Company’s Website Fuels New Growth and Escape from Boom and Bust

Boiler companies play a critical role in oil and gas, an industry notorious for its boom and bust cycles. In the midst of a boom, these companies are busy serving drilling and oil recovery customers. When the industry is in decline, investments dry up. Then all companies join the struggle to wait out the bust.

In 2020, Arctic Boilers & Fabricating Ltd. was one of these companies. The oil and gas industry had entered its first decline in 11 years. The company’s boiler sales and maintenance revenue dwindled. The business was largely reduced to selling parts and materials over the phone.

No one was certain how long the situation would continue, but the status quo was not an option.

Status Quo Is Over

When the operations manager at Arctic Boilers approached Wordbeats, he had two goals:

1. Modernize the parts sales with an online catalog and ordering process. This would be a first — none of Arctic Boilers’ competitors had such a catalog.
2. Acquire more customers in industries that are not oil and gas.

It was clear that achieving these goals would require a new website. The existing website ran on Wix, which doesn’t support ecommerce. Furthermore, the website had been out of date for years. Almost everything would have to be rewritten.

It was also clear that the parts sales process would have to change too.

The operations manager chose JoAnne Burek for her industry knowledge on previous projects and her business process experience.

Building the Solution

For the first phase of the project, Wordbeats created a new WordPress site. It was given a fresh design that harmonized with the logo and the photos retrieved from the old site.

Then a photo studio was set up in the office. JoAnne trained Arctic personnel to take catalog-quality photos of individual parts and process them in Adobe Lightroom.

The ecommerce solution was developed next. The initial solution was reviewed with Arctic’s purchaser. As they walked through the sales process, the company’s unique requirements and practices were revealed. To complete the customization, JoAnne researched and added extra components to the solution.

With the website’s shop pages completed, it was time to address the rest of the website. This included writing a new home page, service description pages, and contact page. Product pages for the company’s portable boiler sales and rentals were also added.

Before the end of two months, the website was launched. For the hand-off, JoAnne developed a comprehensive user manual. It documented all aspects of the website as well as the new business process around parts sales.

Raising Authority and Awareness

After a stabilization period, the second phase began. JoAnne wrote detailed product pages for the boilers and burners.

These products are expensive and complex. Often, users want the manufacturers’ information before buying. As Arctic is a distributor of these products, it made sense to organize and present this information on the website. The content also serves to showcase the company’s knowledge and expertise. 

The detailed product pages are useful to users and buyers in all industries, beyond oil and gas. These pages enable the company to attract business in new industries.

Streamlined Services and New Customers

Before the new website, ordering parts was a manual effort that could take hours to complete. The process usually involved making phone calls to describe and diagnose the part needed. This was followed by photo-sharing to confirm the proposed solution. The process was labour-intensive on both sides. But it was the norm. The competitors were doing it this way too.

With the new solution, the buyers start by looking up the part on the website’s catalog. If they want, they can still call an expert at Arctic to ask questions. But now they can use the website to complete the order and pay online. They can also save their carts and email them to their company’s approver who can then complete the order. 

The catalog, with its photos and product descriptions, attracts a significant volume of traffic and sales organically. Arctic Boilers has also been running Google ads. The return on ad spending continues to make this approach a no-brainer.

Arctic’s bigger goal of expanding to customers in new markets is also on track. The company now ranks near the top in search engine results and they have begun earning significant revenue from utilities, mining, and other industries.