Challenges
- New mobile-first mentality did not align with previous strategies or existing technology stack
- Dependence on developers led to a three-week average turnaround time for website changes
- Content was not personalized by language or user
Kramp is one of the largest suppliers of parts and accessories for Europe’s agriculture sector, with operations in 24 countries. For over 60 years, the company has embraced a culture that places a high value on local business units who understand their local markets and can serve their customers in their own language. This attention to local markets has helped foster loyalty among many customers while their products have benefitted from consistent innovation, including the introduction of many advancements in packaging, delivery, and logistics, as well as being the first in the industry to launch a product catalog and later an online webshop.
However, many of Kramp’s customers have become more technically savvy in recent years, as a new generation of farmers has begun taking over businesses in place of their parents or other family members. These new business leaders are much more accepting of modern technologies, leading to higher expectations for their vendors. To sustain their leadership in the eyes of this new generation of customers, the Kramp team realized their new website would need to deliver a better digital experience than their industry peers, while maintaining that local connection to individual markets.
Long development times for simple content changes
Marketing responsibilities at Kramp are shared between an overarching E-business Marketing team and regional marketing teams that are responsible for promoting the products most applicable to their territories across 24 countries. Their previous content management system severely limited these regional teams, preventing them from making changes to their web pages without the assistance of developers or the E-business Marketing team. Even simple website updates took an average of three weeks to complete due to the team’s reliance on other departments.
Transforming their website into an industry-leading digital experience also meant adopting a mobile-first mentality that was previously lacking in the company. Their existing systems offered poor mobile support, and now they were planning to add localized and personalized content into that same experience. To protect their reputation as a leader in an increasingly digital industry, the Kramp team needed to build a flexible solution that could deliver the optimal experience for each customer according to their geographic location and viewing device.
Supporting multichannel experiences with structured content
Kramp had used Kontent.ai in the past to transform the experience for job seekers visiting their Careers website. From this initial project, they determined Kontent.ai was the ideal solution to address the various challenges related to their corporate website as well.
To ensure a great experience across all regions, the team translated all website content to the languages spoken by their customers—starting with language variants for English, French, and German before eventually expanding to over 20 languages. This localized content enables the regional marketing teams to speak to each customer in their native language, with campaigns and landing pages tailored to their specific market. The solution is integrated into Kramp’s in-house personalization engine, which selects the optimal piece of content for each visitor based on a variety of contextual factors, such as geographic location, the channel in which a visitor arrived, and previous activities stored within other internal systems.
The content repository offers an intuitive interface that enables regional marketers to quickly update content and create new landing pages within their market, removing their dependence on developers and the E-business Marketing team. To ensure the experience meets their future needs as new technologies and channels are introduced, the new website was built on top of a modern technology stack that leverages microservices to pull clean, structured content from the Kontent.ai API and deliver it to every channel without imposing restrictions on any other systems.
Improved time to market with Kontent.ai
The marketing teams at Kramp are now able to react and publish faster than ever before. The regional marketing teams enjoy a new level of independence that allows them to perform simple content updates immediately, while creating new landing pages only takes an hour or less, instead of the 4-6 weeks required with their previous solution. Website content is now contextually relevant as well, offering a more personalized experience presented in each customer’s language of choice.
The modern technology stack and flexible delivery model ensures a great experience across all channels, while future-proofing their architecture so new improvements can integrate seamlessly into the solution. Ultimately, this means a more productive Kramp team can execute on campaigns faster than ever, deliver contextually relevant experiences to a wide variety of customers, and continue to innovate in ways that ensure they remain a leader in Europe’s agriculture market for years to come.
