It Does What? Marketing a Product That is Hard to Understand

Picture this… You’re driving down the freeway and you’re coming up on an 18-wheeler (one that gives you major Optimus Prime vibes). It’s another big rig, on its way to deliver groceries to your local supermarket.

Then you notice this.

Okay, maybe you don’t actually notice it, because how often are you looking at the mud flaps on a trailer?

Well, I’m going to let you in on a little secret: they matter. And upon a closer look of those mud flaps in the photo, what matters more is that bent bar the mud flap is attached to — not exactly a good spot to be in.

How Does This Tie into Marketing?

It’s funny, because when you go to school for marketing or advertising, you learn about campaigns for Coca Cola or Nike.

Enter BettsHD — a leader in spray suppression and safety products for heavy-duty trucks and trailers. Let’s just say, I didn’t imagine working on campaigns for heavy-duty truck parts…

But it has been absolutely amazing.

The agency was tasked with developing a marketing plan for their newest product, the Trailer Mud Flap Retention System (TMF-RS). Unabashedly not knowing much about heavy-duty trucking or spray suppression, research was crucial. What we found was that this was a potentially difficult product to communicate about with consumers.

Simplicity is Best

When you’re trying to capture folks at the top of the sales funnel, it’s always in your best interest to keep it simple. There’s a time and place later in the sales cycle where you can dive in deeper.

Our strategy was to focus on the pain points of mud flap retention and call out the reasons why TMF-RS was the appropriate solution. It was important to provide accurate information, but it had to be easy enough to read for an audience of all different education levels.

This campaign would need to utilize multiple tactics to ensure we were providing enough meaningful touch points. Industry research shows that it takes seven to nine touch points to drive a consumer to take action or drive behavior change.

Use Media to Your Advantage

We were supported by the client with a YouTube video of the product in action. From there, we created a dedicated landing page where the video would be embedded — which also gave us a place to direct media and consumers to track actions against our objectives.

To get the word out to our target audience, we worked with the client to draft a press release that spoke to what TMF-RS was, what it could do and why it was important for the end user.

It landed some pretty awesome pickups!

After seeing the success of the YouTube video, we decided to create an additional video. This time, it was going to be animated.

To supplement the video, we drafted a blog for the website. This was purposeful for the fact that we could optimize the blog to include keywords that would enhance the website’s SEO.

If a product is potentially hard to decipher, that should never be a barrier to advertising. All it takes is a little bit of patience, research and the willingness to explore new ideas and opportunities. Looking for a team that’s up for the challenge? Send us a note!

–Nicole Maul, Social Media Manager