KVH Case Study

KVH Industries is a top manufacturer of satellite solutions that provide high-speed Internet, television, and voice and data services to mobile users at sea and on land. Founded in 1982, the Rhode Island-based company has 500 employees in 10 offices around the around the world, The company’s global presence includes offices in Belgium, Brazil, Cyprus, Denmark, Hong Kong, India, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, the Philippines, Singapore, and the United Kingdom. KVH provides services for military and government agencies along with corporate entities and even leisure customers, so it’s important for the brand to meet the unique challenges of both B2B and B2C marketing.

KVH offers services ranging from satellite television for RV owners to mini-VSAT Broadband service for maritime satellite communications, so the company needed a set of templates for quickly tailoring responsive content to a wide range of consumers. And since many of the company’s maritime and military customers use mobile devices as their primary point of contact, KVH needed mobile-first solutions to fit the unique needs of its broad client base. 

KVH used ion Quick Starts, a set of pre-built interactive content templates, to quickly build, tailor and manage content for its diverse audience. The company’s in-house marketing team quickly became comfortable using Quick Starts to build everything from interactive quizzes to configurators and assessments, according to Nancy Martineau, Art Director and Webmaster for KVH Industries.  

“We pretty much try to stay on top of everything ion is coming out with,” Martineau says. “We’ve been making quizzes and interactive PDFs as well as making interactive infographics and incorporating them into our landing pages. Pop-up lightboxes for our CTAs allow us to create the page using every advantage to address the customers needs. We utilize everything ion has to offer to keep us ahead of the curve.”

It’s also now much easier and less time consuming for KVH to target multiple dynamic experiences to its broad user base. 

“We have banner ads that are tied to many different landing pages,” Martineau says. “For example, we have some that are used to target our leisure marine clients vs. our commercial customers with different promotional offerings for those customers. We can pivot the design and CTAs quickly and respond to changes in the market without wasting time on rebuilding new templates.”

The new content has made complicated — and often highly competitive — pricing and service information more accessible to customer's looking to discern one provider from another. Martineau says it’s often difficult for customers to differentiate marketing materials in the commercial maritime market, but the brand’s new content works well in separating KVH from the crowd. 

“Before, we were trying to make things responsive in a platform that wasn’t working and ended up making our content much too simplistic from a visual point of view,” Martineau says. “Driving someone to a landing page that doesn’t look good on mobile is a lot of wasted man hours and money. Now we can easily make things that visually look better, including interactive features like image flips that show answers to questions, that allow us to keep the customer's attention and provide answers they might not have thought to ask. We’ve seen our retention rate go up quite a bit.”

In addition to raising retention rates, the new, responsive content is also a hit with KVH’s sales team because it lands more qualified leads than previous efforts. Sales gains important customer feedback in the form of quiz and configurator responses as well as “refer a friend” calls to action.

“Interactive content works so well that military sales guys who told me 15 years ago not to make marketing material in color because they didn’t want to be too flashy, now want more interactive infographics because we’ve gotten such a good reaction,” Martineau says. “They’ve completely changed their attitude.”

KVH initially chose ion because the easy-to-use templates would save the in-house team money and man hours, but Martineau says far and away the best thing about working with the brand has been the personal attention she’s received from the ion support team. For example, when KVH asked for a plug-in to create a countdown timer for one of its interactive campaigns, David Kavalsky, Product Specialist at ion, created one tailor-made for the brand. 

“Right from the beginning, ion has been great to work with,” Martineau says. “They’ve been helpful at every point in the process and have helped us to utilize the platform to it’s fullest potential.”

KVH’s interactive content has been so successful in the United States, the company has trained its UK team on how to use ion’s services, a process that ion will help KVH adapt to the specific needs of their UK market.

“We’re going to be reaching out to a completely different market,” Martineau says. “The better the content, the more chance we have to catch new leads and keep them. But even if we’re experimenting with different messages and different pictures, it’s credibility and differentiation through exceptional digital content that counts most. To accomplish that, we lean on ion’s newest templates, like the quizzes and interactive forms, and we’re also bringing in more team members to help us expand and evolve how we use ion to create even more innovative content.”