The Complete Guide To Heavy Equipment Marketing

Is your current marketing strategy not carrying its weight? Do you feel you are spending time, money, and energy only to see mediocre results? You are not alone, as many construction equipment businesses need help to find profitability from their marketing investment.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Heavy equipment companies have a unique opportunity to use digital marketing strategies to reach new customers and grow every division of their businesses. This article explores some of the most effective digital marketing techniques, with methods specific to your construction equipment business. 

Let's dig in.

Investing in Digital Marketing To Sell, Rent, & Service More Equipment

Referral marketing is and always will be critical to your business. But if you want to see greater profits, you will need to invest in digital marketing. Here are a few reasons heavy equipment companies should invest in digital marketing to promote their equipment:

1. Reach new customers: Referral marketing takes a step, whereas digital marketing allows companies to leap and reach a wider audience. Sure, you can invest in traditional marketing, such as coupon books and newspaper ads, but seriously, how well do those work? Using the internet and various social media channels, you can market your heavy construction equipment anywhere you hope to do business, targeting your exact customer with scary accuracy.

2. Build brand awareness: We all love the branded coffee mugs and tire flaps, but those will only do a little to keep your brand top of mind. A solid online presence helps build brand awareness for heavy equipment companies beyond promotional items. When potential customers search for information about heavy equipment-related topics, you're more likely to earn their business if they find you first.

3. Increase profits & revenues: Isn’t this the goal we are aiming to achieve? Digital marketing helps increase sales by reaching potential customers more than traditional marketing methods. In addition, digital advertising targets specific demographics, which results in higher conversion rates than traditional advertising methods.

4. More bang for your buck: Digital marketing is often more cost effective than traditional marketing techniques such as magazines and mailers. Seriously, you will reach a larger audience at a fraction of the cost of conventional marketing methods.

Search Engine Marketing For Heavy Equipment Companies

Search engine marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing techniques available today and can reach customers both near and far.

There are two types of search engine marketing. The first is paying for search engine marketing with pay-per-click ads, and the second is increasing your search engine rankings with SEO. The greatest opportunity is with SEO, so let’s start there. Let’s help you understand why and how search engine optimization works for the heavy construction equipment market.

Local Search Engine Optimization

We can use local search engine optimization (SEO) to improve a website’s visibility in local search results. SEO is important for heavy equipment companies because it can help them reach potential customers in their local area who may be interested in purchases, repairs, and rentals. There are a few things that you can do to improve your local SEO:

1. Optimize your business listing: Google is the most important, but claim and optimize your business listing across all the major local search engines, including Yahoo and Bing. Also, claim and optimize listings on local and industry-specific directories such as Nextdoor, Yelp, and Yellow pages. 

Managing your business listing ensures that search engines display your company correctly while having up-to-date information. More importantly, it helps you show up when people search for any terms related to your business.

2. Optimize your website for local searches: Optimize your website for local searches by including relevant keywords and phrases. Your keyword list will consist of the areas that you do business in, the services you offer, the industries you serve, and the products you offer. Also, Google considers your website optimization as a ranking factor for your business listing.

3. Publish content about your local area: Publish content on your website and blog about local community topics. A shortlist includes partnerships, events, helpful guides, and more. Search engines look for subject authority when ranking local businesses, so keep talking about your industry and the community.

4. Get involved with the community: Get involved with the community by sponsoring local events or taking part in charity events. Community involvement helps you naturally build backlinks to your website, which is an important ranking factor for Google.

What is a backlink?

A backlink is a clickable hyperlink that goes from one web page to another website. For your business, this might be a local paper mentioning your business in one of their online articles.

Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a form of online advertising that allows businesses to bid for placement in the sponsored search results on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. PPC is a very effective way to reach potential customers interested in your products and looking to choose a company either soon or now.

There are a few things that you need to keep in mind when using PPC advertising:

1. Choose the right keywords: When creating your PPC campaign, choose keywords applicable to your heavy equipment business that people are likely to search for.

2. Set a budget: You must set a budget for your PPC campaign and make sure that you stay within that budget. Like credit card companies, the PPC platform’s goal is to get you to spend as much money as possible.

3. Track your results: Make sure you track your PPC campaign’s results to see how it performs. Reporting helps determine whether the campaign is successful and provides insights about necessary adjustments.

4. Optimize your ads: Optimize your ads for maximum effectiveness. Optimization includes testing different headlines, ad copy, and targeting different demographics.

5. Use landing pages: Make sure that you use landing pages for your PPC ads. A landing page is a page on your website where people can learn more about your product or service. The goal of a page is to capture information while delivering a resonating message. Your landing page must be well-designed and easy to navigate.

Social Media Marketing For Heavy Equipment Companies

You’re mistaken if you assume that social media marketing doesn’t work for construction equipment companies. Think about it; most boys had a bin full of Tonka dump trucks because we love the idea of big-bad machinery. Our love for the dump truck doesn’t end in childhood; even as adults, we still love our oversized toys.

So yes, social media marketing is another effective digital marketing technique we can use to reach potential customers. Even if not for the immediate future, they will need to buy, service, or rent heavy construction equipment at some point. A well-executed social media strategy positions you to earn their business over the competition.

Like search engine marketing, you have two marketing options with social media. The first is social media advertising, where you pay to reach your existing and new customers. The second is to make social media content for your current followers, who will like and share your content so that it becomes discovered by others.

Social Media Advertising

Heavy equipment sales companies can use social media advertising to reach a wider audience. Paid advertising allows businesses to target their specific audience with ads that appear in their social media feeds. With the right strategy, social media advertising can be a very effective way to reach new customers and grow your business.

Creating Social Media Content

The simplest way to produce engaging content is to show your construction equipment in action. Since your equipment is on the job, ask those buying and renting your equipment to record videos of them using it, then share them on your profile. Then, tag the company in your post, helping to promote them at the same time.

Tip: Since construction machinery is loud, having someone speak about the equipment won’t work well. Instead, include captions on your posts so people can read them while watching the construction machinery in action.

Email Marketing For Construction Equipment

Email marketing can be a very effective way to connect with potential customers and grow your business. However, most of what we see from the construction equipment market deserves to be in the trash where it ends up going. Taking the lazy approach to email marketing is worse than not doing it at all. However, if you take the time to add value with email marketing, it’s a great way to keep in touch with customers and help you stay top of mind.

7 Strategies For Marketing Heavy Equipment

Flushing out one-of-a-kind content marketing strategies is what we do best. While the best strategies take a personalized approach, our experience has discovered some universal strategies that any heavy construction equipment company can use to build a digital presence.

Here's a look at 7-ways to grow your business with social media and search engine marketing.

1. Ask employees to share your social media posts when you feature them in the content.

2. Leverage your content marketing by creating short-form posts.

3. Partner with other local businesses to develop cross-promoted social media content.

4. Include news about your community as a part of your email marketing campaign.

5. images and videos to Google Business Profile

6. Create articles where you compare your equipment to competitors. In content marketing, we call these versus articles.

7. Take advantage of Facebook’s lead generation forms to capture customer information without them having to leave the app. 

Digital Marketing Agency

Are you looking for a digital marketing agency to take over the heavy lifting for your heavy machinery marketing? Look no further. The Nine is a digital marketing agency that helps companies in the construction industry grow their business through digital lead generation and customer retention.

Schedule a time to talk with our digital marketing specialists. Our experts will give you example case studies where we’ve helped the heavy equipment industry and how we can help your business win with digital marketing.