Ahlstrom-Munksjö Reinvented Its Marketing Efforts Using Livestorm

Paper and fiber-based solutions

Ahlstrom-Munksjö is one of the world's leading players in sustainable and innovative fiber-based solutions employing over 7,800 people in 14 countries. The company’s mission is to provide its customers with products that are backed by sustainability, innovation, and quality. You can expect to find Ahlstrom-Munksjö-produced materials right under your nose, including coffee capsules, tea filters, food packaging, face masks, healthcare materials, and much more.

Traditional industry and practices

We had the pleasure of interviewing Estelle Seibert, Marketing Specialist at Ahlstrom-Munksjö who boasts a career of over 15 years in the paper and abrasives industry (a particularly complex and technical range of products). Estelle started at the company in 2004 and manages all the marketing efforts for Ahlstrom-Munksjö’s abrasive backings business with a colleague.

Until recently, traditional channels of promotions and communications, like industry trade shows or printed newsletters, were leveraged by their industry to reach this audience and Estelle recognized this approach as being “old-fashioned”. She explained, “For the longest time, we didn’t want to share too much technical information online with the public, because it was so targeted and we wouldn’t want the competitors to see it.”

The marketing landscape changed

It was not until 2017, when Estelle returned from a maternity leave, that she saw just how much the online marketing landscape had changed. Digital platforms and social media channels made it so that information could now reach targeted audiences very easily, and there was a lot of power in value-added content that Ahlstrom-Munksjö developed in the abrasive business that they were not capitalizing on.

For the seasoned marketer, the challenge then became one of building out their content and choosing the most accessible communications channel on which to engage their audience at scale. “Our objective was to deliver technical content in an interactive way to a global but targeted audience,” Estelle explained. They needed to think about how to add value to enrich the content that would be shared and make it more memorable. Success depended on the right tools and creating value-added, didactic content.

Innovative virtual events

Estelle decided to modernize the abrasive strategy from a product- to a customer-focused approach, concentrating on producing content that provided support, explanations, and solutions that anticipated their customers’ most common concerns. She explained how they introduced inbound marketing and a series of carefully curated webinars to help interact with their customers.

Estelle chose to follow the recommendations of her mentor and digital marketing instructor Stéphane Truphème and decided to try a video engagement platform called Livestorm. The platform’s clean user interface and engagement features helped to win her over. She said,

You have a truly integrated marketing platform that’s easy to use. The fact that I can customize emails and follow-ups has added a lot of value to the customer journey.

The abrasive team proceeded to launch an educational webinar series on Livestorm called the Coffee Break Sessions that ran from June to December 2020. This series focused on four big topics seen in the coated abrasives business and customers were invited to book private sessions. Estelle explained,

These sessions allowed our customers to invite stakeholders from within their own organization and ask questions openly knowing that the slot was not shared with potential competitors.

In May 2021, Estelle and the team upped the ante by hosting a disruptive digital trade show dedicated to the abrasives industry called DediCOATED 3.0. It was the first online convention of its kind and the team gathered five key market players from the coated abrasives supply chain to exhibit. By coupling Livestorm with a virtual environment built by Synthes3D, they were able to simulate the trade show experience and offer conference lecture halls with exhibits.

Guests were invited to participate in various DediCOATED 3.0 seminars and discussions that ran as live events - the aim was to inspire the sharing of expertise and ideas. Although the webinar sessions were all public, private questions were enabled to ensure that attendees were able to pose questions to the Ahlstrom-Munksjö team without their competitors seeing.

Two major initiatives in one year

In just one year, Estelle and her team succeeded in launching two major marketing initiatives with Livestorm that engaged over 700 attendees from around the world. The chat and Q&A features helped them create interactive exchanges that added value to the information that was being shared. She shared,

Everyone has seen the positive impact of digital events and we’re convinced that sharing content this way is a must. Our customers now expect it.

For the Coffee Break Sessions, Ahlstrom-Munksjö’s first webinar series, Livestorm helped the team strike the right balance between one-to-one reach and one-to-many conversations. The team was able to target customers worldwide, securing 63 private webinar sessions with 400 highly qualified attendees from 28 countries. This was done in the span of 7 months. The recordings are now being used as evergreen content to generate leads on their website.

The DediCOATED 3.0 virtual trade show generated 337 conference attendees from 35 different countries in only two weeks! “Even though this event was virtual, our audience felt like they were all in the same room with us because they were able to engage with us directly. It was a huge success!” said Estelle.

New series to come

Never skipping a beat, Estelle told us that Ahlstrom-Munksjö’s abrasive business has already planned another Coffee Break series for the end of 2021. She added,

There is an audience for this our technical topics and holding webinars is a great way to reach a this highly qualified segment. It also develops the team spirit and places the team’s expertise at the forefront to capitalize on our expertise.

To get the same results as Ahlstrom-Munksjö, create a free account on Livestorm now.