Swedish district heating solutions veteran Cetetherm has a proud 60-year history of sustainable heating and hot water systems innovation in Scandinavia. When it made the decision to move into the UK market, however, it had low brand recognition amongst British prospects.

Cetetherm entrusted BCM with its UK marketing at all levels – including research, search engine optimisation (SEO), translation and localisation, social media, website content, collateral, and product launch management.

Inevitably, there were challenges - in particular, modest budgets, limited in-house marketing resource, and the inherent risk involved in entering new markets. 

We responded to this by focusing on marketing productivity – the ability to achieve more without spending more – and by acting as an outsourced team that Cetetherm could regard as an extension of its own in-house marketing function. 

The outcomes of this engagement, over an ongoing relationship since 2022, have moved Cetetherm’s brand from the position of unknown foreign newbie to uniquely vocal, high-profile champion of sustainable technologies that are now perceived as game-changers in the UK heating market.
 
The Solution

Deep knowledge of our clients’ business, markets, and customers are always key to creating timely, relevant marketing that ‘moves the needle’, and Cetetherm was no exception. 

We immersed ourselves in the company’s history, strategy, and ambitions. We carried out extensive market and industry research to identify the scope of the geographic opportunity, buyers’ pain points and need for education, as well as a full audit of the competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.

With the highly segmented and targeted data that we produced from this, we distilled critical key messages and, simultaneously, carried out a gap analysis of the company’s marketing communication channels to identify opportunities for more effective delivery of messages to these audiences.

Localisation played a huge role here, as we transformed the mature Scandinavian market messaging into an altogether more instructive approach for a UK market, largely unacquainted not only with the brand’s heritage and reputation, but also with the technical concepts that underpin the benefits Cetetherm’s products deliver.

Combining this with our team’s language skills, we embarked on a programme of social media outreach, website content and SEO, and collateral creation, ensuring on-message exposure for all the company’s UK-focused products, and delivering the key components of the UK product launch that we would subsequently execute.

In short, our work not only gave Cetetherm an authentic English-language voice, but one that resonated with the priorities of a UK market in a very different stage of maturity from that of the company’s Scandinavian homeland.
 
The Results

Working with Cetetherm has enabled the company to build the UK brand credibility necessary for it to be taken seriously as both a disruptor and a trustworthy, experienced industry player.

Consequently, UK interest in the company’s products has been high, and the company has recently completed a major district heating substation installation in this country.

The measurements and metrics – which, as a marketing agency, we focus closely on to demonstrate value and ROI – give an insight into these successes.

On the social media front, we enabled Cetetherm to grow its LinkedIn following by more than 70% and impressions increased by almost 400%.

The keyword-rich content we created for the English-language website, 38 pages in total, together with the SEO work we undertook, tell a similarly strong, results-oriented story, securing over 2,000 visits each month. We also helped the business move to GA4 reporting in this time.

And armed with the localised range of collateral we prepared, the company was able to bring its wider product range to market in the UK, and, through our launch campaign planning, attract interest in its flagship Pioneer product range from major UK energy companies and developers.

Evidence, if any were needed, that effective segmentation, laser-targeted execution, cultural sensitivity, and timely, relevant marketing communications can take a brand from newcomer to front-runner – at little or no additional marketing spend.