Case Study: Granol AG Scale Up Their Website Traffic Using Pimcore

Granol AG is a family owned manufacturing company. It produces plastering materials for construction, renovation and restoration purposes. It one of the leading companies in its sector in Switzerland. Products are locally produced and sold to construction companies, architects, and retail shops.

Business Needs

The previous version of Granol.ch was run on a platform that was poorly suited for enterprise web content management. The website was therefore only used for basic purposes. The existing CMS was complicated to work with. Visitor frequency on the website was low because of the absence of engaging content and because it was not structured in a customer-friendly way. The page was not representing the premium corporate identity. It was not providing customers the information they were looking for. Bad user experience led to low visitor frequency and low click rates.

These were the key business drivers for the renewal of Granol.ch:

Improve lead generation: Granol AG wanted to make the “contact us” easy and reliable, enable efficient e-marketing, and encourage site visitors to sign up for newsletters and frequent returns to the web site.
Integrate with ERP: They needed a solution to keep the website up-to-date by feeding it with live product and price data from the ERP system.
Improve usage of technical product data: Another goal was to improve the site’s appearance and have a WOW user experience, while providing customers with targeted content and tools, including product search.
Increase efficiency: Granol AG wanted to save internal unproductive time and printing costs while decreasing technical product support requests by providing improved product information and enhanced search capabilities.
Maximize technology: They felt it was important to implement a modern and easy-to-use CMS platform that enables employees to easily update the website without the involvement of the IT department.

The selection process included evaluation of content production and delivery, ease of use technology and availability of multilingual sites.

Pimcore Solution

„The independent and simple management of our platform is an important criterion for us. This is clearly achieved by using Pimcore.“

Patrick Sieger, Granol AG

Granol AG selected Pimcore’s all-in-one CMS, PIM and DAM solution. Pimcore’s partner, w-vision, was entrusted with technical design, implementation, and deployment of the new Granol.ch. The applications modularity made it a perfect fit in Granol’s IT architecture. The website relaunch proved to be a big success for all involved stakeholders. The premium corporate identity is now immediately visible to the visitor of the fully responsive website. The navigation was vastly improved and the user is guided well through the content.

One feature is an interactive map of Switzerland which makes it possible to quickly find a sales representative with a postal code search. The product data shown on the website is always up-to-date due to the ERP integration, which could easily be established with the Pimcore "Connect-Anything" - Architecture. For ERP integration the data was structured into XML files first. These are periodically imported to Pimcore.

The powerful CMS part of Pimcore with the intuitive interface makes it possible for all staff to easily update and manage content. In order to display the products in a fast, intuitive and easy-to-find way, w-vision used one of many available plugins for Pimcore: CoreShop, which is an eCommerce plugin, offered all needed functions for the online shop.

Business Results

By using Pimcore, Granol AG has taken a big step in conquering digital transformation and is well prepared for the next challenges. Website traffic improved a lot because of better and more relevant content and product information and because the built in Pimcore SEO features improved the visibility in search engines by a magnitude. Better page structure and page loading speed (made possible due to Pimcore’s high-performance architecture) led to more clicks and conversions on the website, which means more leads can be passed to the sales department. These process improvements resulted in time reductions for formerly repetitive tasks. The staff can now focus on more qualified tasks and ensure ongoing business success. Motivation to enter fresh content has improved a lot, due to the intuitive user interface and the built in user management system, which gave each user exactly the work spaces, which are required to complete the needed quest.