Useful Marketing Facts for Equipment Owners from the Detroit Digital Summit 2019

By: Matt Reinhart

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A key goal of The Fleet Cost & Care marketing team’s efforts in 2020 is to expand our services by offering paid marketing services to our clients in the heavy equipment rental space. As we develop our marketing services strategy and goals, we are working to expand our capabilities and hone the skills we already have so that we can provide the best service possible to our clients.

Part of professional development efforts including spending two days at the Detroit Digital Summit 2019. The #DSDET conference boasted an impressive lineup of marketing experts who lead workshops and sessions focused on email marketing, SEO (search engine optimization), advertising, content marketing, mobile marketing, website optimization, and so much more. Below are a few useful marketing statistics I learned at the conference and my tips for beginning to implement marketing efforts at a heavy equipment rental business.

Email Marketing Facts:

Email marketing drives $44 of revenue per $1 spent
Email newsletter recipients spent an average of 51s per email
70% of B2B marketers say increasing email list quality is their #1 goal
Email is 40x more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter
The average email response time is 90 minutes
The best time of day to send emails is between 4-8pm

My Email Marketing Tips for Beginners

Email marketing is an affordable way to engage with your audience, gain trust, and promote your brand. Despite the high return on investment, many heavy equipment rental companies are doing little to no email marketing. If you’re looking for an affordable way to implement an email marketing strategy, start small by doing the following:

Compile a list of key customer contacts and leads in an excel spreadsheet.
Sign up for a free MailChimp account and import your excel spreadsheet.
Choose the best content you have available on your website to share. I recommend a blog post that highlights your safety efforts, a big job you recently completed, or a sales page that lists out the equipment you have available for rental.
Write a short subject line, one paragraph of text, and choose a call to action (CTA) to put at the bottom of your email. Your CTA should link to the content you chose on your website to share.
Send your blast!

Bottom line: if you own or operate a heavy equipment rental business, you want your existing and/or past customers to call you with new jobs. Email marketing is one way for you to stay top of mind with your customers and demonstrate that your company is trustworthy.

Social Media Marketing Facts:

40 characters is the optimal length of a Facebook post
200M Instagram users per day visit a business profile
Social profiles drive an average of 15% of total website traffic to local businesses

My Social Media Marketing Tips for Beginners

Social media has proven to be a concept we cannot ignore. Well, you can try to ignore it, but with 7 out of every 10 Americans having at least one active social profile, you’d be ignoring a large audience of potential customers. If you’re looking to establish an online social media presence for your business, do the following:

Start with Facebook.
Create a business page attached to your personal account. Be sure to include a profile picture, a link to your business’ website, the current phone number and address for your business, and a short description of the services you offer.
Commit to posting to your Facebook page once a week. Snag a picture of your coworkers sharing lunch together, recruit your crane operator to get a cool shot on a job site, share a link to a video with relevant safety tips.

Bottom line: 100 true social media fans for your business beats 100,000 followers. Aim to create affinity for your brand through social media by engaging your employees, family and friends, and customers. Don’t worry about gaining thousands of followers. Once you’ve done this, the next time someone searches for your business, they’ll likely find your Facebook page in the search engine results – which could lead to them making a phone call and/or sale.

SEO and Content Marketing Facts:

92% of searchers will pick businesses with search results on the first page
Google sends 66% of all website referral traffic on the web
60% of marketers create at least one piece of content each day

Bottom line: Identify WHO your audience is first. For example, if you are a company that rents operated cranes in Detroit, your target audience is likely local made up of local general contractors and local oil refineries and factories. To get in front of your audience via content marketing, ask yourself these questions: Where is your audience most likely to consume content? Do they listen to podcasts? Do they listen to the local radio? Are they visiting specific websites or searching for general themes of content? Once you’ve answered those questions, that’s when the real work starts. Creating content is time consuming work, but it’s worth the effort.

Marketing Services for Equipment Rental Businesses

Now here is where my sales pitch comes in – if you’re interested in what I wrote about above, consider hiring the Fleet Cost & Care marketing team to develop your marketing strategy and execute your email, social, and content marketing efforts. We’ll work closely with you to understand your unique business needs and achieve goals that we decide upon together. The best part is, since we currently work in the heavy equipment rental space, we already understand the industry. We won’t be new to the business, and we certainly aren’t new to marketing.

In case you’re wondering who I am – that’s me below in the hard hat hanging off of the GMK 6300 at the JJ Curran Crane Yard in Detroit. Ignore the fact that I’m wearing sandals and pretend they are steel toed boots. Also pictured below: Matt Reinhart, Senior Marketing Specialist at Fleet Cost & Care. Matt is an event planning expert and a serious email and social marketing connoisseur. He is pictured here with an alien for no real reason.