CVR Energy’s 2025 Refinery Marketing Wins New Audiences

Refinery marketing platforms give you a direct line to specific demographics, but actually connecting with new audiences requires a smart, data-first plan. Getting seen is only half the battle. The real work is making that connection stick and turning that first contact into real business, especially for industrial players like the energy sector. So how does a focused refinery marketing strategy actually find and win over a whole new audience?

Campaign Teardown: CVR Energy’s “Future Fuels” Initiative

In the cutthroat world of industrial energy, growing your market reach is a flat-out necessity. CVR Energy, a holding company deep in petroleum refining and nitrogen fertilizer, knew this when they launched their “Future Fuels” campaign in Q3 2025. The goal was crystal clear: bring in new B2B partners and investors who were looking for sustainable energy plays. This wasn’t some fuzzy brand awareness campaign. It was a surgical strike meant to change how people saw the company and open up new revenue by showing off their real investments in renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). The campaign had a $350,000 budget and ran for six months, from July to December 2025.

Strategy and Objectives: Beyond Traditional Energy Narratives

The entire strategy hinged on a major change in their story. Instead of talking about refining capacity or how efficient their operations were, the campaign set out to frame CVR Energy as a company looking to the future, committed to decarbonization. The main objective was to get more engagement from new B2B audiences, especially in logistics, aviation, and agriculture, sectors that are actively looking for green supply chain partners. A second goal was to catch the eye of institutional investors who have an ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) mandate.

We saw a clear opening in the market, as many potential partners automatically assume traditional refiners are moving too slowly on green energy. Our job was to prove CVR Energy’s real commitment by pointing to actual projects and concrete investment plans. That meant we had to walk a fine line between providing enough technical detail for the experts and keeping the message accessible and focused on benefits.

Targeting: Precision in a Niche Market

Our targeting for “Future Fuels” was incredibly specific. We went past standard company data like size and revenue and layered in psychographic and behavioral info. We were hunting for companies and people who showed real interest in sustainability reports, attended renewable energy conferences, or followed policy changes around emissions. For the B2B side, this meant procurement managers at major airlines and logistics firms, plus agricultural co-ops that were looking into bio-based fuels. For investors, we zeroed in on portfolio managers and analysts who specialize in clean energy and ESG funds.

The primary platforms we used to find them were:

• LinkedIn Campaign Manager: We targeted by job titles (“Head of Sustainability,” “Biofuel Procurement,” “ESG Analyst”), industry groups for renewable energy, and even people who engaged with their competitors’ content.
• Programmatic Advertising (Display & Video): Using demand-side platforms (DSPs), we targeted IP addresses at key corporate offices and ran ads on industry-specific sites like S&P Global Commodity Insights and Renewable Energy World.
• Direct Email Marketing: We built our own lists from attendees of recent sustainable aviation fuel summits and renewable diesel forums, then segmented them by their job and what they’d expressed interest in.
• Public Relations Outreach: We pitched journalists who cover green tech and sustainable finance at outlets like Bloomberg Green and Reuters Sustainable Business.

Creative Approach: Visualizing the Future

The creative had to look and feel completely different from CVR Energy’s old-school branding. We chose visuals that suggested clean energy and partnership, and we stayed away from the typical shots of industrial plants. Key creative pieces included:

• Video Content: We made short (30-60 second) animated videos that explained how they turn waste into renewable fuels, complete with testimonials from the actual scientists and engineers on the projects.
• Infographics: We created data-heavy visuals that showed exactly how much SAF and renewable diesel reduce environmental impact compared to old-school fuels, citing official sources like the EPA’s Renewable Fuel Standard program.
• Thought Leadership Articles: Our team wrote in-depth articles for industry blogs and CVR Energy’s own newsroom, getting into the weeds of their tech and strategic partnerships in the sustainable fuels world.
• Landing Pages: We built dedicated campaign pages on CVR Energy’s website, all designed for lead capture with detailed info, white papers, and contact forms.

A good chunk of the creative budget went into producing top-notch visuals that could explain complicated ideas in a fast, compelling way. Our in-house team worked with an outside agency to create three different video concepts and five infographic designs so we could A/B test them across our channels.

