To grow the business and expand into new markets, SCHOTT needed the ability to communicate with existing customers and educate new audiences about how its specialty glass could enhance their products. The number of industries SCHOTT serves, and the diversity of its products, complicated the marketing team’s efforts to get the right content out on the right channel to the right audience.

Jörg Duhr, Head of Digital Experience at SCHOTT AG explained, “Existing customers know our specialized glass, so for them, brand awareness, as well as a quick path to information is important. But there’s a large audience who have never considered using our products for their applications, too. The aim is to open their minds to using this great material. The website starts a journey to ignite curiosity, educate, communicate, and collaborate on new ideas.”

Product and market diversity means SCHOTT’s business model is a centralized operation with specialized business units that serve very different markets. SCHOTT chose Sitecore because its solution offered the flexibility required to support this type of business model. A seamless, integrated ecosystem was developed using a suite of industry-leading tools:

• Sitecore® Experience Platform™ (XP 9.1)
• Sitecore Content Hub Digital Asset Management (DAM)
• Sitecore® Experience Database™ (xDB)
• Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA 1.9)
• Sitecore Email Experience Manager (EXM)
• Sitecore® Headless Services™

“Sitecore XP brings the demands of different units together with components that easily work for everyone, including non-technical marketers,” said Duhr. “We have integrated Content Hub with XP because of its usability, functionality, and roadmap to future enhancements like AI. Content Hub is a modern and innovative solution.”

Sitecore enabled SCHOTT to build a platform where central and business unit marketers collaborate with ease.  SCHOTT now has a new website in eight languages serving 30,000 digital assets to 40 countries including China. The streamlined site has 50 % fewer pages – 12,000 down to 6,000 – and has increased monthly visitors by 67%.

The transformation has also delivered far-reaching results for business operations. “Sitecore makes the SCHOTT portfolio and our spirit of innovation accessible to our target groups in such a flexible way that we can serve widely differing markets. With the new website and technical ecosystem, we’ve adapted everything we do to a customer and market perspective so we can balance market demand with internal business operations,” said Duhr.