How we helped a European supply chain company develop a well-founded digital marketing strategy

Our Client: 

A company active in the B2B supply chain industry gained a strong European footprint with 20+ brands spread across 10+ countries. The group aims to become a global leader – transforming the industry with innovative, sustainable and reliable solutions with best-in-class service.  

We maintain anonymity to respect the client’s choice due to the impact and scope of this project.  

Challenge: 

While the company is well-established with a strong European footprint, the current acquisition strategy relies heavily on the sales representatives. The company spotted untapped potential in the market: due to low marketing maturity and a lack of an active lead generation strategy, the current clientele is limited to a small percentage of the total market.  

Hence, the global management of the client called upon The House of Marketing & Customer Collective to: 

• Build the brand to emerge as a global leader 
• Develop a strong digital marketing strategy that enables lead generation and organic growth for the company and its different European brands 
• Define a future-proof marketing organization capable of implementing and executing the business ambitions 

Approach: 

• Gather internal and external insights to define the playing field: The first and foremost step was to define the “As-Is” situation of the company to have a clear overview of the playing field. This process was kick-started with a thorough audit of the current (digital) marketing activities and marketing tool stack. 

Simultaneously, our team gathered data and insights via in-depth interviews and quantitative surveys with the key internal and external stakeholders. In addition to primary data, we also conducted desk research on market trends, keywords, and competitors. These different elements helped us have a strong understanding of the company’s ambitions, the market and the business landscape.  

• Build marketing fundamentals and define the ambition for the marketing team: An effective marketing strategy contains a solid definition of WHY (Vision, Mission & Objectives), WHO (Personas & Customer Journey), WHAT (Value Proposition & Content Strategy), WHERE (Channel Mix), and HOW (Organizational Design & Tool Stack) of the business.  

Based on the insights gathered from surveys and client interviews in the initial stage, we defined the target personas and mapped out their customer journey. This was validated by the internal stakeholders. 

Subsequently, we facilitated collaborative workshops to: 

1. Crystallize the value proposition 
2. Define the brand architecture and brand positioning 
3. Define the marketing mission and mandate 
4. Develop a capabilities framework for the new marketing organization 

• Build the digital and content strategy: Once we defined the marketing fundamentals, we collaborated with the client to ideate the content plan. This was followed with an internal ideation workshop with the digital experts of Upthrust. This included prioritizing and defining the right channel mix for the different target personas based on their customer journey.  
• Prepare the implementation of the new marketing organization: Our team of organizational design experts collaborated with the client in workshops to define the final marketing team structure. This stage of the project involved kick-starting the implementation of the new, future-proof marketing organization. To do so, our team prepared the job descriptions for the new roles, including hierarchy, responsibilities, skills and interdependencies.  
• Build the roadmap to guide the company to marketing maturity: We created a multi-year roadmap to bring the recommended strategy to life and transition the company towards marketing maturity. This included a transition timeline for the brand architecture, the digital & content strategy as well as the marketing organization. 

Results: 

The goal of our approach was to create a well-founded and implementable strategic plan that is ready for action. Considering the diverse portfolio of the group, our process was designed to involve key stakeholders from the different European sub brands to reach consensus and facilitate change management. Our deliverables included: 

• Market and consumer insights via desk research, surveys, and in-depth interviews 

• Definition of 4 target personas with well-defined and validated gains, pain points, drivers, and barriers 
• Map of the customer journey for these 4 personas detailing the touchpoints, challenges, and opportunities 
• Crystallized value proposition focused on the target personas 
• Digital strategy recommendation with a content and campaign plan proposal, channel mix proof of concept and marketing tool stack 
• Organizational design blueprint and detailed job descriptions for the marketing team 
• Multi-year roadmap to facilitate the transition of the brand architecture and the organization design for all the sub brands 

“I have appreciated the approach and collaboration with The House of Marketing a lot. The project followed a well-structured set-up which was led in an organized, flexible, pro-active and very qualitative manner that brought out the key insights for our marketing and brand strategy. I can highly recommend them both from a content point of view as from a personal relationship point of view, it was great quality and fun at the same time.”
– Chief Commercial Officer