Feltest: Turning a niche market into a global opportunity

Pulp & paper industry

Feltest had global ambitions but a slow, outdated website was limiting their visibility. Reaching a highly niche market across continents felt nearly impossible without the right strategy, systems and tools.

We rebuilt Feltest’s website and led their go-to-market strategy, adapted and localized to reach several key international markets. Feltest has seen a 425% increase in leads, has been recognized as a two-time winner of the FD Gazellen Award for the fastest-growing Dutch company and reached 90 countries on 5 continents.

Go-to-market strategy and international expansion
UX/UI website design & development
HubSpot implementation
Growth marketing team and execution
Lead generation campaigns
Storybrand Script

+ 425%

leads generated

2x winner

of the FD Gazellen Award for the fastest growing Dutch company

countries reached
(on 5 continents)

How Feltest empowers papermaking professionals

In a remote corner of the industrial world, in the niche of pulp and paper technology, you’ll find Marcel Lensvelt. A passionate inventor and the founder of Feltest, Marcel creates specialized tools and measuring instruments designed to help improve paper production.

His market is limited: in fact, only 3,700 people on Earth could be his customers. Marcel isn’t chasing millions. He’s chasing exactly the right 3,700 people.

That’s where our story begins. Despite having an incredibly unique product, the only one of its kind in the market, Feltest faced a major obstacle: obscurity.

Finding the
right online marketing partner

In their extremely niche market, Feltest wanted to get found by the right people. The ideal scenario? Customers searching for the kind of tools Marcel offers would find Feltest easily, stay on their website and keep purchasing from them. However, with their current marketing setup, this was not possible.

And so Marcel began his search for an online marketing agency. Finding a partner he could trust and that would fulfill Feltest’s unique international marketing needs proved more difficult than he imagined.

Until SUM Digital came in.
After more than six years of collaboration, Feltest is now a global player successfully serving several international markets and has been recognized as a winner of the prestigious FD Gazellen Award for the fastest-growing Dutch company. Not once, but twice!

Feltest’s growth journey in 5 phases:

Building a scalable webshop

At the start of our partnership, we immediately identified the main blocker holding back Feltest’s growth. Their website, built in WordPress and available in five languages, was slow, difficult to maintain and impossible to update quickly. Every minor change required a chain reaction of translators, edits and delays.

Customers couldn’t find Feltest. And even when they did, there was no scalable system to guide them towards other products or conversions.

We started by rebuilding a webshop that made it easier to scale. Setting it up was fast and affordable, laying the foundation for realizing Feltest’s international growth ambitions.

A marketing strategy designed for international expansion

The next phase? A deep dive into marketing strategy. With 99.5% of Feltest’s sales coming from exports, reaching audiences across different countries and continents is essential. We developed Feltest’s go-to-market strategies for expansion to key international markets. After identifying Feltest’s two main buyer personas - the mill manager and the production manager - we created two StoryBrand Scripts to speak directly to their pain points and make sure our message was crystal clear.

We were able to localize and adapt dozens of marketing campaigns to break into those new vastly different markets. Feltest’s products are now used and loved not only in Europe but in Australia, North, Central and South America, and Asia.

“Because we want to address dozens of different cultures simultaneously, our methodology, with its quick and numerous experiments, is ideal.”

Diederik Gerbranda

CEO SUM Digital

Laying the groundwork for long-term growth with HubSpot

Then came the power of HubSpot. We helped set up automation, cross-selling sequences and customer nurture flows that allowed Feltest to reach out at scale without sacrificing personalization. Feltest now runs a flexible, multilingual webshop, powered by a test-and-learn digital funnel. Results vary by region, with great results in Asia and more modest traction in South America, but every test delivers new insights.

“Migrating Feltest from their legacy marketing automation tool to HubSpot gave us all the tools we always knew we needed to truly be successful but never had the access to. It was a complex but at the end very satisfying migration project that helped the client break through technical boundaries and scale in a way they could not up to that moment.”

Boudewijn Dekker

HubSpot Lead

AI-powered conversion, automation and
customer growth

With more leads came a new challenge: conversion. Different time zones, languages and the unique profile of Feltest’s audience - factory floor professionals rather than desk-bound email checkers - made follow-ups difficult.

To solve this, we’ve built a fully AI-driven marketing and sales system. A GPT-powered marketer and copywriter now create tailored campaigns and localized content, while our AI go-to-market specialist continuously adapts strategies for international expansion. Marcel’s video avatar delivers personalized outreach and product explanations, ensuring that every prospect and customer feels directly connected to the founder without requiring his constant time.

At the same time, we’re automating the sales process as much as possible. From intelligent lead nurturing and cross-selling flows to predictive upselling recommendations, AI ensures no opportunity is lost. The focus is no longer just on winning new business, but on transforming one-time and two-time buyers into long-term, multi-product customers.

This combination of human expertise and AI automation allows Feltest to scale globally without losing out on the personalization element and their customers’ trust.

Next steps: further localization and reaching new customers worldwide

With a strong digital foundation and a proven international marketing playbook, Feltest is now ready to enter its next growth phase: deep localization in priority markets. While the first wave of expansion successfully brought Feltest products into 90 countries, the next step is to go beyond translation and adapt marketing and sales strategies to the cultural, regulatory and business realities of individual regions.

In the coming years, our partnership will focus on China, Japan, and Indonesia - three markets with significant growth potential but also unique challenges. From tailoring messaging and campaigns to resonate with local buyer behavior to refining SEO for regional search engines and setting up localized distribution channels, each market requires a customized go-to-market strategy.

This localized approach will strengthen Feltest’s positioning as the global leader in pulp and paper measurement technology while maintaining the laser focus on reaching exactly the right 3,700 professionals worldwide.

Looking for a marketing partner was a process of continuous disappointment. Until we met SUM Digital back in 2018. Since then we more than doubled our sales to 90 countries on 5 continents with their spot-on marketing. Thanks guys!

Marcel Lensvelt

Founder and CEO

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Feltest: Turning a niche market into a global opportunity

leads generated

of the FD Gazellen Award for the fastest growing Dutch company

countries reached (on 5 continents)

How Feltest empowers papermaking professionals

Finding the right online marketing partner

Feltest’s growth journey in 5 phases:

Building a scalable webshop

A marketing strategy designed for international expansion

“Because we want to address dozens of different cultures simultaneously, our methodology, with its quick and numerous experiments, is ideal.”

Laying the groundwork for long-term growth with HubSpot

AI-powered conversion, automation and customer growth

Next steps: further localization and reaching new customers worldwide

Looking for a marketing partner was a process of continuous disappointment. Until we met SUM Digital back in 2018. Since then we more than doubled our sales to 90 countries on 5 continents with their spot-on marketing. Thanks guys!

Marcel Lensvelt

B2B Growth Playbook

Read other cases

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Contact Us

Ready to talk

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countries reached
(on 5 continents)

Finding the
right online marketing partner

AI-powered conversion, automation and
customer growth