Madeinadd is an Italian digital manufacturing platform backed by leading industrial investors, including CDP Venture Capital, Dumarey and Mimete. With a specialized focus on additive manufacturing (3D printing) technologies and services, Madeinadd offers Italian industrial companies expert support for adopting additive manufacturing and allows them to get their parts manufactured through their network of vetted local manufacturing partners.
When we started at Madeinadd, there was a rough marketing foundation in place with 1 marketing manager and an agency handling paid acquisition. Over 80% of revenue was driven by outbound sales so the priorities were to build a strong strategic marketing foundation, develop the brand identity, build a demand capture engine and effectively align marketing to sales. The goal was to establish Madeinadd as a leading digital manufacturing player in the Italian market.
When we first joined Madeinadd, the company was positioning itself as a go-to partner for additive manufacturing for a variety of businesses and industries. A lot of emphasis was placed on the expert advisory services they could provide to companies looking to leverage additive manufacturing to reduce costs and improve efficiency.
The challenge was clear: selling a relatively new technology, through an innovative digital platform to traditional companies that place a huge amount of value on trust and relationships.
Together with the CEO and the team, we tackled handful of positioning challenges:
Our first focus was on nailing down the Ideal Customer Profile. We looked into data, spoke to sales and analyzed the market, and came to the conclusion that we should focus Madeinadd’s inbound marketing efforts more on medium-sized businesses, whilst using their outbound efforts to test and validate larger deals.
This suited the fact that it’s mid-sized companies that are more comfortable and ready to test new solutions, especially through a digital platform.
We also decided to push the additive manufacturing service more aggressively, and to present the advisory services as more of a white glove benefit, than an end-service that was for sale.
This meant putting the network of partners more in the spotlight, placing more emphasis on renders of manufactured parts, highlighting the network’s certifications and documenting processes for quality control and data protection.
Selling the manufacturing services was more scalable and addressed a more critical need (to reduce costs and increase efficiency).
Finally, we decided it was best to focus on becoming a leader in the Italian market for the moment, rather than spreading ourselves too thin across different markets.
Given the fact that uploading IP and spending money for physical prototypes and end-parts comes with some perceived risk, it was crucial to not only handle objections but to also proactively build trust amongst the target users.
Doubling down on the Italian market and positioning Madeinadd as a trusted local player with unique expertise was crucial for enabling deals.
With the new positioning focus, it was also important to make sure the Madeinadd. This was especially important giving the range of services on offer and the complexities involved.
The core of the previous website was an animated one-pager that showcased the overall process. But the sales team had to rely heavily on their own collateral to educate buyers.
Our plan was to create a website that:
As an innovative player in a traditional space, we thought it important to have strong branding that underlined the innovative and disruptive nature of what Madeinadd was building. We needed to differentiate clearly from traditional players.
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In the revamp, we played with the transition from conceptual design to physical end-part in the hero animation. We also placed a lot of importance on visuals, including renders and photos of parts as well as videos of additive manufacturing processes.
We also made sure that the wide range of services were easy to find, thorough straightforward wayfinding across the website.
And we made sure every page had strong social proof, from showcasing the renowned investors, to showing pictures of the experts within the team to displaying industry certifications.
The advantage of a more extensive website was that we could create dedicated SEO pages for each service and capability, leading to the first real high intent SEO rankings for top keywords.
Finally, we implemented a crucial conversion change on the website. Previously, everything was geared towards one primary CTA, which required users to upload a design file to get a quote. But our ICP-research suggested we were losing signups to people who were close to buying but didn’t have the right design files on hand.
We added a “Talk to an Expert” CTA, which unlocked a new set of sign ups on the website.
In an industry like this one and with a complex service offering, it is crucial that the website serve as a central place where potential buyers can get the information they need to make a decision.
With conversions significantly up across the board, the launch of the website not only directly contributed to revenue growth, but it also unlocked new opportunities in capturing both paid and organic search.
One of the first things we noticed when we audited Madeinadd’s marketing setup, was that there was quite some potential for capturing demand through search ads on Google and Bing.
2 other agencies had previously created Google ads set ups and done a fair deal of in-platform optimizations, but we saw the opportunity to leverage our industry-knowledge to maximize end-results.
When we took over the paid ads in June, we implemented a number of changes:
Some of these measures were obvious, others even counterintuitive for usual markets. But they were necessary for filtering out low-intent and non-converting traffic.
Despite no increases in traffic, we were able to get a lot more tangible results out of Google Ads campaigns:
New positioning, a strong website and a Google Ads engine that is optimized for the market form part of a reliable demand capture engine that is currently fueling Madeinadd’s rapid growth.
Our marketing efforts supported Madeinadd’s growing team and expanding product offering to achieve important growth milestones.
