A Hyper-targeted Product Launch For Wavin
Wavin is a global market leader in water management and drainage systems. In late 2017, they turned to Dept to help launch their latest product, Tapwater, in Norway.
The Challenge
Enhancing Digital Acquisition
The project was highly complex; Wavin operates in a saturated market and its new product was already offered by its main competitors.
The market structure in this industry is tiered, comprising of two mains segments: the wholesalers and the installers. The decision makers are the large buying groups and wholesalers, who have product teams deciding on which products to carry in their portfolio of offerings. The influencers are smaller plumbers who buy their supplies from wholesale buying groups. The challenge was to get both the wholesalers and the installers to switch to Wavin from its main competitors.
Marketing pull and push had to be created – a pull from the influencers’ side, and a push from the decision makers. It was Dept’s task to find a way to do so. The goal of the launch was to strengthen Wavin’s position as the one-stop-shop versus its key competitors, and to create sales for the new product.
The Strategy
Business, Audience And Interaction Goals
The specific goals of the project were defined on three levels: business goals, audience goals, and related interaction.
- The business goal was to increase awareness and stimulate audience curiosity for the launch of a new product.
- The audience goal was to then turn that curiosity into a need for more information about Tapwater as a product.
- Related interaction goals were to increase the reach and viewability of the campaign, and to achieve a good opening rate of the targeted emails.
This campaign was about quality, not quantity. Wavin operates in a niche market with a highly limited number of decision makers. In turn, this meant that the campaign had to be hyper-targeted in order to influence the correct people.
Connecting With Customers
How did we help Wavin to create awareness among installers but also trigger switching behaviour from larger wholesalers? We developed a cohesive campaign framework tailored around the needs and wants of the identified audiences, the channels they use most (Facebook for influencers, LinkedIn for decision makers), and the go-to market activities.
This framework was then split into three distinct phases: tease, launch and sustain:
- TEASE: the main goal was to create awareness and build momentum before the product launch.
- LAUNCH: deliver sales qualified leads to the Wavin sales team to convert immediately after the moment of product launch.
- SUSTAIN: build an always on nurture approach to keep Wavin top-of-mind and to develop the relationship with decision makers.
For each of the stages, we created a tailored approach for the audiences and delivered creative campaign assets that would resonate best to the needs of the prospects. We built the campaign flows in Wavin’s marketing automation tool (ClickDimensions), and helped further develop the nurture approach after launch.
The Results
Building The Project Pipeline
We helped Wavin to define a new value proposition, create a customer journey, and plan a content approach to launch their new product. We combined a digital acquisition approach with marketing automation for lead nurturing.
Due to our identification of the correct audiences, we were able to create hyper-targeted messaging that helped Wavin immediately create sales conversations. Previously, sales conversions would take months, but with the Dept campaign, Wavin was getting traction in just a week. Within the first twelve weeks after launch, Wavin had a project pipeline with more projects than expected for the first nine months.