Ready for the future

aquatherm breaks new ground in sales marketing with digital techniques

Attracting and retaining new customers is not easy. For many years, cold calling with phone calls, e-mails and flyers was the classic way to attract new business partners to your company. The problem is that these methods often come to nothing. Too much information flow makes today’s customers feel inconvenienced.

So-called inbound marketing works the other way around: Instead of approaching people and flooding them with information, customers are made to approach the company. This is exactly the path that aquatherm, the world’s leading manufacturer of plastic piping systems made of polypropylene for plant construction and building services, is taking and has started with modern sales marketing.

“We have been very successful with our classic routes in recent years,” explains aquatherm marketing manager Meike Strauch. “However, we are noticing that today’s customer obtains information differently in a rapidly changing environment. He searches directly on the Internet for the solution to his problem. That’s why search engines and social media are playing an increasingly important role. From now on, we are increasingly serving these two areas with our new marketing strategy.”

In concrete terms, this means that aquatherm will be presenting a new blog on its new blog (http://blog.aquatherm.de/) provides a wealth of relevant information for planners, tradesmen, architects and decision-makers on all aspects of polypropylene piping systems: from the advantages of prefabricated piping systems, manifolds and special components to sustainability issues and the special role of polypropylene as a plastic compared with metal. In addition, these topics are played on the company’s various social media channels. The method is complemented by automated marketing options and a close coupling between sales and marketing.

Produce added value

“We want to attract customers by making them aware of aquatherm with relevant and helpful content, as well as offering customized customer experiences,” says Meike Strauch. “At the heart of this is the idea that we produce added value, meet our target groups with their challenges and problems, and continuously expand customer knowledge.”

In other areas of the company, too, the signs are pointing to digital transformation at aquatherm. Work is currently underway on a new website, and the beginning of the year also saw the “go-live” of SAP S/4HANA, a comprehensive ERP system with integrated intelligent technologies and cloud-based. Since then, workflows have been controlled entirely via the powerful software – with numerous advantages. For example, administrative processes are optimized, productivity is increased, resources are used more efficiently and flexibility is enhanced.

The introduction of a Product Information Management (PIM) system is also scheduled for the course of the year. PIM provides a central place to collect, manage, and enrich product information, create a product catalog, and distribute it to sales and other digital channels. Overall, aquatherm thus improves its data quality, avoids errors, saves time and becomes more efficient – with positive effects on customer satisfaction and loyalty.

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