Brauer Natural Medicine has a rich history dating back to founder and pharmacist Hermann Brauer, who began selling his natural remedies from a pharmacy in Australia in 1929. Since then, the company has grown by leaps and bounds, and now produces natural, plant-based homeopathic remedies and skincare solutions in its Barossa Valley production facility. Brauer’s products are sold throughout Australia in over 4500 chemist and health food stores, but their WordPress site and Shoppe online store were creating headaches on every level, failing to deliver the results Brauer knew were possible.
Brauer knew their customers were curious about both the story behind Brauer products and the rich history of homeopathy, and content marketing seemed the natural solution. They wanted to be able to provide all the answers to their customers’ questions, as well as start branching out into creating blogs and guides to living naturally. Their online storefront only sold a limited range of products not because their customers only wanted a limited range, but because Brauer was unable to manage their online storefront effectively.
From a back-end standpoint, their current solution caused more problems than it addressed. Their combination of WordPress, Shoppe, and MailChimp created a ton of data that had to be manually managed within a web of spreadsheets, and their contacts database kept growing without the ability to segment it easily. Because none of their systems interacted with one another, real-time, closed-loop reporting was a feverdream. Brauer’s marketing was only able to estimate the impact of their digital marketing. Worst of all, any efforts to unify their systems were held ransom by expensive web providers and incomprehensible systems.
With all this in mind, Brauer started searching for a technology solution that would allow their marketing efforts to address the business goals of:
Growing traffic, revenue and customer engagement
Creating a profitable eCommerce revenue stream
Removing dated technologies and replacing them with a powerful, integrated solution
Brauer began looking for a solution. They began by searching for someone to rebuild their WordPress site. After contacting local HubSpot partner The Kingdom, though, Brauer’s eyes were opened to a whole new world of digital marketing.
After three discovery meetings, the solution was determined. The Kingdom would deploy HubSpot and integrate it with the eCommerce platform Shopify, bridging all customer information across the platforms and closing the loop by using Revenue Conduit to exchange relevant data.
The Kingdom began by transitioning the old WordPress site to HubSpot’s Website Platform. Along the way, they created more pages of content (up to 250 pages from 45 in a little over 8 months,) helping Brauer’s SEO through helpful content and indexed pages. Brauer has also launched two blogs that are chock-full of information about living healthy and naturally, using education to keep their customers engaged between purchases. Instead of fearing each change to the website, as they did on their old WordPress site, Brauer now has the training, knowledge, and support to add and change content in moments, instead of weeks.
HubSpot frees up resources that would otherwise be spent on website management.
Brauer’s contact lists are easily managed in the HubSpot database, where the team can create custom lists that are segmented by purchasing and other buyer behaviors, in a matter of only seconds. The Kingdom augmented the power of Shopify by using HubSpot’s Workflows tool. As customers continued their journey with Brauer, these workflows allowed Brauer to nurture buyers that had interacted with them before and keep their back-end data clean by accurately tracking and modifying the amount of items each customer bought.
Social media has transformed the way Brauer drives traffic. With the easy-to-use social media tool from HubSpot, Brauer has increased their website traffic from social media by 573% from September 2015 to February 2016. They’ve also begun using Perfect Audience to target specific web visitors and remarket those pages and related products. Brauer has had huge success, too, in gaining customer engagement and feedback using Survey Monkey, increasing their average number of responses by 5x. As Brauer moves forward with evolving their content marketing strategy, they plan on integrating Wistia to gain more insight into customer behavior. These small budget, high impact marketing tactics are items that never would have been possible on their old platform.
Brauer Natural Medicine couldn’t be more excited about the future of their digital marketing. The fear of change and inability to experiment with their clunky platforms has been replaced with an optimism and ease of innovation. The real-time, closed loop reporting has empowered the marketing team to not only deliver better reports on their impact, but also to tie it directly back to how a specific campaign impacts sales.
We love the reporting. Being in real time, it makes it easy for me to report back to board and the CEO. It gives me the information that we need, in terms and facts and figures as it happens.
We get our reports in real time, and on mobile. This gives us the flexibility to respond as the numbers are recorded. Otherwise, we’d spend 4 weeks waiting for stats to close out the month, then 2 weeks waiting to analyze and get the results, but by then it is too late. Now we can spend more time analysing the information, rather than just waiting to get reports.
–Allana Hinks, Marketing Manager
Brauer is also pleased to be working with a technology solution that is backed by real people, providing real support. The training, support, and community that came from partnering with The Kingdom and HubSpot is so much deeper than what could have been achieved by bringing in a web developer or IT department.
With HubSpot and The Kingdom, we get heaps of support and loads of training. It felt like we were joining a community, bringing on a whole department of aid rather than just bringing on an agency.
While they love the technology, Brauer is also looking forward to continuing to grow and develop their inbound marketing strategy. Brauer knows they’ve only scratched the surface with their current lead nurturing and segmentation strategies. They plan on expanding the growth of their online store with targeted remarketing strategies and focused campaigns. Brauer is also keen to restructure both their content and web presence to more closely align with the inbound methodology. They plan on celebrating their heritage and their holistic philosophy with new content that emphasises quality in all aspects of living naturally.