How E-FWD Thinking helped drive the energy transition

The question was, how?

DC Thomson first approached Fifth Ring to help them with market research and strategy work on how to elevate the Energy Voice brand to attract an audience engaged with the energy transition at the senior leadership level and generate a new revenue stream. They had an idea of what they wanted to achieve, and some ambitious revenue targets with tight timescales. But they needed help to properly define, claim, and own that space. This is strategic marketing at the highest level: marketing involved right from the beginning of a project with objectives aligned to wider business goals. Beyond that, this was a project with the potential to transform the conversation around the energy transition and accelerate the pace of change.

Strategy

The client’s first instinct was to develop a higher value tier of their existing Energy Voice subscription. However, our experience working with energy transition clients informed our recommendation to develop an entirely new brand and product offering, fully differentiated from Energy Voice’s more general energy audience, with a unique identity that would resonate with a senior and engaged audience. The resulting product offering was a unique combination of publication, subscription, content, and community events. The brand is E-FWD.

Crafting a Winning Formula

As a B2B agency immersed in the energy sector, we knew that to achieve the ambitions of this project we needed to craft an impactful, serious, credible brand position. We needed to follow this with consistent, insightful, and inspirational campaigns that would resonate with this key audience. We knew that the brand must soak through all touchpoints, elevating even simple messages to align with the high ambition of the project. Finally, we knew that urgency must play a key role, both in the overall mission, but also in driving decisions to sign up.

Strategic Focus

Our strategy was to focus on the exclusive and curated nature of the product offering. E-FWD would be a hub for a highly selective group of people. These are exceptionally busy individuals, extremely literate about the energy transition, with no time to waste reading poor quality content or attending inconsequential events. Naming would therefore be a key strategic aspect of this new brand, as it would act as a magnet to draw that community together – and only those people. Naming is always a far more emotional and subjective process than one might want to admit with a project like this. However, we deployed our artful brand positioning methodology, which uniquely brings objectivity to brand creative development. When the client first saw “E-FWD” it was, as they described, a light bulb moment. They saw a name and brand that they immediately understood and got behind. This naming moment, paired with the brand identity and design cues, ‘made everything real’ and injected new energy across the team.

Execution

Once we had defined the audience and claimed the creative, we were able to move onto activation, deploying highly calibrated artful storytelling and strong brand visuals into traditional B2B channels such as LinkedIn, PPC, display advertising, and events to drive subscription sign-ups.

Execution began with discovery and ideation, where we focused on understanding and expressing our client’s customers’ needs within the target group that had been defined. Our knowledge of the energy industry enabled us to either accelerate or safely shortcut a lot of the market testing that a brand agency would ordinarily have to do. We were close enough to their target customers to have a legitimate sense of how this would be received. This meant that our first guess was much closer to the mark than it would have been with a non-specialist agency.

Challenges and Solutions

The true challenge was in articulating the advantages of E-FWD’s new offer. Blending publication, content, and community events, this was a new concept and there was no easy comparison or model to follow. It was crucial, from a messaging point of view, to make sure this was understood and was converting. Every campaign must attract the right audience, particularly in the case of E-FWD where exclusivity is part of the proposition. Success would be measured by who, not how many, were being reached. Activation and optimization were,, therefore,, one and the same thing, characterized by continuous experimentation and refinement. We crafted multiple versions of every image, every message, and every call to action, constantly refining what would connect with the target audience.

A/B testing allowed us to quickly analyse and improve our engagement rates. In one LinkedIn campaign, we found ads with ‘be a founder member’ CTA generated the majority of the actions, with 68% clicks compared with ‘lead the change’ (32%). In terms of messaging, the ads with ‘elevate’ copy generated 57% of the overall campaign clicks compared with ‘embrace’ (23%) and ‘secure’ (20%).

Own the Space

Success would always be binary for E-FWD. Part publication, part community - without the right people in the room the project would fail. We brought the right people into the room, in the right numbers. They are already working together, affecting change to accelerate the UK energy transition.

At its most fundamental level, the launch of E-FWD achieved exactly what was needed. E-FWD met its initial membership acquisition targets, both in terms of sign-ups and revenue. The first two events, which we also managed, delivered the right attendance numbers. Our digital long-term subscription campaign continues to achieve above-average levels of engagement. But this project was always about quality over quantity. And this is where E-FWD shines. Those busy and influential changemakers? We reached them. In the LinkedIn campaign referenced above, most of the clicks came from senior-level positions, accounting for 54% of the overall campaign clicks, followed by managers and directors. The E-FWD events have been attended by some of the most senior and influential energy transition stakeholders in the UK: major energy company CEOs, bank leadership, union heads, politicians and even the UK ex-prime minister Gordon Brown.

The campaign launched in September 2023, and the most recent event took place only last month. The reaction has been so positive that we are now helping E-FWD to raise the bar even higher by introducing new tiers to their membership structure sooner than planned, generating more value than initially forecast. It is early days, but on these results alone, we are confident that E-FWD is well on the way to owning its space in the North Sea energy transition.

Client Testimonial

And DC Thomson agrees. In the words of Owen Wyatt, Chief Growth Officer of DC Thomson:

“The minute that we all looked at it as a team, we all got straight behind E-FWD as the winning concept. It was completely standout. It captures everything that those who are solution orientated in energy want to align behind. There is a massive need for players in politics and business to get behind goals that will drive the energy transition in the UK, and I really think that the team at Fifth Ring have created a brand that will enable us to do that.”

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