Getting B2B results: John Deere, DM & WOM

Posted at December 22, 2009

The Ultimate Skid Steer Smackdown: a DM campaign for John Deere by GyroHSR

When John Deere wanted to move into a new category of earth-movers, GyroHSR conceived a campaign centred around head-to-head contests between JD and the competition. The following article looks at how the campaign evolved and the results it delivered.

Since its launch in April 2008, the John Deere ‘Smackdown’ microsite has had more than 150,000 visitors with 125,000 unique views and over 350,000 page views.  Smackdown videos have attracted 100,000+ views on YouTube.

By Christoph Becker, Chief Creative Officer, GyroHSR

Contrary to what some may think, direct marketing is not just a tactical tool, it is a strategic approach.

It can build brands and it can create an intimacy that no other approach can. Believe it, because if you don’t, you can’t sell it. And if you can’t sell it, you might be left to turn the lights out as everyone else embraces a new era somewhere in the future.

This is an approach we had to adopt when launching a US campaign for agricultural and construction equipment giants John Deere.

The challenge was clear: John Deere wanted to enter a new digger category

The audience was contractors, landscapers, farmers and dealers. So a simple offline DM piece, targeted and tracked, might have done the job.

It might have done. But then, it might have gone down as another classic example of the real potential of direct marketing going well and truly unexploited. Instead, we created a campaign that incorporated the stalwarts of direct marketing and used them to create something much, much bigger.

“Smackdown” involved staging a series of head-to-head battles featuring the top machines in a ‘robot wars’- style duel. The events – the hill climb, visibility test, power lift and serviceability – were based on real-world situations that drivers experience and were staged in front of a live audience.

Initially, the audience was engaged via offline mailers, but that was only the beginning. At the heart of the programme was the ‘SkidSteerSmackdown.com’ microsite, featuring videos of digger battles. The site was fully interactive, enabling visitors to engage in a number of ways. For example, fans could create e-postcards which could be customized and distributed to friends and co-workers. This simple tool converted dealers and operators into the campaign’s strongest advocates.

A series of eDMs were distributed to alert both dealer and prospects when new content was available on the site, and finally – traditional elements such as print ads were also incorporated.

And through this activity, John Deere gained a cult following

Since the site launch in April 2008, the microsite has had more than 150,000 visitors with 125,000 unique views and more than 350,000 page views.  Smackdown videos have garnered more than 100,000 views on YouTube.

Offline, the Smackdown-themed lead generators yielded a 4 percent response rate, outpacing many other similar mailers during the year. Drive-to-site banner advertising had click-through-rates of approximately 3 percent, and eBlasts promoting the site had response rates of more than 7 percent.

This was a campaign that had direct marketing at the heart – there was an identifiable audience, a clear proposition and a measurable response. But to encapsulate it in this way does no justice to the true reach of the activity. We could have sent out the mailers and waited to track the sales. But we didn’t. We took the brand to a new marketplace and created a following populated by genuine advocates. We drove awareness, created buzz and instigated WOM.

More on Social Media:

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PR & B2B. The perfect couple – the importance of PR in B2B

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

Making B2B marketing work, Marcoms

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