Case Study: Panasonic and its growth with Marketo

It is very difficult for you not to know who Panasonic is, a Japanese company established in 1918 with annual revenues of more than $62.7 billion, whose philosophy has always been to contribute to society through its products and services, always putting the customer first.

In honor of this philosophy, the company strives to improve customer satisfaction, and one way to achieve this has been to implement technologies that improve communication between employees and customers.

Panasonic knows the value of its history, and transmits it to its customers, grew to become one of the largest Japanese producers of electronic products, and be an ally for more than 300,000 companies that rely on their solutions. But imagine having so many companies that you have to treat exceptionally well and communicate successfully, Panasonic is no slouch.

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"We have a huge group of existing customers and partners, but there are many untapped prospects that can benefit from our technologies," says Joerg Hufschmid, marketing manager, Panasonic Business Europe. "It's my team's job to unlock this opportunity and help refine our marketing on a global scale," he adds.

For a company like Panasonic with more than 15,800 employees, this is no small feat. Such a large organization with their marketing teams by region, perhaps they have their approach to telling their story. And let's not forget the number of products they have to offer to virtually every industry in the market, this ultimately translates to a lot of Buyer Personas, from site technicians to CEOs.

Let's see then how Panasonic is achieving this. In 2012 the Hufschmid team adopted Marketo, to drive their B2B marketing through a single platform, also helping to make this possible was the enactment of Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which called for greater control over how companies manage and use their data to serve customers.

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Technologies such as Marketo have come to achieve proposed objectives, such as sending 1500 campaigns in Europe from a single platform, this has had a great impact on their ability to generate more opportunities for their sales pipeline while improving the experience of their customers. In addition, with Marketo, 51% of B2B sales are attributed to marketing, with email strategies or on channels such as LinkedIn, wherein a period of 18 months the network grew to over 3000 followers.

Knowing all the nuances that distinguish Panasonic's many customer groups was crucial to achieving these goals. It is important to know, for example, that a marketing manager of a retail company will not be interested in the technical details of the product, as that is not their primary concern. All the information obtained through Marketo allows having information that identifies what is the best communication for a prospect or customer, having the confidence that, through automation, the campaigns are speaking to the audience in a language that resonates with them. Marketo digs into your customers' behavior to send them the right message at the right time. Using A/B/n testing, as well as predictive content and triggered emails to improve results.

It is important to follow the right methodology, in the end, it is not just about automating the process but building content for those Buyer Personas. At Panasonic they have created thousands of pieces of content since 2012, many quite successful, and although this content has been shared mostly through mailings and newsletters, they have gradually understood the importance of sharing it also through social networks and the web. For this reason, they have expanded their reach on Marketo to reach them through multiple channels.

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One such channel is LinkedIn when just after 18 months, Hufschmid's team increased Panasonic's following from zero to 3,000 followers. It's still early days in their journey, but the positive results they've seen so far are an encouraging sign of great things to come. Several of Panasonic's LinkedIn campaigns have achieved an engagement rate of up to five percent, significantly higher than the platform average of two to three percent.

You may find it surprising and almost impossible how Hufschmid managed to guide a large organization down a new path, particularly one that is already in a position of strength. But with each successful campaign, he and his team prove that it is possible and necessary. With Panasonic's leadership firmly behind them and the right tools to support their efforts, they are poised to continue bucking the trend.