[Case Study] How a Crane Company in Ohio is Branding Itself to Specific Industry Professionals for Less Than One Cent

Our work truck and crane client in Ohio has been highlighting industry-specific products with easy-to-understand case studies, and are reaching thousands of highly-engaged prospects and generating quality leads in the process.

We’re doing this using a combination of text, video, and display ads across platforms like Facebook, Google Display Network, and Google Text Ads, reaching people in the tree-care industry.

Today, I’ll show you how we’ve been able to get results like this:

• Total Ad Views: 393,857
• Total Ad Clicks: 2,153
• Target Audience reached on Facebook: 13,948
• Total Ad Spend: $1,013.16
• Average Cost Per Visit: $0.47
• Average Cost Per Brand Exposure: Less than $0.01
• Leads Generated: 30+ (Phone Calls not included, however, our client is very pleased with the volume of phone calls received during this campaign)

We’ll jump into how we put this together in just a minute, but first I want to show you the foundation for this campaign.

It all starts with…

The Marketing Funnel at Work: Attracting a Targeted Audience via Content that Has Strong Appeal

If you’ve been around marketing for any time, you’ve heard of a “funnel” to warm up cold traffic into leads and eventually customers. Here are the basic elements:

• Top of Funnel: Ads and content designed for a COLD audience who has never heard of your brand or product, with a goal of warming them up to become a lead.
• Middle of Funnel: Ads and content designed for a WARM audience who has heard of your brand and designed to turn visitors into leads, and getting leads ready to buy.
• Bottom of Funnel: Ads and content designed for a HOT audience who is ready to buy, and making it easy for them to do so as soon as they’re ready.

This system works because you should never expect COLD visitors to buy from you the first time they interact with you, so you create something engaging for your audience and LEAD them towards taking natural steps with you.

For this particular case study, we focused specifically on reaching a cold audience with the goal of introducing them to our client’s brand and planting the seed for a future lead – and ended up with great results!

OK – Let’s get into the good stuff…

START WITH YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE

Our client creates work trucks for a wide variety of industries – but wanted to focus on their trucks designed for the Tree Care industry. The audience consists of owners of any sort of Tree Trimming or Removal service – residential or commercial. These guys are typically owner-operators with maybe a small team of workers.

These trucks are a big investment, but definitely make life easier and profitable for their clients. However, there’s little to no chance someone buys one of these trucks the first time they interact with our client.

Therefore, we decided to introduce the product in a way that would pique the interest of the Tree Trimmers and get them to remember our client’s product specifically when they decide to make an investment in the future. In this case, Case Studies provided a great way to showcase a product to a specific audience.

WE STARTED BY CREATING AN ENGAGING CASE STUDY PAGE ON THEIR WEBSITE

We wanted to give the audience a quality page to land on so they’d have a good experience and want to come back. Remember: this is a COLD audience we don’t expect to buy on their first time to the site, so we need to give a good first impression.

Here’s a quick look at the top of the page, including some gripping text and a video to draw the audience in:

HOW WE CREATED BUZZ USING VIDEO ADS ON FACEBOOK

One of the best ways to reach a COLD audience and warm them up quickly is to use Facebook Video Ads. It’s an interactive and visual medium, so people can almost imagine themselves in the video (if it’s done right).

Because video works so well to warm an audience up, we were able to use companion text that is a little stronger than we’d be able to use with an image-based ad. The best performing ad touched on some of the benefits of the truck and the audience could virtually see themselves in the business owner’s shoes.

WE MADE SURE WE WERE SHOWING ADS ACROSS THE WEB

Even with the great results we saw with Facebook Video Ads, we wanted to reiterate the benefits of the truck outside of Facebook. To do this, we used Google Display Network ads, which are image-based ads that show up on other websites across the web (such as weather.com).

We targeted the ads to show up on websites and pages that are specific to the Tree Care industry, so Tree Care Professionals would be likely to see one of our ads on a website they frequent that’s relevant to improving their jobs.

Here are a few examples of the ads we were rolling out on these specific websites:

We were able to dramatically increase our client’s brand exposure and reinforce the benefits of the Tree Care work truck.

HOW WE MADE SURE WE’D SHOW UP WHEN PEOPLE SEARCH IN GOOGLE
The final portion of our awareness campaign was to show text ads in Google. Since we’re focused on driving awareness at a work truck designed for the Tree Care industry, we can bet that the audience is likely to do a few Google searches to find out more about these trucks.

While we were running this campaign, we wanted to make sure our client would show up in Google when their audience searched for anything related to Tree Care Trucks. The only way to guarantee we’d show up is to show ads, which cements in their audience’s mind that our client is one of the best brands around.

WRAPPING IT ALL UP

Our client has been very happy with the results of this campaign, and have since launched similar campaigns directed at other industries with some of their other work truck packages. We keep seeing great results – and are repeating this process as much as we can within budget.

HOW THIS BENEFITS YOU

If you’re in need of reaching your audience in a fresh, engaging way, this template is a great place to start.

Remember – our goal wasn’t to get an immediate sale, it was to increase brand awareness, interact with a COLD audience at the top of the marketing funnel and warm that audience up into leads over time. Focus on these steps at the top of your funnel and you’ll be well on your way to connecting with your audience in a way that will leave your competitors scrounging for help.

Questions? Let me know.