About Aurora

Aurora is a drilling optimisation specialist and a software provider for oil and gas operators. They provide detailed drilling system analysis – focusing on durability, efficiency and performance. Aurora was founded by Nick and Harrie in 2006. They both bring over 40 years of experience in drilling operations and have worked globally. They draw on their expertise from a deep understanding of well optimisation, bit efficiency and drilling performance.

Goals

In the summer of 2022, Aurora was introduced to us by a local brand consultant, Anja Peter, working with the company on rebranding. The founders, Nick and Harrie, have strong credibility in their industry, which has paid off for over 15 years.

There was now an opportunity to grow Aurora beyond its current network. Our mandate was to establish a more prominent online presence and generate more interest in its drilling optimisation services.

So, Doqaru collaborated with Anja Peter to develop a new brand. We delivered a detailed marketing strategy to achieve the following goals:

  • Boost Aurora’s visibility to a broader oil and gas audience
  • Reintroduce Aurora to industry decision-makers as a leading expert in drilling optimisation
  • Share insights with current and future drilling professionals on achieving efficient, on-time and on-budget outcomes

Solution

We ran a marketing strategy workshop with the Aurora team. The session aimed to build a clear picture of key market opportunities. It also helps to identify the steps towards achieving Aurora’s business goals.

Following the workshop, we developed a detailed marketing strategy comprising two sets of actions:

  1. Build & Boost
  2. Engage & Educate

The collaboration with Anja Peter supported vital parts of Build & Boost, creating a recognisable new brand for Aurora. Based on the marketing strategy, Doqaru developed all the website content. Doqaru collaborated with a graphic designer and a social media specialist to create a new brand identity for Aurora.

For Engage & Educate, we led content and value proposition development. Leveraging our oil and gas industry knowledge, we generated dozens of themes to drive visibility and engagement with target buyer personas. This groundwork laid the foundation for future articles and other digital content.

Furthermore, we created and implemented a strategy for engaging key stakeholder groups such as professional bodies, higher institutions, and potential partners. We aimed to elevate the visibility of the Aurora brand beyond the founders’ immediate networks. Less than six months on, we’ve started to see green shoots.

It was clear from the outset that Yekemi Otaru & Sarah Gardyne had an understanding of what we needed to do to accomplish our goals. Aurora needed to expand the visibility of its brand and service offering and the understanding of our industry, shown by Doqaru, made this process very easy.

The growth in the visibility of our brand is beyond our expectations and therefore we highly recommend Doqaru should you or your company need an aligned strategy to reach out in new directions.

Nick Biggs
Owner at Aurora

Outcomes

Between August 2022 and January 2023, we established the Aurora LinkedIn business page by creating and publishing content often, generating 3%-4% engagement from the company’s target audience of drilling managers and senior engineers.

The content plan included “introductory” posts to showcase the Aurora team through “get to know” features. These posts did well and ignited renewed interest and, ultimately, Aurora’s area of expertise. The new Aurora website launched in January 2023 and received approx 500 visits within the first 28 days.

Over 20% of those views were from organic searches and another 20% from LinkedIn. Some other key outcomes are:

  1. Aurora’s LinkedIn page followers doubled within six weeks, and we recorded a further 50% growth after four months.
  2. New articles focused on company news generated significant engagement and opportunities for sales-focused follow-ups.
  3. Thought leadership articles like Bit Design for Beginners hit home with drilling professionals – 10% of people that saw it in their feed read it, and 30% of those who read it engaged.
  4. An increase in engagement from people not known to Aurora founders Nick and Harrie.

The early results are promising thanks to a stand-out new brand and ongoing marketing efforts. These days, we are bringing more traffic to the Aurora website now that it’s live. The future will be about converting those website visits into sales conversations.

Future

We thoroughly enjoy working with the team at Aurora. The next few months will see more thought leadership and video content, more web traffic and a greater focus on long-term sales success.