Precision tools for tailor-made experiences.

Digital spin for tailor-made customer experiences

How do high-tech industries shape the future? Tools from Walter AG are a great start. With precision tools for turning, drilling, milling, and threading metal, as well as tools for industrial manufacturing processes, the company helps aerospace companies achieve lofty goals, automakers gain momentum, and wind turbine manufacturers move forward with renewed energy.

To show each type of industrial customer the tailor-made solutions offered by Walter, the company relies on B2B marketing that is both personalized and automated. Walter's tool of choice is Adobe Marketo Engage, part of Adobe Experience Cloud.

Staying connected across online and offline channels

Staying connected with B2B contacts today means keeping an eye on numerous channels. Prospective B2B customers don’t only rely on e-mail or trade shows to communicate with companies. Just like consumers, they use digital channels across web and mobile apps. This has dramatically increased the effort required from marketers to target prospects and turn them into qualified leads.

"As a global company that serves a wide variety of customers in 80 countries, we needed to completely rethink our marketing processes in the digital age," recalls Claudia Kley, Demand Marketing Manager at Walter AG.

She drove the strategic implementation of personalized and automated marketing at the tool manufacturer. The clear goal: to centralize the growing volume of customer data and make account-based marketing on all channels much more efficient through automatic processes.

This was not possible with the existing solutions. "We had a lot of data silos in many individual applications that could not be reconciled," says Kley. "All customers have different preferences for touchpoints. Without a complete record of customers, there was no way to map the entire digital customer journey."

Walter started looking for a solution that would be able to combine customer data and use it to derive automatic recommendations for campaign content and timing. The company had high requirements, including precise personalization options, powerful assistance for cross-selling recommendations, and the ability to automatically prepare and implement marketing campaigns and measure their performance. Walter also wanted the solution to be the one go-to platform across the global marketing organization, so it also needed to offer intuitive operations in multiple languages.

Finally, Walter wanted a solution with a clear B2B focus. It needed to not only account for channels such as digital marketing but also events such as trade shows when looking at lead generation. “The ability to combine real life and digital worlds was very important to us because, as a traditional B2B company, we still attach great importance to personal sales contact," says Kley.

Bringing marketing automation global

Walter chose Marketo Engage as the solution that met all of the company’s requirements. After a fast implementation, it was rolled out to support personalized customer communications across all regions, in part due to the broad support in multiple languages. "We got started quickly. You don't have to do much more than set up templates to immediately get started with Marketo Engage," says Kley.

Walter now has a platform for marketing automation that can easily link to its customer data platform. It brings together information from various IT systems, such as the customer relationship management for sales, merchandise management from logistics, and enterprise resource planning which spans the entire company.

Marketers enrich this data pool using the marketing automation platform to lay the foundation for orchestrated customer communications. Walter uses built-in analytics to determine where the customer is in the decision-making cycle and display different content across digital channels. Qualified leads are automatically forwarded to the sales team, who can then provide additional targeted advice to prospective buyers.

Through this interplay of data and campaign management as well as sales and marketing, Walter succeeds in providing cutting edge communications that focus on creating experiences and promoting sales.

"Adobe Marketo Engage changed everything for us. The solution enables our B2B marketing team, to map the entire customer journey and create personal customer experiences automatically," says Kley.

Increased engagement with less effort

The marketing automation platform adds tangible value for the tool manufacturer. Kley is enthusiastic about how the app’s versatility simplifies marketing across Walter. "Whether it's large digital events, account-based marketing, or newsletter campaigns, Marketo Engage significantly increased our engagement rate through tailored customer experiences, while reducing the time and effort required," says Kley.

The Adobe app also helps support important events in the B2B sector. "The questions of who participated, who needs additional information afterwards ― they can be answered very well thanks to the Adobe solution. Tracking is particularly easy and helpful," says Kley. This insight helps sales also benefit from marketing automation.

Future-proof marketing application

With Marketo Engage, Walter achieved its goal of implementing a comprehensive solution that removes data silos and creates the best possible database for a personalized customer approach. And Kley sees many more possibilities. "We are not yet using the full potential of Marketo Engage,” she says. “There is still much more we can do to automate campaigns, and we are still in the early stages of automated lead scoring. That gives us the good feeling that there's still a lot we can do."

Recommended for you

Content as a Service - Tuesday, September 5, 2023 at 12:40 (no-lazy)

See all customer stories