Why video dominates Shell's content marketing strategy

Gareth Flood, CMO, Shell Lubricants, shares with BuzzInContent.com how video content improves customers' operations and livelihoods rather than just talking about products

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BuzzInContent Bureau
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For a lubricant industry, it is kind of necessary to provide informational guides on products for the customers. And what form is better than a video and infographics. Shell Lubricants invests heavily on digital, allocating 70% of its total budget to the medium. It is distributing relevant content to its B2B and B2C customers, trying to improve customer operations and livelihoods rather than just talking about products.

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Gareth Flood

“Our products have a technical background so we share widely informational guides through our distributor network and trade partners. Video content is about distributing valuable and relevant content to a clearly defined audience,” said Gareth Flood, Chief Marketing Officer, Shell Lubricants India Cluster, in an interaction with BuzzInContent.com.

Infographic, blog spots, informational guides or videos might be flooded with words of information, which might make it boring for customers, but for an industry like lubricants, such content is what serves better.

Sharing how effective video content is for this industry, Gareth said, “For the Shell Advance motorcycle oil brand, showing how the product can help bikers, we launched ‘Outride Anything’ with a story of a road trip in the Himalayas, and tried to connect customers with the brand in ways that relate to their lives and needs.”

‘Outride Anything’:

To help customers reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO) of their operations to demonstrate the partnerships, the brand for its campaign ‘Power of Partnerships’ for B2B customers had launched the “Bangalore Bat Doctor” initiative.

“Bangalore Bat Doctor”:

To a question whether it is difficult for brands to create content to educate customers, Gareth said, “It is not difficult. We base it on solving our customers’ problems, make businesses more efficient and making their lives easier with our products. We work with our agency partners and good content is available.”

Shell Lubricants, for all of its videos, never endorses products with a celebrity face. When asked, he said the celebrity endorsement market is cluttered and may confuse the target audience. It has also become very expensive, so the return on investment is not always like it was in the past. So it depends on your product and objectives to make it effective. “We prefer at this stage to target our customer directly with brands and messages that have some benefit for their business operations or customers themselves directly,” he added.

Being a global brand, Shell Lubricants, for much of its content, shoots everything in India, to be specific and vernacular to the market.

“We do change this further for some campaigns and initiatives to take account of India’s huge diversity and vernacular requirements. We adjust for more languages and local requirements in south India, for example,” he said.

In the B2C space in 2019, the brand plans to launch ‘Shell Advance Mechanic Masterclass Competition’ to upskill mechanics in a national and regional competition with the Indian winners going to MotoGP in Malaysia later in the year. In the same area, it is launching in Q2 an app called ‘Share’ for retailers, mechanics and motorists to earn loyalty rewards and keep up to date with information.

Shell's content marketing strategy Gareth Flood Shell Lubricants