This campaign focused on the partnership between Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (as a relay and panel manufacturer) and Rayburn Electric Cooperative (a small, not-for-profit electric cooperative in northeast Texas).
On the SEL side, this story highlighted company values like Customer Focus, Communication, and Integrity (each of which are shared by Rayburn and are defined on the SEL website). It also served as an advertisement for the fact that the company manufactures substation panels, and that the Engineering Services division is an efficient resource for high-quality panel design and delivery.
Panels and Partnership: Managing Growing Demand with Rayburn Electric Cooperative
This campaign included the following products:
- A 1500-word interview-based story
- Direct email promoting the story, directed at most existing customers
- A promotional landing page for the story itself (which acted as a collector from social posts and web ads)
- A promotional landing page for a custom panels webpage (also a collector from external links)
- A social post about SEL Engineering Services, related to custom panels
- A social post about custom panels
- A social post about the story itself
- A trade magazine ad
- A webpage about a custom panels
The content was designed to funnel readers toward the custom panels webpage or an Engineering Services contact form. The story itself provides a very nice stopping point for non-technical readers, as it is not sale-oriented. Even the custom panel webpage is not necessarily sales-oriented, so much as it describes the value of getting specific services with a panel manufacturer.
The Story
The story is based on interviews with Rayburn’s Engineering Manager and Projector Coordinator. They provided much of the human detail about the importance of this partnership—the values that took it beyond a transactional, customer/vendor relationship into something that Rayburn can count on going into the future.
📄 Download the initial release of the story (PDF)
Read the story on the SEL website →
Direct Email
On release of the customer story webpage and video content, a promotional email drove readers to those pages. Like the customer story, this email promoted the customer first: expanding transmission service in the United States is complicated and expensive, and Rayburn was doing a
great job for their customers.
The email succeeds in driving traffic to the target pages by emphasizing services that are valuable to all transmission service providers and that are visible in the story.
This email took advantage of a close working relationship with the designers. SEL is known for quality craftsmanship, and neat panel wiring is part of that reputation. It’s not something that can easily be supported in a short email, however, so we chose to let the hero image of the email do that work.
Landing Page: Story Promotion
Digital advertising drives traffic to a landing page prior to the story itself. This intermediate step frames the story as one of customer service and substation panel construction quality, creating a pre-emptive call to action for readers interested in ordering substation panels.
The page features two separate calls to action. The visually-primary element is the button to Read the Story. Testing has found that a subscription box for readers to sign up for information about related content is successful as well. Crucially, the subscription box does not activate a new page when clicked.
This page’s success hinges on a connection to a single common need among all target customer groups: providing excellent service.
Landing Page: Custom Panels Promotion
From web ads and social posts related to this story, audiences were driven to a landing page promoting substation panel solutions.
One primary connection between the customer story and this landing page is the lack of administrative steps required to order a substation panel—the idea that SEL is a good supplier because customers can order full panels pre-wired, tested, and ready for commissioning. Engineers and utility managers would understand that this means the panels include non-SEL products as necessary but that a single order would encompass something that could otherwise
require a long list of suppliers and an integrator to put the order together.
This landing page succeeds by responding to a need specific to this customer group. Substation digitization makes individual panels far more powerful than in the past, but it also makes them more complex. Simplifying ordering and future maintenance reduces a major hurdle towards
modernization.
Social Post: Promote Related Services
Prior to any story content going live, we released a social post to prime audience interest in Engineering Services and substation panels. This social post was not as popular as the other posts in this campaign, largely because we were sharing content that is a little dated and has already been used in other promotions.
Social Post: Promote the Story
This social post promotes the customer story itself. It is meant to drive attention and clicks towards the customer story itself by highlighting benefits to Rayburn Electric Cooperative that other readers would find valuable.
- For utilities, this post emphasizes the fact that Rayburn is able to fulfill their mission of
delivering adequate and reliable power to customers. Reliability is a key word for many utilities
who must meet specific federal reliability standards. - For non-utility readers, including the “average reader,” this post also emphasizes the fact that
Rayburn is able to fulfill their mission while providing lower costs to customers.
The story itself identifies each of these benefits as a result of partnering with SEL on substation panel projects.
Social Post: Promote Related Product
These social posts promote a niche benefit in SEL panel solutions: neat wiring. This is a benefit
that is hard to claim on any product or solution webpage. After all, “we wire panels neatly and
label every connection” sounds like something any competitor could claim as well.
However, in conversations with customers, this is a consistent, positive remark. The social post
exists to remind those customers of their positive experience and offer a proof point—however minor—that SEL panels are a pleasure to work with.
Content from platform to platform differs slightly to meet the requirements of each. Note that these posts were all written to get the full message across (including some or all of the link) before truncation.
Print Ad: Protection, Automation, and Control (PAC) World Ad
This print ad was published in the September 2023 issue of PAC (Protection, Automation, and
Control) World. This magazine’s readership is generally limited to electric utility engineers.
SEL is widely known in this area, and it is not uncommon for PAC World to feature an article
written by SEL personnel or about the company’s technologies. As a result, this advertisement is
less about raising awareness of the company or promoting a particular solution and more about
driving traffic toward a well-known type of content on the website.
This ad performs a secondary function for the other customers that may be considering a request
to be the subject of one of these stories. The ad is free promotion for the customer in question and
a chance to show our respect for the utilities we work with.
Webpage: Custom Panels and Enclosures
The Custom Panels and Enclosures webpage consolidated and updated content from two pages,
which were then deactivated. As custom panel solutions became a marketing focus, it became
clear that two separate pages may have performed a technical service by separating two product
lines, but they were damaging SEO by splitting traffic.
This project served four goals:
- Update the content of both pages to ensure they were technically accurate to current offerings.
- Generalize the content to future-proof the pages against changes in what we could offer based
on supply chain and other constraints. - Harmonize the benefits of custom panel solutions with what we were promoting in the Rayburn
Electric Cooperative customer story. - Drive interest toward direct panel purchases and contracts with our Engineering Services
division.
The final item is the most important business goal, as this is the doorway to long-term
partnerships and large contracts. As a result, a contact form for Engineering Services is in the
standard location that current customers would expect (the page footer), and many of the CTA
links in the document lead to pages with more prominently placed contact forms.
Tabbed content is expanded in the PDF link below, and it was captured on July 28, 2023. A live version
of the page can be found at https://selinc.com/solutions/custom-panels-enclosures/
