ROCKWOOL GROUP is a multinational manufacturer of stone wool products and one of the world’s largest maker of insulation materials. Understanding that more than 90% of all business decisions begin with a search, and that most people’s first touchpoint with ROCKWOOL GROUP is the website, the company realised the need of a new mindset and a new way of doing business to properly address stakeholders’ needs.

Always connected to the user

ROCKWOOL GROUP began a journey of digital transformation to manifest its brand as an industry leader through digital means. The early aspirations were to leverage the opportunity to elevate the brand, entangle with customers and ultimately attain ‘zero degrees of separation’ by creating a best-in-class .COM digital infrastructure. In doing so, this would elevate ROCKWOOL GROUP’s relationship with their customers and move from mere engagement to capturing a long-term ‘Share of Life™’.

To enable this experience transformation, the Optimizely Digital Experience Platform was chosen to bring this vision to life, empowering ROCKWOOL GROUP to drive demand for its brand, products and mature in its digital infrastructure. This included;

• Re-imagining global content to support a personalized experience with customers across markets
• Garner insights through real-time data and analytics to develop a deep understanding of their customers

Driving customer acquisition while catalysing cultural change towards a more customer centric and data driven organization.

Building an impression, digitally

ROCKWOOL GROUP needed to create business impact by nurturing leads throughout the digital marketing funnel depending on what each stakeholder searched for and how far they were in their decision journey. Structuring data insights was essential to enable the personalized experience across touch points and provide ROCKWOOL GROUP the intelligence to make more informed and data-driven business decisions aligned to the digital strategy.  Finally, the need to scale the digital ecosystem across 22 languages and +80 sites, across 5 brands within the portfolio. This made the choice of Episerver obvious, to ensure a faster return-on-investment than other evaluated leading platforms.

Together with its partner, Vertic, ROCKWOOL GROUP set out to elevate their brand purpose, drive commercial excellence and deliver operational excellence through the platform.

Brand elevation would be achieved from discovering what ten different stakeholders looked to understand about the business, based on an ‘outside-in’ perspective of what stakeholders cared about. Rather than the ‘inside-out’ focus of talking about products, ROCKWOOL GROUP devised a communication theme of ‘Modern Living’, focused on discussing topics that aligned with stakeholder themes of interest, such as fire safety, noise pollution and acoustics in schools.

Engagement through content

Engaging audiences on these thought leadership pieces through the corporate site of ROCKWOOLGroup.com and their subsequent brand sites enables ROCKWOOL GROUP to capture users at the beginning of their decision journeys, before maturing them through the appropriate product sites, each localized for market relevancy. This was key to drive acquisitions through the sites and creating commercial excellence across the organization.

ROCKWOOL GROUP take advantage of Optimizely Content Cloud by leveraging the Visitor Groups capability. This gave them the ability to display different content to users dynamically based on aspects such as location, type of content consumed and visitor behaviour.

Connecting the solution to Microsoft Dynamics CRM was a key aspect of measuring end-to-end commercial excellence success – what was the conversion from initial user engagement through to lead acquisition, onwards to opportunity conversion, end sales and, ultimately, customer lifetime value.

ROCKWOOL GROUP is undertaking the final step of the plan, to achieve operational excellence, through the integration of commerce platforms and selling direct to customers, whether those be consumers or businesses.

Creating the digital universe

The Optimizely platform for the .com acted as the ‘spine’ of ROCKWOOL GROUP’s digital transformation, connecting the intelligence of all front-end interactions with users to back-end systems. The new brand architecture through the sites enabled ROCKWOOL GROUP to elevate its brand and conversations into being a thought leader. The new digital universe has accelerated ROCKWOOL’s commercial excellence through three elements; digitizing customer service through chat bot and enabling scale, generate demand and leads through form submission, and enriching sales process with stakeholder insights and data.

Stakeholders are seeing that digital architecture has also enabled ROCKWOOL GROUP to seamlessly move prospects and customers across different digital properties while ensuring a consistent, relevant experience. This provides a 360 view of the customer that enables ROKCWOOL Group to build a more comprehensive data driven profile for all customer segments, allowing easier maturation throughout their journey. As the company evolves a direct commerce model with the customer in the future, the website will evolve further to be a holistic end-to-end experience beyond just the pre-sale journey moment, recognizing previous purchases and adapting experience dynamically to it.

The platform will be one of the most sophisticated created, with the opportunity to redefine the customer engagement model, drive business impact and create new opportunities to entangle with customers. With the new digital platform Modern living and ROCKWOOL’s customers are brought even closer together.