Arneg Spa

The challenge

Arneg turned to us with a double challenge, concerning both the short- and the medium-to-long term. Firstly, the company needed help digitalizing the details of visitors coming to their stand at Euroshop, a leading international trade show attracting thousands of visitors and business partners from all over the world. 

The long-term objective of this first goal was even more ambitious: digitalization at the trade show was to be the first step of an overall process of digitalizing the company's operating procedures, with a view to optimizing the work of the marketing and sales departments and to increasing the company’s overall efficiency through the use of technological tools.

It all started, therefore, with Arneg's participation in Euroshop, an international show dedicated to the retail world taking place in Germany every three years. Given its role as world leader in its sector, the company had already been taking part in the event for several years with considerable success, and for the next edition had decided to invest important resources – both economic and human – to design a stand of more than 2,500 square meters and to organize a rich schedule of events to take place during the show and after its conclusion.

However, participation in previous years of Euroshop had highlighted a critical issue: significant investments in the event invariably translated into excellent feedback from visitors, which however the company was unable to keep track of efficiently and effectively. The inevitable excitement of the days of the show and the need to build valuable relationships with customers put the recording of visitor data in second place. Such data was recorded on paper and processed after the end of the trade show, thus making it impossible to contact visitors promptly.

The aim of our project, therefore, was to help the company optimize its participation in the event, allowing it to digitalize data, obtain well-profiled leads and carry out an effective customer satisfaction survey after the end of the show. The positive effects of this work would be felt, not only immediately, but also in the long term: customers would be able to experience the concrete benefits of digitalized marketing and sales processes, and the work team would learn new methods, thus increasing their knowledge base and know-how.

It was immediately clear to us that we would have to liaise closely with the marketing team and sales department of Arneg, two fundamental stakeholders for the success of the project. After touching base with them and laying the foundations for our collaboration, we embarked on a step-by-step journey that resulted in significantly changing the company’s lead collection and management system.

Step 1: Analysis

During this first phase, we focused on analyzing the company’s normal interactions with customers, and in particular the activities carried out at previous editions of Euroshop. First of all we interviewed members of the company holding roles of particular responsibility – owners, marketing and sales managers, marketing staff, sales staff and area managers – to understand their point of view and identify the precise issues to be solved and any opportunities to be leveraged. We then studied the organization and peculiarities of the trade show and analyzed the sales data collected in previous editions, in order to have every useful element with which to begin planning our work. 

Once we had all this data to hand, we defined and shared a roadmap outlining key project deadlines, identifying precisely the people involved in the various activities, and focusing on their specific skills and competencies. 

Working in synergy with the marketing and sales departments, we then built the profiles of the benchmark buyer personas and their customer journey, a fundamental step in order to start imagining the user experience required.

Step 2: Strategy

In this phase we determined what actions to take before, during and after the trade show in order to achieve the goals set. 

With the marketing department, we developed a targeted content marketing strategy and created teasers and marketing automation workflows so as to allow Arneg to get the most out of every marketing or commercial interaction taking place during the trade show. At the same time, we developed a system that would allow us to address every possible prospect, putting together material in seven languages (Italian, English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Russian).

We also trained the marketing department, so as to allow the Arneg team to stand on its own two feet and manage the Hubspot platform independently. This fundamental tool would allow them to collect and centralize the contact details in a single container, to track data coming from the different channels, and to automate communications.

Step 3: The event

During the trade show, we communicated daily with customer's contacts, informing them about the various events that would take place during the day and about the benefits of visiting the Arneg stand. 

The contact database was updated every evening, importing the data collected by scanning the visitors’ badges upon entering the stand and the data of those interacting with Arneg online: in this way we collected more than 3000 profiled leads, thus expanding the company’s contacts and improving the user experience.

Step 4: After the trade show

Using the data collected at the event, we developed four automated routes, based on the characteristics of the various buyers personas, allowing us to make visitors to the Arneg stand appreciate the new services and products offered by the company.

We then sent questionnaires to every contact in order to assess their satisfaction regarding the quality of the events, the organization of the stand and the reception received, with a view to obtaining useful feedback for continuous improvement.

Results

Our project allowed Arneg to to digitalize the experience of customers and prospects before, during and after the trade show by implementing automated processes perfectly linked to the knowledge base and contacts built by the company during its ten years in business.

The use of advanced technological tools has allowed the company to automate activities that were previously performed manually, taking up enormous amounts of time and energy. The marketing and sales departments, in particular, have benefited significantly from this structured management of customer data. Automatically cataloging trade show leads in the CRM software has freed staff of a number of tasks that are now carried out more effectively, thus allowing them to devote more time and attention to visitors to the stand.

“Our wealth of experience and the use of advanced technological tools have proved to be a winning mix. In one go, we have been able to improve our work method and to watch our customers’ satisfaction grow.”

Tiziana Raiteri, Marketing Manager