HELLO
HELLO
After years of working with Yale Materials Handling Corporation, a lift truck manufacturer, we had a clear understanding of their primary target audience – warehouse managers that have lift truck purchasing power. We’ve come to know and successfully reach these decision makers through industry events, trade publications, social media and other channels.
For a new campaign, however, Yale wanted to engage an entirely new group – the lift truck operators who use their products every day. Although they’re not the ones who sign order forms to purchase new equipment, lift truck operators have major influence.
Our goals were to:
Create an open dialogue and relationship with the people who use Yale equipment
Build a community of loyal Yale advocates
Exemplify the brand’s commitment to and support of lift truck operators
Celebrate operators and demonstrate their true value to warehouse managers
We’re used to marketing to warehouse managers and know where they go online. But reaching a new audience meant finding the best places to engage lift truck operators, so we targeted operators with programmatic ads. Using search engine and browser history, we were able to track which sites operators were visiting, and then use that information to bid in real-time on those sites’ available ad inventory, giving us a better chance to catch the eyes of lift truck operators than with general ad buys. These targeted ads featured a 15-second cut of the Yale Elite campaign video. More than 76% of impressions converted into video completions, coming in above the campaign goal.
We aired the full 2-minute video as a YouTube pre-roll ad, which could be skipped after 15 seconds. To target the right audience, we built a custom audience segment based on search history that suggested the user could be designated as a lift truck operator. With a very conservative budget, these ads generated more than 1.3 million impressions in just six months, and 17% of viewers went on to watch the entire video.
We also sponsored social posts on Facebook and LinkedIn. From past experience, we knew that warehouse managers would respond to our campaign on LinkedIn, but we were uncertain whether our new operator audience would, too. It turned out that operators were far more likely to engage on LinkedIn than managers. Warehouse managers generated significantly more impressions on the platform but engaged at an industry-average rate and clicked through at a below-industry-average rate. However, lift truck operators averaged a 6.98% engagement rate and a 1.3% click-through rate, both well above the industry average.
Overall, our advertising campaigns across programmatic, social, trade media and Google Ads generated more than 2.2 million impressions, nearly 4,400 clicks and a video completion rate of 42.4%.
In the first 12 months, the Yale Elite campaign has generated:
