A 10-year collab with Belgium’s premium bathroom hub Van Marcke
The partnership between bathroom manufacturer Van Marcke and Duke & Grace has spanned for over a decade, starting in 2010 with advertising. Today, Duke & Grace has grown out to be Van Marcke’s primary agency for online communication, taking care of all things marketing, UX, campaigning and more. Let us guide you through our decade-long journey together!
2010-2013: Dipping toes in tech
After the first few years of working together on small-scale SEA assignments, Van Marcke presented a first large challenge to Duke & Grace in 2013. At the time, Van Marcke’s online presence consisted of multiple websites, resulting in fragmented link value and traffic. Duke & Grace tackled this problem by conducting research and identifying the factors that sustained the issue first, taking on both the SEO plan and the design for a new B2C platform. The resulting website, designed by Duke & Grace and implemented by Van Marcke, saw a 40% increase in SEO traffic, a 20% decrease in bounce percentage and a 25% increase in visited pages per session.
2014-2018: Sprinkling in some online marketing
Additional efforts to increase traffic to Van Marcke’s website consisted of continuous content marketing. Duke & Grace assisted Van Marcke in amplifying its reach with micro conversions, such as newsletter opt-ins and Facebook likes, and launching its company blogging platform ‘O!Blog’. To highlight the launch, Duke & Grace proposed a creative campaign called ‘The Bath Guest’ (‘De Badgast’ in Dutch or ‘Le maître baigneur’ in French): by uploading a picture of their home bathroom, participants had the chance of winning a squeaky new Van Marcke bathroom. The campaign was overwhelmingly successful in putting O! Blog in the spotlights, driving up website traffic with a whopping 25% percent as compared to the year before. With 88% of unique visitors being new visitors, 2014 turned out to be a wildly successful digital year for Van Marcke.
In 2015, we launched several additional creative campaigns. A notable mention was Father’s Day, a playful campaign centered around kids surprising their dads with a technician on the holiday. Father’s Day sparked high visibility online with over 500,000 Facebook impressions, 5,000 blog sessions and 60,000 reads through partner websites.
With Van Marcke being a yearly participant of Batibouw, Belgium’s largest trade fair for construction, renovation and home improvement, creative campaigns pertaining to this topic generally do well. Along with the Badbot campaign, which we already covered in a previous case, we devised an original way to inspire people to visit Batibouw. Enter: a Tinder-inspired app to meet your perfect match! (The bathroom kind, mind you.) The application was a resounding success, with 4,000 contestants and a 48,5% full funnel conversion ratio. We also got to take two Digital Marketing Awards home, one for ‘Most Performing App Campaign’ and one for ‘Most Performing Social’.
2019-2021: A sparkling partnership
In 2019, we launched a long awaited upgrade of the existing online appointment tool. By integrating Skedify into our strategy, we brought customizable scheduling software to the Van Marcke platform, allowing both customers and Van Marcke employees to customize and tailor the flow of the module according to their personal needs. Improvements included many new integrations, such as the possibility to communicate with different Van Marcke venues as well as additional appointment subjects, comprehensive time slot implementation and an intuitive follow-up flow. The new tool inspired a 14% increase of appointments as compared to 2018.
2019 also marked Van Marcke’s 90th birthday. To celebrate the significant milestone, Duke & Grace built an interactive landing page that implored visitors to pick a faucet for a shower to work. A correct answer gave visitors the chance to win the grand prize of the day, while an incorrect one would still grant the possibility to win Batibouw entry tickets. The landing page ran for five days, each day representing a different Van Marcke supplier and signifying another opportunity for visitors to win the grand prize. It became the most successful campaign thus far, with over 6,000 participants in total.
2019 also marked Van Marcke’s 90th birthday. To celebrate the significant milestone, Duke & Grace built an interactive landing page that implored visitors to pick a faucet for a shower to work. A correct answer gave visitors the chance to win the grand prize of the day, while an incorrect one would still grant the possibility to win Batibouw entry tickets. The landing page ran for five days, each day representing a different Van Marcke supplier and signifying another opportunity for visitors to win the grand prize. It became the most successful campaign thus far, with over 6,000 participants in total.
In 2021, for that year’s Batibouw, Duke & Grace put together a series of luxury videos focusing on bath and wellness items, published as part of the Treat Yourself campaign. Each video featured a vibrant stop-motion tutorial highlighting how to create a luxury item at home with household items. The campaign is currently ongoing.
Having started the partnership with a lean advertising job back in 2010, Duke & Grace now takes up the lead position as full-service communication agency at Van Marcke. Covering SEA, SEO & UX, social, campaigning, web analytics and performance, Duke & Grace is constantly on the lookout for optimizing opportunities and new tools to further enhance Van Marcke’s online presence. In fact, we’re currently working on some projects that might visit your bathroom real soon. Stay tuned!
While we can’t build you a bathroom, Duke & Grace can make your next project shine!