What Worked: Data-Driven Successes

The campaign had some big wins. The programmatic ad component, which ate up about 60% of the budget ($210,000), was incredibly effective. We hit 12 million impressions across our target B2B publications and news sites, getting an average click-through rate (CTR) of 0.85%. That CTR might look low for a consumer campaign, but for a tight B2B industrial market, it showed we were getting strong engagement.

Specifically, the video ads showing the closed-loop renewable diesel process pulled a 1.2% CTR, crushing the static display ads (0.6% CTR). This confirmed our hunch that showing these complex sustainable processes visually would connect better with our audience. The cost per click (CPC) for programmatic display ads came in at an average of $2.10.

Our LinkedIn campaigns, built for direct lead gen, brought in 1,800 marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) at a cost per lead (CPL) of $85. This was far below our $100 CPL target and a huge improvement over the $180 industry average for industrial leads, according to a 2025 HubSpot B2B Marketing Report. About 25% of those MQLs turned into sales-qualified leads (SQLs), which tells you just how good the lead quality was from our precise targeting.

The PR work is always harder to track with direct numbers, but it landed us features in three major trade publications and an interview for CVR Energy’s CEO on a popular energy podcast. That kind of third-party validation is priceless for building trust with a new, skeptical audience. We saw a 15% lift in organic search traffic to the “Sustainable Fuels” section of their site during the campaign, and we’re confident that was mostly due to the PR push and the authority it built.

All in, the campaign produced 1,500 new prospect conversions, which we defined as someone either requesting a detailed proposal or talking directly to the sales team. The cost per conversion was $125. This was a 25% increase in new prospect conversions from the six months prior, showing we had effectively reached a new audience. Calculating the return on ad spend (ROAS) is tough with long B2B sales cycles, but early pipeline projections pointed to a potential 3.5x ROAS within a year.

What Didn’t Work: Learning from the Data

Of course, not everything was a home run. Our first attempt at email marketing using purchased lists had a pretty weak open rate (18%) and an even worse click-through rate (1.5%). The lists just weren’t as targeted as what we could do on LinkedIn. We made a quick pivot, pulling $15,000 from the email budget and pushing it into more programmatic ads and sponsored content on industry forums where we were seeing much better engagement. That was a critical adjustment. It’s a classic trap. The promise of a huge list can make you forget to ask about its quality.

The initial creative for our static display ads was another miss. We ran ads with generic green-themed images like leaves and solar panels, and they bombed. It showed a real disconnect with the industrial audience we were trying to reach. Even people interested in sustainability still want to see a certain level of technical realism from a company like CVR Energy. We quickly changed them out for visuals that mixed industrial imagery (like a refinery stack emitting steam instead of smoke) with subtle green design elements or photos of sustainable crops. That change alone led to the 15% CTR lift on display ads within two months.

Optimization Steps Taken: Agility in Action

We were constantly watching the data and running A/B tests, which led to several key changes on the fly:

1. Creative Refresh: As mentioned, we overhauled the static display ads to feel more authentic to an industrial audience. We also started weaving more case studies and success stories into our videos to show real-world examples of their renewable fuels in action.
2. Budget Reallocation: We moved money from the failing email campaigns and pumped it into programmatic and LinkedIn, where the CPL and conversion numbers were clearly better. That kind of dynamic budget management let us get the most out of every dollar.
3. Enhanced Landing Page Personalization: We set up dynamic content on the landing pages. If a visitor came from an aviation-focused publication, they saw a hero image and intro text that was all about SAF. This simple change gave us a 10% bump in lead form completions.
4. Retargeting Campaigns: We put a strong retargeting plan in place for anyone who hit our key landing pages but didn’t fill out a form. We served them ads with deeper content, like white papers or invites to exclusive webinars, which converted 7% of that retargeted group.
5. Partnership with Industry Influencers: We identified three respected voices in the sustainable energy space and sponsored some of their content, also getting our experts on joint webinars. This got our message out through trusted channels to people who might have ignored a direct corporate ad.

CVR Energy’s “Future Fuels” campaign is a great playbook for how a smart refinery marketing strategy can break into new audience segments. The keys were niche targeting, creative that actually resonated, and the agility to optimize based on what the data was telling us. Changing the story from a traditional industrial one to one focused on sustainability, and backing it up with proof, was what made the entire effort work. It really shows you have to understand what your audience cares about *now* and be willing to adjust your message to match.