Challenge

thyssenkrupp Materials is a service wholesaler of steel, stainless steel and aluminum. The company has over 2,300 buying customers across the Netherlands and Belgium. They provide a wide and deep range of products and offer extensive processing possibilities for their customers.

Driven by a need to automate processes and increase sales, thyssenkrupp decided to pilot an e-commerce webshop dedicated to the local aluminum market. Using this digital go-to-market approach required no sales involvement, but did need automatic campaign workflows. The goal was to drive revenue without sales involvement through a combination of targeted marketing and self-service e-commerce tools. This objective was made more challenging by the fact that the typical aluminum consumer is not used to ordering directly online. This challenge required a lot of experimentation to determine the best marketing tactics for this very traditional business-to-business market.

Solution

By implementing Marketo Engage, thyssenkrup Materials was able to engage with potential customers with relevant content and convince them to purchase aluminum online. The first step in the process was to investigate which uses cases would bring the most value to the pilot. This was done in a series of two workshops – the first to brainstorm on all possible use cases and the second to refine and prioritize them, looking at value, contribution, feasibility, and impact.

This pilot had a unique starting point: the database would start at 0 and all additions would be the direct result of marketing success. With this in mind, the selected use-cases for Marketo Engage became setting up the basics, driving traffic to the webshop, and running gated content campaigns to capture new leads. There was also a heavy focus placed on reporting and analytics, because the results of this pilot would be used to justify extending and expanding the use of Marketo Engage within the organization.

Results

The pilot is still running, but we expect to have some good results in the next few months. Check back soon for more detailed results regarding thyssenkrupp’s implementation and ecommerce pilot. Once the initial pilot is completed, we expect to be experimenting and scaling up those items that work in this e-commerce environment.