Global paid media strategy with Roland DG: NMF day 3
Author:
Categorised In:
Share:
At Embryo, we’re extremely proud to be the headline sponsor for Prolific North’s Northern Marketing Festival 2025. Prolific North is the northern cornerstone for all things marketing, media and tech, and their annual marketing festival is a fantastic opportunity for new and existing members to learn new skills and make new connections. This year, I had the honour of being a speaker for the festival’s third day in Manchester.
During my recent talk at the Northern Marketing Festival, I hosted a fireside chat with a long-standing client of Embryo’s Roland DG. I thought this would be the opportune time to reflect on the conversation we had. During this session, we discussed global paid media strategy and navigating challenges. I was joined by Stephen Davis, the EMEA marketing director.
Roland DG is the world’s leading provider of wide format inkjet printers operating within the durable graphics industry. Embryo currently manages the paid media for the EMEA markets, operating across multiple different networks with the core focus of lead generation for the business.
Due to Roland primarily operating in the B2B market, and the printers typically costing in excess of £10,000, the core market is vendors/dealerships across the regions.
This diversifies the paid media strategy, and with standard lead generation the business may be worked directly, or the enquiries are past via the dealership network to the local business to sell the printers to the potential customers, this presents challenges in lead feedback analysis, and also attribution as the lead lifecycle regularly goes offline and becomes in-person following qualification and the lead reaching the vendors.
Building a global strategy
When we began working with Roland, our key focus was to establish unique strategies within all of the different territories, and also ensure our targeting was unique and relevant to product demand in each area.
Our key success factors were driving qualified leads at and driving new business through paid media, with secondary KPI’s focused on building demand for new product launches and focusing on brand recall with ATL advertising efforts.
Due to regional sales targets, our KPIs were defined at the regional level, meaning we needed to direct budget allocation accordingly to targets.
Following this, we reviewed historical performance via auditing the existing marketing efforts, and utilising Roland’s attribution software StatWolf, to understand the current investment strategy and to begin media planning for the calendar year. Then we built an investment framework and began to segment our strategy.
Roland currently targets:
- United Kingdom (Primary Market)
- Italy
- Germany
- Spain
- France
- Turkey
- Poland
Roland customer personas
Creative Carol
Creative Carol is a young entrepreneur aged 25-30, starting her own business. She is passionate about creating high-quality, bespoke products while prioritising sustainable practices. She aims to offer custom and one-off creations, showcasing her commitment to craftsmanship and uniqueness.
Personaliser Pietro
Pietro is growing his business and beginning to scale up. He’s built his business on custom personalisation and high-quality creative
products. Pietro embraces technology and social media as positive forces for society’s progress. He eagerly adopts new technologies and trends, always looking for ways to stay ahead in the market.
Steady Sven
Steady Sven is a printer professional with a successful business built from the ground up. Committed to growth and improvement, Sven values reliability and quality, actively seeking innovative technologies for cost-effective business expansion.
Production Ian
Productive Ian is a dedicated professional working in a big printing company. He is focused on achieving the highest quality, output, and speed levels in his printing operations.
Budget allocation
Based on our defined KPIs and territory targets we began planning from a top level and then worked this into territory based objectives. We kept the budgets agnostic at channel selection and focused on the primary strategic goals, before we looked into network nuance.
Below are the budget allocations we defined with the client based on our KPIs and regions in the following tables:
| Marketing objective | Budget allocation |
| Lead Generation | 60% |
| Product Launches | 20% |
| ATL | 15% |
| Re-engagement | 5% |
| Territory | Budget allocation |
| UK | 30% |
| Italy | 20% |
| Germany | 20% |
| Spain | 10% |
| France | 10% |
| Turkey | 5% |
| Poland | 5% |
Platform selection
Splitting the objectives, and reviewing B2B marketing efficiency, we quickly found that Google ads and LinkedIn would be our strongest routes to market, with a secondary consideration for Meta for startup businesses. Our key focus during platform selection being the acquisition of vendors and or customers to pass through the vendor network.
