Case study
Helping the challenger
punch above its weight
Client
ALE
Sector
B2B
Process
Content, PR and lead generation
Engineered heavy lifting and transport specialist ALE has performed some eye-catching feats, breaking a host of world records in the process.
The company has a highly specialised offer to customers across a range of industry sectors. Customer buying patterns in these sectors vary from a quick distress purchase to lengthy multi-stage procurement processes. As a challenger brand competing against larger businesses, ALE wanted to shout louder than its competitors in order to build market share across different customer types.
The strategy
As part of a broader project to revitalise the brand and website, ALE wanted to upscale key marketing communications such as social media, PR and digital content. Given the nature of its business, these activities needed to strike a balance between a reach and volume that would achieve cut through whilst maintaining a strong value proposition to its technically-minded customer base, whatever stage of their – often lengthy – purchase cycle they were at.
The strategy was based on two key tenets:
- Define what most clearly differentiates ALE in each industry sector and ensure this is the focus of marketing content
- Map marketing activity against customer journeys to ensure this content has maximum efficacy
From here, it was a case of ensuring a regular supply of credible content was produced and that the audience this reached within target industries was maximised.
Tailoring the message
ALE knew that customer requirements could vary across nine industry sectors, but had no way of coordinating this into marketing materials to maximise their relevancy – and crucially the chance of someone being encouraged to place an enquiry.
A brand audit was carried out, engaging with ALE staff and external stakeholders. This process resulted in a clear three-pillar messaging strategy that retained the pre-existing Smarter, Safer, Stronger brand proposition and combined this with a messaging matrix relevant to differing customer requirements.
For the journey
With messaging clear, there needed to be a more structured understanding of when marketing activity could have the most impact on a purchase decision.
Two journeys – reflecting both short-term distress purchase customers and those whose requirement was part of a larger, complex project – were developed. These reflected both the short-term need for ALE’s services that would likely be in the form of a phone call or web search, and a longer procurement based requirement focussed on relevancy and visibility of content across a sustained period.
Tracking results
Tracking was put into place across all activity, allowing ALE to understand the size of the targeted audience created by the activity, the engagements it was receiving through its social media activity, through to the value in marketing qualified leads (MQLs) generated through the website in general and PPC activity in particular. Data was presented in Google Data Studio, allowing ALE’s marketing team to easily view and analyse these multiple data sources in one place.
