Bobcat Local Marketing Tactic Expansion Success Story
Bobcat Business Booms From Trying New Tactics With BrandMuscle
Background
Bobcat, the popular manufacturer of farm and construction equipment, continues to innovate and elevate their media offerings to impressive new levels. 2022 has seen significant growth in program participation, with the company launching over 1,000 campaigns year to date, as well as new trials, tactics, and optimizations that have produced phenomenal results.
During the two years that Bobcat and BrandMuscle have worked together, Bobcat’s organic social program has grown more than 1,517%. Posts on dealer pages promoting Bobcat are up 1,107% since January 2020, and engagement is up nearly 800%. Bobcat’s already solid organic social program leveled up during 2022, with the launch of the free social trial, an exciting offering to introduce new dealers to the program. Bobcat’s trial of boosted posts proved highly effective: Boosted posts saw reach that was 1,960% higher than the non-boosted posts, and consumers took action 13,483% more on the boosted posts than the non-boosted posts.
Online business listings, also known as location data management, are another example of the Bobcat program’s significant growth. Dealer program participation has increased more than 81% since its inception. As a result, their business listing impressions have grown from 1.5 million in 2019 to more than 15 million in 2022. Views in Google Maps also increased by 71%, which means that consumers are using this tool to find Bobcat locations.
Bobcat offers a strong lineup of digital tactics, including paid social, paid search, geotargeted display, and digital direct mail. 2022 also saw Bobcat successfully venture into the world of connected TV, which yielded a completion rate of nearly 98%. This dynamic mix of dealer, co-op, and corporate funded campaigns has positioned Bobcat to realize their strongest performance yet, with more than 104 million impressions, 441 thousand clicks, and a conversion rate more than double their target.
The success of the Bobcat media program is an example of collaboration and synergy between the Bobcat and BrandMuscle teams. Bobcat’s willingness to try new tactics and trial new programs has equipped them with a power-packed arsenal of tools to drive brand awareness and door swings for dealers across the U.S. and Canada.
As an example of their success that stems from their openness to experimentation, we’d like to focus on one particular success: paid media.
Challenge
Bobcat has over 700 dealerships throughout the United States and Canada. Bobcat set out to increase engagement and better their dealers’ marketing experience. With the continued challenge of inventory shortages, they understood that the opportunity for dealers to stay engaged in marketing campaigns has dwindled over the last year. Bobcat wanted to focus on ways to improve participation and educate their dealers on the importance of a consistent marketing presence.
Solution
Because of inventory shortages, Bobcat changed all paid media tactics to offer a three-month commitment length, in addition to already offering a six-month commitment length. They also added shorter promotional tactics such as Promotional Facebook Lead Generation. Bobcat initiated, adding new forms for quick and easy campaign enrollments, in addition to corporate funded campaigns.
Results
After program initiations, dealer participation rate increased significantly. This correlated directly with an increase of co-op utilization. Bobcat not only has an increased number of locations participating in subscriptions, they have an increased number of unique dealers. Paid digital subscription counts have more than quadrupled. BrandMuscle achieved a conversion rate 238% higher than Bobcat’s goal in 2022, which aimed for 1%. We drove more conversions in Q1 of 2022 than the entire year’s goal across all dealer types. We noted a 2X bump in the overall click through rate from our test and learn campaigns. Equally important is the way partners are getting educated about the importance of a consistent marketing presence. As our State of Local Marketing Report finds year after year, educated partners at higher levels of marketing maturity tend to drive more revenue.
