This case study details a heavy construction equipment distributor and the hurdles they overcame to make their marketing strategy their greatest sales tool.

Part 1: Investment in Marketing

At this point in this company’s history, their marketing budget had been reserved to tradeshows which already put them back tens of thousands of dollars per year. However, like all small businesses, they understood that the world was going digital, and changes needed to be made.

To key in on their target market of large construction companies and municipalities, they subscribed to a CRM/email distribution software with reporting and analytics built-in, and they created a quarterly newsletter.

To expand their reach they created a few social media accounts and invested in some online advertising through search networks and industry publications also hired a freelance graphic designer to ensure a level of professionalism. They even had a staff member with digital design experience to keep costs down for small adjustments.

All in their new marketing budget had nearly doubled but they’re expectations were optimistic.

Part 2: The “Roadblocks” to Success

After doing their research, establishing their strategy, preparing a schedule, and deciding on a budget they had done everything right. Little did they know, they were going to run into some very common roadblocks on the way to marketing success.

Meaningless data

The promise of meaningful analytics is what sold this company on investing in online marketing so it was exceptionally disappointing to review the engagement report from their first few newsletters. The sample size of the open rate and click through rate was too small to glean any useful insights. 

They were spending time and money trying to squeeze any usable insights out of a handful of clicks.

CRM admin time

The nature of their small prospect pool makes targeted marketing and building relationships crucial and the most effective tool to accomplish that is a CRM. However, their directory of prospects took weeks to segment into the most basic categories and after it was “done” there was little 

Weak Content

These professional content writers did not know the intricacies of the business and they couldn’t possibly do the research required to position the company as industry experts. Despite investing significant time into outlining, reviewing, and rewriting content, deadlines were missed and the newsletter schedule became inconsistent. They entered into a vicious content writing cycle:

1. First draft: Required complete rewrites
2. Second draft: Riddled with mistakes no industry professional would make
3. Third draft: Technically error-free but embarrassingly lacking any thought leadership
4. Final draft: Late and with little value to the target audience
5. Repeat.

They were spending time and money putting out ineffective content that didn’t position them as an authority.

The questionable value of a tradeshow

Trade shows are far and away the largest expense in the budget and, despite efforts online, had remained their most effective lead generation tool. The industry expects distributors and manufacturers to attend these events but outside of a few major players, attendees don’t see anything close to a return on their investment. 

They were spending time and money on trade show booths, fees, staff, and travel and all they got was a handful of qualified leads

Part 3: Quest Solutions

This client’s “roadblocks” are so common among marketers in small businesses that Quest’s services were literally designed to alleviate them. In this case, we set up a Quiz Dev Campaign and a Live Event Quiz Show Series for their trade shows.

Quiz Dev is a system of strategically written quizzes, tests, and questionnaires the results of which are tied to a CRM and a data report. These are intended to achieve 4 key business development goals gaining visibility, generating leads, building relationships, and making sales. 

To prioritize their goals, they took the B2B marketing goals quiz which resulted in an RLSV type company, and prioritized their goals like this:

1. Build Relationships
2. Generate Leads
3. Make Sales
4. Gain Visibility

Trade Show Quiz for Lead Gen– An educational and entertaining trivia challenge written to engage tradeshow attendees to test their knowledge. An excellent lead generation tool that starts a meaningful conversation.

 Self segmenting content

By promoting a new quiz each month, this company no longer needed to dedicate man-hours to cleaning and sorting their CRM. Simply by participating in a quiz, either online or at a tradeshow, any opt-in is segmented into groups in the CRM based on predefined criteria. 

To accomplish this, we flushed out their ideal prospect segments to give the best chance to succeed in building relationships with their audience. We consider 3 different types of segmentation, general, interest-based, and habit-based. 

Our client’s ideal segmentation looked like this:

General Segmentation: Location of prospect, ownership (municipal, private)

Interest Based Segmentation: Manufacturer brands, construction discipline

Habit Based Segmentation: Event attendance (trade shows, conferences), association memberships

Effective thought leadership

It was crucial that anything this company produced positioned them as an expert authority in their industry. Creating knowledge based tests is a very effective way to accomplish this and it has the added bonus of checking the other boxes of effective marketing content

Effective marketing content is:

• Entertaining – The audience enjoys it and looks forward to it
• Educational – The audience sees you as an expert resource 
• Engaging/ Engageable – The audience has the desire and ability to interact with it
• Goal-Oriented – Audience engagement should be measurable and relate to a key business development objective.

Before writing the content, we establish specific goals and KPIs for each quiz to measure its success. This practice allows our quizmasters to effectively adjust the quiz questions, titles, and results pages based on data. Here are a few examples:

Talk of the trade

The primary purpose of attending a trade show for our client is to generate leads and more specifically qualified leads. To accomplish this we wrote a quiz for each trade show to challenge attendees to flex their knowledge of their industry and have their name displayed on a leaderboard. 

This was measurably more effective at generating high quantities of leads than any raffle they’ve brought to previous events. Simply participating in the quiz segmented the leads into habit-based and interest-based segments, answering certain questions organized the leads into more specific interest-based segments, and filling out the brief survey to have their score displayed provided general segmentation. 

This was the most successful qualified lead generation system they had ever implemented.

In the End

With the introduction of Quest’s live event quiz shows and innovative Quiz-Dev content marketing system, this client was able to turn a potentially disastrous investment in online marketing into one of their most successful initiatives.

Organically engaging social media posts and memorable trade show booths put their brand in the mind of potential clients. Interactive content both online and at live and virtual events generated qualified leads segmented by interests, habits, and general attributes. Targeted email content builds firm relationships and when a sale is on the table they are head and leaps ahead of the competition.

The bottom line?

This client’s Quiz Dev System, monthly reporting, CRM, and 4 quiz shows per year completely turned around a $100,000 investment for an additional $4,570 per year.