Tadano America Corp.
Launching and selling out a global fan favorite.
Program
- Brand Positioning & Marketing Strategy
- 6-month engagement
With their sights set on unveiling the newest edition to their formidable equipment lineup at CONEXPO-CON/AGG 2023, North America’s largest construction trade show, Tadano knew they needed to build record-level excitement and anticipation prior to the event, and tapped Thrive to lead the initiative.
Working with Tadano’s North American marketing team, as well as their 3D design team in Sweden, Thrive set out to develop a campaign strategy that would appeal to Western crane buyers both emotionally and logically.
- Audience segmentation
- Positioning review
- Marketing strategy
- Visual design
- Content design & strategy
- Landing page &
HTML email dev
Tadano was already well versed in the behaviors and nuances of their primary audience; however, they knew that for their truck crane launch to be a breakout success, they needed to know even more about their buyers.
As a result, Tadano asked Thrive to take the audience-segmentation even further by breaking the audience down into individual roles.
In order to understand Tadano’s primary audience—crane rental companies—with more granularity, Thrive drilled down into three specific roles within that audience: owners, branch managers, and operators. Each role was concerned with a slightly different aspect of the new truck crane. Using data gleaned from the discovery process, we developed an evergreen campaign message which we then unpacked with separate-yet-related messages to each individual role.
- Crane Rental Company
- Owner/Principal
Return on investment
- Lower purchase price versus all-terrain crane
- Lower total cost of ownership
- Crane Rental Company
- Branch Manager
Utilization and reliability
- Faster speeds versus all-terrain crane
- Ability to complete more jobs per days
- No curfew restrictions
- Reputation for reliability
- Superior performance
- Crane Rental Company
- Operator
Comfort, capability,
and ease of use
- Easy access and egress from the crane for operator
- Wide cabin
- Comfortable seat
- Thoughtful controls placement
- Dependable
Since the truck crane was still in production in Japan, there was no photography available for us to use. So in order to bring our creative direction to life, we collaborated with Tadano’s Sweden-based 3D design team to render true-to-life 3D images of the truck crane that we could use in both the tease and launch phases of the campaign.
By providing detailed direction and feedback via collaborative Zoom-and-Figma-based design sessions, we were able to help produce an assortment of renders that allowed us to show various features of the crane.
Tadano came to Thrive with three specific campaign goals in mind: educate new customers, inform existing customers, and generate orders for a certain number of cranes. In order to meet each goal, we knew we had to devise a campaign that appealed to both logic and emotion.
We began with an internal brainstorming session that identified that Tadano faced two marketing challenges rather than one. Building upon that discovery, we then crafted two How Might We (HMW) questions that allowed us to rally around a campaign North Star.
- How might we create awareness and anticipation for a soon-to-be- introduced product?
- How might we empower crane buyers to quickly understand the benefits of owning a Tadano truck crane?
The answer to these questions helped the Thrive team bring the campaign to life.
and anticipation
To build awareness and anticipation, we broke the overarching campaign into two phases: tease and launch. In the tease campaign, we utilized intrigue and mystery to tease what was coming with a headline that instructed potential buyers to “Reach for What’s Next.” What’s next, of course, is the future—a future that has the specific roles for Tadano’s audience in mind, which are reflected in the corresponding campaign headlines.
while generating net-new leads
Since the primary campaign goal was truck-crane preorders, connecting the messaging strategy with audience-segmentation exercise was key. We worked with Tadano’s internal email marketing and Pardot teams to ensure the right emails with the right messages got to the exact right audience roles. The result was a significant bump in open rates when compared to their standard awareness campaigns and an average read rate of approximately 70 percent across all sends.
When Tadano’s new truck crane launched to the public, curious buyers were met with a campaign that promised “A Crane Built for the Way You Work.” Continuing the audience-segmentation exercise we began in the tease campaign, we then focused subsequent campaign headlines and artwork on individual buyer roles concerned with individual features of the crane. The result was a highly specific, highly impactful campaign that met every single goal we set.
