Solution: Put Uberflip at the Heart of Their Digital Strategy

Stantec identified their challenges, researched options, and landed on Uberflip as the solution for their new Ideas Hub. “Uberflip is now at the heart of our digital knowledge sharing strategy. All the ideas that we share and promote go through Uberflip,” Riches said. “The ability to customize the look and feel of tiles, article templates, and hub layouts to complement our main site was the deciding factor. Not to mention, the cost savings compared to building something from scratch.”  

After finalizing the scope of the design, Riches’ team migrated several hundred blogs into Uberflip to prepare for their launch. Uberflip’s success team was fundamental in training a dozen Stantec employees on the platform. 

Stantec launched their knowledge sharing platform, Ideas, in December 2017. They embedded over 100 Streams built for Stantec’s diverse markets, services, offices, and people pages on their website. 

“As an enterprise company, the selling feature was how easy it was to manage and organize hundreds of content items in one place. Tags and smart filters allow us to automate the process of publishing an item in multiple locations very quickly. With Uberflip, we’re more nimble because our distributed team can publish items on their own without any back and forth” said Riches. 

Stantec’s marketing team were not the only ones using Uberflip. The platform was quickly adopted by HR to share stories about Stantec’s culture on a new Careers Hub. Watch, Stantec’s Video Hub, was also launched. 

As a global company, it was important to be able to share content and launch campaigns in multiple languages, leading Stantec to offer their Ideas Hub in Italian, Dutch, and, coming soon, French. 

Results: Generating the First-Ever Leads From Their Website 

The results have been phenomenal. Total item pageviews tripled from 7,918 in December 2017 to 25,885 in July 2018. Stantec’s seven items of gated content have generated over 200 leads—the first-ever leads generated from their website. They also completely diversified the type of content they were publishing, which had previously been limited to blog posts. Content such as conference information and slide decks, links to trade publication articles, videos, and webinars now accounted for 40 percent of content posted to the Ideas Hub. “Diversifying our content mix is another way that we’re more nimble in our content marketing efforts,” said Riches. “We can capitalize on the variety of ways that our experts share their ideas.” 

Stantec also launched their first digital thought leadership publication, The Design Quarterly, as a Flipbook. Each issue included six to eight thought leadership articles based on a theme. To give the content more life, each article was repurposed as a blog post throughout the quarter. And each blog post, of course, promoted the larger publication. The Design Quarterly soon became the most-viewed item on Ideas thanks in part to Flipbooks’ user-friendly interactivity.

Not only had Stantec accelerated in their content marketing efforts, they were now using Uberflip to empower the sales team. Previously, the marketing team was taking hours to pull together a custom brochure for the sales team, but soon they were building Sales Streams in less than 10 minutes. Their first targeted Sales Stream resulted in the client calling back the next day, and a face-to-face meeting was scheduled directly after that. 

“Professional consulting is a people business. No one hires us without talking to us, and people certainly don’t buy architecture and engineering services off a website,” said Riches. “Yet clients are researching firms and issues online more and more before making that contact. Uberflip and our Ideas Hub is helping us use digital marketing to connect our experts with the clients who need our services.”