Customer journey focus leads to critical market share gains
Yanmar, founded in Osaka, Japan, in 1912, is a premium compact and sub-compact tractor manufacturing company. The sub-contractor market focuses on acreage owners and smaller farmer owners versus larger agricultural applications.
The Challenge
As a Japan-based company, Yanmar has had to overcome low brand awareness and affinity in the United States. They have been looking to gain a stronger foothold in America in order to drive more leads to their dealers, with the end goal of increasing tractor sales.
Our Strategy
SEO
Recognizing we needed to do more than simply rank for certain keywords, we looked at search demand over time, identified spaces in the competitive market we could occupy quickly, and brainstormed how we could support our strategy from a technical perspective with site taxonomy and markup that promoted unique placements.
Content Strategy
Yanmar does not share the same brand recognition as key competitors in their industry, so our content strategy focused on highlighting Yanmar’s unique differentiators. We also took a much more intentional approach to our seasonal targeting, positioning Yanmar as a brand you can trust and turn to for expert advice on relevant tractor uses and topics.
Marketing Automation
Our marketing automation strategy focused on developing campaigns to further educate and inform prospective customers on Yanmar. We also deployed a regular newsletter to prospects and owners to keep them updated with the latest news and expert tips from Yanmar.
Paid Media
Our paid media campaigns were fueled by a full-funnel approach utilizing display, discovery, and paid search channels. With this media mix, our strategy was to build awareness at the top of the funnel with display, increase consideration in the middle of the funnel with display retargeting and discovery, and drive action at the bottom of the funnel with brand and non-brand paid search.
Paid Social
Yanmar had not previously advertised much on Facebook and Instagram, so the first step in our paid social media strategy was to launch an awareness campaign in their market to gain brand recognition. Soon after, we started driving traffic to their website to build a retargeting pool and focus on users who had interacted with our ads. After a couple months of active brand awareness and traffic campaigns, we were able to launch a lead generation campaign.
The Results
Our team was able to drive a 17% year-over-year increase in quote requests and a 62% increase in franchise leads.
We also saw a 19% lift in branded search volume year-over-year and a 30% increase after we implemented our programmatic media program.
62%
increase in franchise leads
30%
increase in branded search volume
17%
increase in quote requests
“We were able to double market share in 18 months. The only thing we changed in those 18 months was an increased focus on digital marketing with Spinutech.”
