Uponor Asia How A Marketing Strategy Using HubSpot In China Prompted a Global Initiative

Founded in Finland in 1918, Uponor is a leading provider of plumbing and indoor climate systems for the residential and commercial building markets across Europe and North America. Uponor is also a market leader in municipal infrastructure pipe systems in the Nordic countries.

With 4,000 committed employees and a local presence in 30 countries, Uponor works in a close partnership with other building professionals - designers, specifiers and installers. Uponor Corporation is listed on Nasdaq Helsinki in Finland.

Compared with its historic beginnings in Europe, Uponor Asia is a relatively new entrant to the Asian market providing plumbing, indoor climate and energy systems for residential and commercial buildings in the region since 2006.

In 2015 Uponor Asia Director of Marketing Asia, Robert Cubick, was tasked with the daunting challenge of both raising awareness of radiant cooling as a commercial solution in South East Asia, as well as expanding Uponor’s plumbing and radiant heating solution adoption in China and South Korea.

Robert understood he needed a sustainable way to increase both visitors and lead flow online in English using “Western” social media channels for South East Asia, WeChat for China, and Naver for Korea. Due to a lack of internal marketing resources, Robert began the search for an inbound marketing agency that could provide these awareness and lead generation services both inside and outside of China.

Uponor found an article by Oxygen regarding HubSpot’s then expansion to Asia, discussions began and a strategy was put forward for an inbound marketing program on HubSpot that would address the need to raise awareness of radiant cooling in South East Asia, as well as convert assist in converting leads for China and Korea.

The Solution

Based on what we discovered during the buyer persona research, we planned and delivered several content campaigns centred around a PDF download spanning each stage of a typical buyer journey from awareness to consideration to making a purchase decision. This was recently brought in line with the Uponor Asia Marcom calendar, ensuring a unified marketing and communications strategy.

In order to get the source data for the blogs and PDF’s, Oxygen’s content writers interviewed Uponor staff to obtain seed information. They performed their own research online and through reaching out to buyer personas identified in the research phase. Oxygen designed each PDF, ensuring it was in line with Uponor’s global branding guidelines.

The PDF downloads were each supported and promoted by a series of blog posts that covered topics of interest to the buyer persona and addressed problems they were facing. For example, we paired “awareness” type blogs that addressed issues such as “Pros and Cons of Radiant Cooling in Humid Climates” with a PDF download of Radiant Cooling vs All-Air Cooling in Humid Climates.

In addition, we paired more decision stage blogs such as “Best Pipes For Plumbing? PEX-a Pipes vs The Rest” with the latest radiant cooling and plumbing brochure as a PDF download.

In each case, the lead exchanged their lead information via a form to download the PDF.

Over time consistently publishing quality content that covers key topics such as “radiant cooling” and gaining backlinks from authoritative websites meant that Uponor quickly rose up the Google search engine rankings for such terms and over time significantly grew its organic traffic on what is a very niche subject.

Upnor's Radiant Cooling Blog Page

A complete overhaul was required for the site to get everything on-brand. From content offers, banners to CTA's and trust signals. Our designers meticulously selected fonts to fit the brand and worked with our developer to create page templates tailored to the direction of the texts.

In order to get the source data for the blogs and PDF’s, Oxygen’s content writers interviewed Uponor staff to obtain seed information and performed their own research online and through reaching out to buyer personas identified in the research phase. Oxygen designed each PDF, ensuring it was in line with Uponor’s global branding guidelines. With the Buyer Persona's in hand, we could move on to accurately market to the China market.

Buyer Persona Research Journey

A special approach was required for marketing in China. Uponor already had a WeChat channel, however, there were no existing conversion paths. We followed the same inbound methodology we used for Uponor Asia but used WeChat to promote content to installers and distributors in China. We created China-specific workflows and automation and directed WeChat leads to different salespeople based on region.

Despite using HubSpot, we ensured that the user experience was “China-centric” and one where the lead didn’t feel (and indeed weren’t) leaving WeChat at all.

Despite these successes, we realised, through using the HubSpot tool, that not everyone was reading the email that was sent with the follow-up and PDF to download. Thus, we developed an innovative SMS automation app specifically for China with SendCloud (a PRC government authorised SMS service in China).

Instead of sending an email, we simply linked to our app via HubSpot’s “Trigger a webhook” workflow feature. Our SMS allowed us to create SMS templates for Uponor that were then authorised by SendCloud as acceptable in terms of PRC local laws.

The Asia offers were converting up to 40% of the leads that visited the landing pages, meaning a significant number of the visitors were turning into genuine prospects. Well above industry averages.

In addition to blogging, content for Uponor was syndicated out on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest. We quickly discovered that LinkedIn was the prime channel for Uponor and dedicated our resources to doing LinkedIn Pulse posts and becoming active on LinkedIn Groups.

Over 145 high-quality industry leads from LinkedIn posts and group discussions that were interested in radiant cooling solutions with Uponor, with 3% of all visits from LinkedIn converting into a lead.

40%

Conversion Rate From Landing Pages

400x

Increase In Leads

150+

High-quality Industry Leads From Social Alone

15x

Increase In Website Traffic

+800x

Increase In Organic Traffic

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