The project overview
We Are North has been working with digital agency, Booming, to deliver digital transformation for manufacturer Avery Dennison for the past few years. Avery Dennison specialize in the manufacture of functional materials including graphic wraps for automotive and architectural applications.
Operating globally, they wanted a better way to reach out to their clients and have worked closely with Booming and We Are North to achieve this. It’s been a real success and a point of pride for everyone involved.
Initial Pairing
Booming is a digital marketing agency that’s part of the Intracto group. The team, led by Lennart Ruigrok, focuses on optimising the digital funnel and with a range of specialists work closely with clients to make that a reality.
As a pairing, We Are North and Booming go together so well because they complement each other's skill sets. We Are North focuses on the super technical tooling, the data - connecting the dots. Booming takes this information and builds marketing activities from it – the ‘sexy’ bit (!).
Lennart and our co-founder, Vincent, have known one another for over 10 years and originally worked together in telecoms. Speaking a similar language of marketing and insight, they have formed a great partnership with an honest and forthright approach to creating value for customers.
Avery Dennison
After speaking with the Avery Dennison representative responsible for marketing within Europe, Booming discovered that there was a lot of potential for creating a body of work which would really help their marketing efforts.
To understand the improvements available we have to dive into how Avery Dennison supplies their products. There are really two core client groups – distributors and applicators. The distributor buys stock directly from Avery Dennison and then advertises themselves as a reseller to applicators. The applicators engage with their preferred distributor to source products and also look to Avery Dennison for information on new product releases.
Every year, new wrap colours and schemes are released to the market and distributors need to contact Avery Dennison to request samples of the new materials. The applicators will either have a good link through their own distributor or they will go directly to the Avery Dennison website, find the product they want and then seek out a distributor from there.
Crucially, these are two very different customer journeys.
The Challenges
As any marketer will attest, it has historically been very difficult to show the value you add – compared with a sales team. This was no different at Avery Dennison where each year larger and larger budgets were requested by the marketing department – without an easy way to justify them. The marketing manager needed a clear way to show the leads – and sales – being generated as a direct result of their activities.
Perhaps most importantly, Avery Dennison didn’t have a system in place which helped them customise their email marketing for their two core client groups – distributors and applicators. This meant that some of their communications fell on deaf ears as they weren’t targeted enough.
With an already strong market position. and relationships with a huge range of distributors and applicators, Avery Dennison were doing well. However, while they knew who their buyers were, they didn’t have a good way to get a jump on new sales to those clients. They couldn’t see when a distributor who worked with a competitor was looking to change.
Up until 2020, Avery Dennison relied on large trade shows for relationship building with clients – which suddenly, due to COVID, was put on pause. Therefore, Avery Dennison needed a digital solution which would keep their sales team in the know when it came to understanding what buyers wanted.
Tools of The Trade
Booming initially worked with Avery Dennison for a year helping to create a more effective email system that would allow them to connect the right buyer with the right content. They also helped implement standardised lead generation principles such as pop ups for the Avery Dennison website. Once Avery Dennison saw the success of this they were interested in working on further web projects that would take their marketing insights to the next level.
This is when Booming reached out to We Are North, understanding that to give Avery Dennison the information they needed to see purchasing trends and buyer interest, they would need someone to be able to look into the data. For the past two years the trio have worked together on this digital insight project.
Metrics like bounce rate and churn are only good with other points of reference. First and foremost understanding the statistics of each individual user is critical in effective B2B marketing. Unlike a B2C environment where user volume is higher with lower spends, B2B marketers need to be able to catch every lead because of the individual value they can add.
High Profile
We Are North implemented the Piwik PRO Analytics platform that delivers both real time web analytics and audience management using the built in customer data platform. This allows Avery Dennison to build detailed customer profiles and it does this without compromising on privacy and compliance.
All of this tracking is consent based and so is respectful of users. It’s a balance between respecting user privacy but also not losing analytics. In B2B there is a big focus on liability and responsibility which impact reputation and the same is true here.
Taking data from Salesforce and other marketing automation platforms which Avery Dennison used and feeding that into the underlying customer data platform of Piwik PRO, ensured that there was a high level of granular detail being added to each user profile when they visited the website.
We Are North were able to get a system in place where the site visitor could be identified and the information could be passed to the sales team. For instance, if a particular user has visited the site 8 times in the past three days. looked at two particular products, and downloaded brochures then they are clearly a lead.
Initially the visitor profiles created by the Piwik PRO Analytics platform just had numbers to identify them. However, as soon as a visitor provided an email address to download a product PDF, a real, traceable identity began to form. After repeat visits, a clearer picture of that individual and their needs began to form.
Avery Dennison now has the ability to create personalised content, downloadable product sheets, and can promote both on- and offline events. Using the profile data the Piwik PRO platform can be used off-site to activate profiles on channels like Facebook and Google DV360.
As a Result
Avery Dennison now has a host of insights that their sales team can quickly grasp and turn into valuable action. Building on the efficacy of the targeted emails implemented by Booming, Avery Dennison no longer needs to reach out to thousands of people. They can use the website profiles that are automatically built and tailor communications to visitors at just the right time. The whole system lets Avery Dennison strike while the iron is hot, capitalising on warm leads in the moment.
Everything on a platform is also COVID-proof because it’s digital. This digitisation also means it can be automated – making it cheaper than live events. The success of this project marks a huge shift for Avery Dennison from traditional marketing to a digital future – it is truly transformative.
The marketing department is now able to show their worth. They can demonstrate that they have helped line up customers. They can prove their product information is taken onboard through brochure downloads and which of these prospects became clients.
Future development is also planned and there’s soon going to be a focus on completely connecting the website, the Piwik PRO platform, Salesforce, and Avery Dennison’s CRM so that customer visits can be updated throughout the systems instantly.
If you’re interested in knowing your customers better, arming your sales team with everything they need and having a better grasp of your data then reach out to We Are North today – we can help.