Google Ads
Google search took a strong percentage of the lead generation allocation, utilising the printer use cases, printer terminology & product codes to acquire traffic. For example
‘Vehicle Graphic Printer’
‘Water-Based Latex Printer’
‘TrueVis AP-640’
These campaigns were all sent to dedicated landing pages covering printer technicalities, use cases and the setup as we’re targeting other printer companies, they know exactly what they require.
These campaigns have the highest cost-per-click, but mirroring all three variations of keyword intent to appropriate landing pages maximises our changes of high conversion rates (clicks to leads).
Demand Gen
We utilised Demand Gen (formerly Google Discovery) to focus on product launches, with Roland often releasing further upgrades and innovations on existing use-cases, we would target existing customers of the older technology, driving awareness and demand up to six months before product launch.
Utilising teaser content with the print quality, also the very topically relevant timing with Roland’s partnership with Alpine F1 team, we utilised highly creative and engaging assets to show the printing capabilities of the new product lines.
This was measured with search volume of the new printer product codes, early sale access sign-ups via email, and measuring the word-of-mouth drip down at vendor level.
YouTube
YouTube was our primary brand recall channel selected, with the new primary campaign focused on, “if you want a job done right, give it to Roland”
We activated this across the UK and anyone utilising English as the primary language across our targeted regions, focusing on market reach and exposure
Meta Ads
Soft lead engagement
Meta addressed the two specific personas revolving around business start-ups and creative experts in their exploratory phases.
Utilising ‘Request for more information’ style brochure downloads and engagement with users still understanding their printer requirements allowed us to target the first two personas of ‘creative carol’ & ‘personaliser pietro’ well.
Brand awareness
Similar to activity within YouTube & Demand Gen, we also utilised Meta for brand awareness, utilising customer lists and lookalike audiences of existing customers to drive awareness around new product incoming and general brand lift
Expert personas
We utilised LinkedIn to target the secondary two personas, being established experts already knowledgeable and operating in the space, they typically know their exact use requirements, similar to the audience we would tap into for Google search.
Utilising comparison messaging, trust and also Roland connect to drive enquiries.
Roland connect is an printer software solution that actively integrates solutions for speed and time saving, and also utilises a direct replenishment order system of ink, meaning printer businesses are never running out of ink.
ABM
Our secondary usage of LinkedIn was to target specific niches where demand would be high and fit specific use cases, with the use of specific companies and job roles within those sectors.
An example of this from a recent activation is electric component manufacturers in Germany. Typically you wouldn’t consider it, but technology all utilises printing. TV remotes, air con controllers, chargers and more.
This allowed us to utilise tailored content, messaging and specific landing pages to suit an extremely specific printer use case, but within high usage extremely lucrative sectors for Roland DG.
Regional nuance
The regional challenges have been ensuring we utilise grammatically correct keyword targeting and also contain this within advert parameters in advertising channels.
For example, German is incredibly challenging with advert copy due to the printer language utilising high quantities of characters, and on asset usage, this would take up a lot of white space with content.
We utilised native speakers rather than relying on AI or software-based translations, and ensured our keyword usage was always what users actually searched for.
Prioritising attribution
Attribution is incredibly challenging when the lead lifecycle moves from offline to online, but we utilised offline conversion tracking when we would qualify the leads and they would be ‘ready for vendor’ to enhance lead understanding better than standardised lead generation.
Re-importing qualified leads into the marketing channels allowed us to optimise our keyword usage for efficient leads and not just volume, and also understand a model of cost per qualified lead.
Roland Connect also allows us to understand metrics such as LTV and payback due to the tracking of ink replenishment and additional further purchases or parts, allowing us to understand the customer value once acquired via marketing channels, further validating the position of paid media within a Global business, despite the challenges of end-to-end profitability analysis
Summary
Global paid media strategies are essentially roll-ups and continuations of single-country strategies, but with regional nuance, budgeting and targeting considered.
Understanding product demand, language use, and the buyer persona for each territory allows you to adjust and steer your strategy accordingly, whilst still keeping it closely aligned with a global branding strategy.
Ensuring your strategy isn’t dragged and dropped from one territory to another, and considering marketing cost variations between each area, is key to forecasting success.
Globally CPC’s and CPMs differ wildly, so this should be always considered when budgeting and planning for new regions.
