No Trucks Given - Carney
The Daily Carnage

No Trucks Given

We dgaf about trucks… Unless those trucks are killing the social media and marketing game.

How to Grow a Facebook Page Without Paying for It

Wanna take a guess at how many followers Mack Trucks has on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? Go ahead… Just take a guess… 

Okay, here are your answers:
FB: 170k
IG: 38.2k
Twitter: 23k

Right?! Those are huge numbers for a truck brand. Who knew there were that many commercial trucking fans out there? When we saw those numbers, we had to know…what are they doing on social media that’s making them so successful?

Apparently, the hosts at SocialPros had the same question because they decided to interview Neil Tolbert, Director of Marketing at Mack Trucks, to find out.

We know, you’re thinking “I don’t care about trucks.” At first, we didn’t either, but Neil drops some serious knowledge about social media and marketing.

Time to get learned…

  • (4:00) Mack is a big brand, with a small marketing team – only 4 people on it. They’re structured by skillset – one person writes content, one does video, one on social media, and of course, the boss oversees it all.
  • (7:01) Mack has never run any paid “like acquisition” ads for their social channels. They try to stick to being organic in their page growth.
  • (7:56) They have a different posting strategy for every social platform. **Write that down.**
  • (11:10) Mack has a super long sales cycle. What metrics do they look at to prove the ROI of social media?
  • (16:40) Unsurprisingly, Mack Trucks is dealing with a lot of customer service requests on social media. They handle those requests with a number of systems including a CRM, a social listening tool, Eloqua, and a little bit of manual emailing back and forth.
  • (21:59) Followers on all of their platforms have increased exponentially. Neil attributes that to their storytelling – they tell customer stories, stories of the trucks, their history, etc. They also use influencer marketing! (Whaaa? We didn’t expect that from a truck brand.)
  • (28:40) How Neil compares Mack to their competitors.

You should probably just listen to this one in its entirety.

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Tangential Content Earns More Links and Social Shares in Boring Industries

“Boring?” Who said that? There are no boring industries, only boring marketers — didn’t you see Monday’s Daily Carnage?

But the obvious truth is, there are boring industries, and it’s super easy to market them that way. Exclusively posting branded content, for instance… Not only is it a turnoff to potential customers, but branded content also makes it more difficult to build links and earn PR mentions.

That’s when ya need tangential content. As in, content that is related to (but not about) your brand. Like a pool company creating content about summer safety tips and BBQ recipes.

Tangential content will help you earn your target customers’ attention, build high-quality links, and increase brand awareness.

While there’s a time for branded content further down the sales funnel, tangential content might be right for you if you want to:

  1. Reach a wide audience and gain top-of-funnel awareness. Not a lot of raving fans in your “boring” brand niche? Tangential topics can get you in front of the masses.
  2. Target a greater number of publishers to increase your link building and PR mention potential.
  3. Create more emotional content that resonates with your audience. If your brand niche doesn’t naturally tug on the heartstrings, tangential content is one way to create an emotional reaction.
  4. Build a more diverse content library and don’t be limited to creating content around one topic.

Today’s Read from Moz shows how tangential content posts perform much better than branded content posts. Especially if you’re in a… ::whispers:: …boring niche. See how certain campaigns compared, why they worked so well, and ideas for coming up with your own tangential content.

Are You Afraid of the Dark Chocolate?

Yesterday, we featured an ad that borrowed inspiration from Goldilocks and The Three Bears. Today, it’s Little Red Riding Hood. Call us a sucker for a theme.

And this twist on a fairytale has a twist ending. Things start out dark in this spot from UK brand, Green & Black’s Chocolate. Perfect for promoting their new line of ~dark~ chocolates. But the ending and tagline are so clever that we just couldn’t resist taking a bite out of this delectably executed ad. Also, chocolate

We’d never ruin the end of a fairytale for you, and we aren’t going to now.

Hey, Look at This

Ever wonder what questions your potential customers are searching for answers to? Not just keywords, but the actual questions? Answer The Public is just for you. Enter your keyword and they find all the questions people ask around that keyword.

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