Background
MediaGroup established our APAC hub in Hong Kong in 2017 as a point of entry into the Asian market, where many of our global clients focus their efforts. Our local team help businesses build successful marketing strategies on Google, Microsoft and local platforms, such as Baidu, 360, WeChat, Yahoo Japan! and Naver.
Recognizing the businesses' need to take marketing strategies online in the wake of the pandemic, we successfully assisted Universal Robots (UR), one of the largest manufacturers of collaborative robotic arms, in implementing a full-funnel online strategy.
The strategy shift contributed to record annual revenue in 2021 of USD 311M, 41% up in 2020 and 23% up from their pre-pandemic results.
The APAC region is a critical region for UR. MediaGroup liaises closely with UR’s local offices in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, South Korea and Japan.
HONG KONG TEAM, SEE OTHER LOCATIONS
Solution
To continue acquiring customers and make rational use of marketing budgets in challenging times, our client has undergone a digital marketing transformation.
MediaGroup Worldwide developed a full-funnel paid campaign covering the whole customer journey to engage our target audience (Operational Manager, Supply Chain Manager, Automation Engineer, Manufacturer Owner, SMBs owners etc.) in different funnel stages, and thus generate quality marketing leads for sales.
Our understanding of B2B, especially in the Engineering & Manufacturing sector, allowed us to identify the value of a more prolonged engagement, 0.5-2 years before the acquisition.
1. Transitioned from physical to virtual events.
One of the biggest challenges during Covid-19 was the lack of face-to-face communication for factory visits or product demos. Instead of promoting offline expos like the pre-pandemic period, we leveraged CRM data and identified similar audiences to promote online webinars and seminars.
We gathered suggestions from local media presentative and shared some best practices, such as running live stream, event ads, creative best practices, and engagement for webinar campaigns. This helped to maintain engagement and conversation with potential clients.
2. Established brand awareness by utilizing online media.
We built brand awareness and established the largest collaborative robotics brand among their audience via several local channels:
- Brandzone on Baidu to expose multimedia variations of the brand; Live link
- Regular posting of social marketing on Wechat, Meta.
- Videos showcasing LinkedIn professional job titles and relevant audiences.
- Automation-related posts on Twitter targeting industrial page followers and automation keywords.
- Showcasing production line and interviews to capture audience on YouTube, Douyin and TikTok.
- In-feed advertisement on Toutiao news.
3. Kept B2B customers engaged by offering a lead magnet.
An audience was fed into the top of the funnel by first becoming aware of the brand. Then, regular follow-up campaigns were scheduled to nurture the audience and convert them to leads. Gated content such as guidelines, tips on manufacturing and automation, E-books and whitepapers were all offered in exchange for contact information. Once contact was received, they became subscribers and automatically received notifications of the latest whitepapers, case studies, demos, and more.
Apart from social media and display channels, we promoted these lead magnets by bidding relevant keywords across Paid search campaigns on global search engines and local platforms.
4. Leveraged data and analytics for acquisition.
Past marketing efforts gathered valuable data like cookies, top landing pages, and job titles of customer experience platforms from multiple sources. It gave us a holistic overview and analysis for more precise targeting, often involving retargeting some engaged or abandoned leads. Since MediaGroup partners with many DMP platforms (such as IPINYOU, BAIDU DMP), this allowed for the sophisticated measurement of each customer touchpoint.
Another tactic was increased customization for the customers further down the marketing funnel, such as assigning operational specialists to site visits to investigate issues at customers’ manufacturing production line. Thanks to close collaboration with Universal Robots and their responsive sales team, we were able to build reports for new leads effectively.
HONG TEAM, SEE OTHER LOCATIONS
5. Pushed for localized responses.
MediaGroup has strong relationships with local media platforms in Asia. For instance, we have a dedicated platform representative on LinkedIn, Meta, Baidu, 360, Douyin and Yahoo Japan!, ensuring we were always on top of new features and stepping ahead of competitors.
This support allowed us to undergo detailed, localized analyses before strategy implementation. We collected opinions from local audiences in terms of landing page navigation, analyzed recent trending search terms on different platforms, compared local competitor ad campaigns, and ensured we followed local laws and regulations regarding content and ad copy.
6. Conducted display activities.
Our diversified programmatic activities focused on each funnel stage with different messaging. This approach successfully increased UR’s revenue in APAC region.
The approach was based on purchasing only highly viewable impressions from proven publishers, directing our paid content to users interested in manufacturing, factory automation, and lookalikes built on website visitors and converters. We also used statistical analysis to optimize the campaign with daily performance reviews. An essential part of the campaign was to secure the budget against ad fraud, which we succeeded in doing.
Results
Our shift in strategy from offline driven sales to an online full-funnel marketing approach brought remarkable results across PPC, Social, and Programmatic advertising in the period January 2021 to May 2022.
In mainland China and Taiwan exclusively, our efforts generated 13,500+ potential clients.
In the wider APAC region, we successfully generated 13,600+ potential clients.
In total, we generated 27 100+ potential clients for Universal Robots.
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