Story by
Ceros Inspire
Stefan is Responsible
This is Stefan
for producing exceptional marketing content for an international professional services company called Stantec. His goal is to produce the kind of engaging material that will really resonate with Stantec’s customers and prospects, but this is usually easier said than done.
Meet Stefan Riches
Ceros Empowers
How Stantec’s Stefan Riches uses Ceros to transform dense, complex content into captivating, scalable, interactive experiences that build loyalty, promote understanding, and drive business.
Tk
Right
Engagement
of
Power
The
Title
Director,
Content Marketing
Company
Stantec
Industry
Infrastructure Design
Featured Project
7 Best Practices of Highly Effective Smart Cities
Company Size
22,000
“”
Stefan on simplifying complex data
an interactive infographic that showcases the best practices of smart, interconnected cities. Previously, the Stantec team created blog posts with this information, burying key stats and figures in paragraphs of dense text.
With Ceros, the Stantec content team had a way to visualize the data, break apart the story into digestible chunks, and deliver a more engaging, self-directed experience. (One of the valuable storytelling features of Ceros is that it allows readers to click on just the areas they’re most interested in seeing.) Plus, there were no development or coding resources required, neither in-house nor third party.
Consider this example—
+
+
Scale content efficiently
Engage more deeply
no-code interactivity
How
Ceros Helped Stantec
What Did Stantec Create?
no-code software tool that gives marketers and designers the power to create rich, scalable, interactive content without developers or an outside agency. For Stantec, that means creating interactive infographics, quizzes, and more—content that outperforms Stantec’s static blogs by an average of two-to-one, and in some specific cases, it’s as high as five- or 10-to-one.
“Ceros helps us come at a particular topic from different angles,” Riches said. “It really helps us distill those ideas more clearly, in a way that engages people, more than a blog post might.”
Ceros is a
The Ceros Factor
creative team transform that complicated subject matter into accessible, digestible content that its audience might not just comprehend, but actually engage in and share? The answer to Stefan’s question was interactive content—eye-catching animations, compelling interactions, visuals that pop off the screen.
But could he do it within his budget and without stretching team resources too thin? Oh, and another thing: Is there any way he could do it without bothering his developers? There was always a long line of requests for that team, and even patient, understanding Stefan couldn’t wait in line every time he had to produce amazing content. Anyone have a no-code solution?
Ceros did.
How could stantec's
Stefan Finds a Way
Stefan has been staring down a problem that plagues nearly every marketer at some point: the subject matter he’s given is often dizzyingly complex, dry, or candidly, more than a little boring. Stantec specializes in the engineering, design, and architecture of infrastructure projects. Ever try to write a captivating white paper about waste treatment facilities? So it’s not surprising that the blog posts his team worked so hard on—essentially walls of text about carbon footprints and renewable resources—went skimmed or totally unopened by Stantec’s intended audience.
For years,
This is Stefan's Challenge
Stefan on the scalability of no-code content creation
“”
Stantec’s Ceros content perform better and scale the team’s efforts, but Ceros gives the company’s creatives the ability to be, you know, creative. Stefan says the design team, led by director Heather MacDonald, was quick to learn its way around the platform to push, and reach its full creative potential.
And Stantec’s designers are always finding new ways to use Ceros and new content types to create. “Ceros has been amazing because it’s allowed us to find sort of creative visual ways to tell some of the stories and to engage people in a different kind of way,” Stefan said.
Now, Stantec is using Ceros to visually engage its readers in complex, often important topics, like an interactive thought leadership piece on reducing carbon through rewilding or a guide to configuring doctors’ offices using Playmobil. And their prospects aren’t the only ones the content is engaging: both of those pieces were also featured in recent stories in Fast Company. As it turns out, engagement is also contagious.
Not only does
Stefan: Content Hero
Jenna V.
Wanna see more?
Emily W.
“Ceros calls it no-code. But it feels more like
no-limits to me and my creation process!”
Peter L.
“Engagement jumped so high
I thought it
was a mistake—
but it wasn't.
It was Ceros.”
sell to has that technical knowledge.
incredibly complex. Not everyone that we
technical challenges our designers face are
ideas we promote and some of the
We’re architecture engineers. Some of the
lets us create up to five or six items per month.
could only create one item a month. Ceros
it was so costly and time-consuming that we
When we had to rely on our web developers
“When I started creating content with Ceros my newsletter click through rate doubled.”
One of Stantec’s signature creations
Music
Music
technical challenges our designers face are
technical challenges our designers face are
up to five or six items per month.
web developers it was so costly and time-consuming that we
a month. Ceros
NOT FINAL
Illustration by Sol Cotti