The Marketing Director Diaries: Fortress Oil & Gas; An Interview Series On Cutting Through the C

We are doing an interview series on marketing directors and those who are responsible for marketing in their company and asking them how they are separating their content marketing from the crowd in the current age.

Efrain Rios is the founder of Fortress Oil & Gas, LLC, an asset integrity consulting company specializing in records and data management. For the past 15 years he has focused on improving data quality and risk management by building robust data management programs around standardized asset integrity software.

1. Thinking about your initial expectations in your marketing role, what has surprised you the most?

The most surprising thing is how easy it is to reach a lot of people, but how difficult it can sometimes be to reach specific groups of people. In this social media age, it’s never been easier to communicate with large masses, and that’s great for a lot of companies. However, in a niche business, such as asset integrity consulting for the oil and gas industry, it’s critical to reach the right people – those who have the right kind and amount of experience to understand the value and importance of that service.

2. What’s one thing that’s really special about your company and what’s it been like trying to convey that through your marketing?

Operating companies are constantly working to maintain the mechanical integrity of their physical assets (well sites, plants, pipelines, refineries, etc.) and those activities generate lots of documentation. Historically, they’ve been so focused on the field work that managing the data back at the office wasn’t always given enough attention. If instead of simply entering data and filing the records (the bare minimum), companies truly focused on building a robust information management program they could unlock the data’s full potential and more effectively plan for future events. This kind of approach would improve their ability to maintain compliance and operate safely. It often saves them money, too. Fortress was founded to help companies see the importance of proper data management practices and to teach them how to use their information to more proactively manage their equipment. We’ve found that our biggest marketing challenge has been communicating our expertise to the right people and educating these future customers on the value that we provide. Sharing quality content through social media channels has been our most successful method of tackling this challenge.

3. What marketing are you doing now that you’re really loving? What’s really working for you? (These can be the same answer or not)

Just this week, we issued the 2nd article in our 5-part series on inspection data management systems. While these can be found on our website, we have also arranged for them to be hosted as a guest blog on a major trade magazine’s website and included in their weekly newsletter. This allows us to reach thousands of people we might otherwise struggle to find. Although we are only halfway through the series, these articles have already led to several support requests and discussions for upcoming projects.

4. If you had unlimited budget, time and resources, what one thing would you do to market your company?

With unlimited budget, time, and resources I would have to say a Super Bowl commercial seems like it would be fun. I can’t say that would be the most cost-effective video marketing campaign, though. We are, however, currently exploring several options for adding video to our content marketing strategy which is very exciting.

Michael Mason is the owner of Perfect Chaos Films, a video marketing company in Austin TX that specializes in company culture videos, corporate video marketing and documentaries.