Customer

Hitachi High Technologies Europe GmbH is one of the world’s leading manufacturers and suppliers of electron microscopes (EM). The products are renowned worldwide for their high performance and accuracy. Innovation is a key word at the company and Hitachi revolutionized the market when it launched a new scanning electron microscope that was small enough to fit on a laboratory desktop. The new machine was priced at the same level as a top of the range optical microscope, so was affordable to many laboratories that did not previously have the budget for an EM.

Challenge

The optical microscope market is about three to four times larger than the electron microscope market worldwide and Hitachi wanted the users of top of the range optical microscopes to be aware that a scanning electron microscope was now in their budget range.

The challenge was to introduce a new concept into the industry quickly and specifically and to reach this new target audience.

Journey

Traditional marketing routes such as PR and print advertising were already underway but not only are these not quantifiable but, as many of the relevant media outlets are published monthly or even quarterly, as relevant as these routes are, it would take time for the message to filter out in the marketplace.

Google AdWords were identified as a fast and specific route to market.

Discovery

Hitachi knew that AdBourn was used to dealing with scientific companies and had people within the organisation who had used EMs and so could empathise with prospective users of this new microscope.

We were ideally qualified to plan and implement the campaign.

Solution

The solution was to target the appropriate target market (both industrial and academic) right at the time of their expressed need. For the academic market this was university holiday time when the lecturers could think about their future research programs.

The aim of the campaigns was to draw their attention to the existence of a desktop scanning electron microscope and how it might compare favourably in price and performance with a top end optical microscope.

Implementation

In Press ran a series of Google Adwords campaigns targeted not only at existing users of scanning electron microscopes in universities and industrial laboratories, but also using keywords used by people looking for high-end optical microscopes. For the academic market we made sure that the ads were visible to searchers every time during the university holiday periods both in the UK and in Europe

Results

This approach has resulted in Hitachi increasing its traffic levels by more than 9 times and enquiries over 16 times during a 12 month period.

The site received 962 qualified enquiries for its instruments in these 12 months and the deputy General Manager judged that 95% of these enquiries were relevant to their business.

He also said that this site receives more enquiries than any other Hitachi site in the same division worldwide. Hitachi in the UK sold more electron microscopes than any other country representative two years running thanks to the Google AdWords campaign.