Blue Streak Campaign
Utilizing Integrated Marketing to Amplify an Important Product Launch
Relaunching a favorite and unknown: The Blue Streak brand of automotive parts was launched in 1934. Over the next 80+ years, the brand would become synonymous with high-quality replacement parts.
When the B2B manufacturer SMP decided to relaunch the brand with new products for modern vehicles in 2018, we needed to communicate two stories to two different audiences. First, we needed to communicate the new Blue Streak to people who were already familiar with the brand. Second, we needed to introduce Blue Streak to an entire generation of younger automotive professionals.
Emptying the toolbox: Due to the brand's history, the Blue Streak relaunch was one of the biggest product launches of my tenure at SMP. Fortunately, over time, I had steadily developed and implemented a fully integrated marketing approach. Our capabilities were at full force for the Blue Streak launch. Here are some of the tools we utilized:
| Integrated Marketing Campaign at a Glance | |
|---|---|
| Channel | How I Contributed |
| Content | Worked with product, engineering, training, and sales departments to develop story and gather materials for campaign |
| Writing / Editing | Crafted concise features and benefits for each product on company's eCatalog |
| Photography | Staged photoshoot and took high-value photographs of older and newer products (see above) |
| Internal communications | Crafted and distributed FAQ-style sheet for sales team |
| Print materials | Oversaw creation of brochure, white paper, and product sheet |
| Video | Produced and scripted product and engineering videos |
| Webpage | Built About Blue Streak and Ignition Coils webpages |
| PR | Wrote and scheduled press release |
| Created and distributed email campaign announcing launch (21% open rate / 10% click-thru rate generated 226 pageviews with 2:36 avg. view duration) | |
| Social | Oversaw comprehensive paid and organic social campaign across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube |
| SEO | Optimized webpages for product keywords. Scroll down for more info. |
| SEM | Created paid search campaign for product keywords. Scroll down for more info. |
| Sponsored Content | Modified product content for paid placement on industry website Auto Service Professional |
| Event | Oversaw 2018 AAPEX Show, which featured lobby banner and dedicated booth kiosk |
How'd we do? Working with a limited budget, we were able to develop a comprehensive story and broadcast it to customers across multiple channels. Here are some of the highlights:
- 6,000+ marketing video views across Facebook and YouTube
- 2,000+ engineering videos views across Facebook and YouTube
- 10,000+ views for this Instagram post of our coil bobbins being wound (a key product differentiator)
- 200+ likes for this Facebook post on our laser-etching (another key product differentiator)
- 7,000+ people visited the Blue Streak pages on our website
- 3,000+ of those people were acquired by our SEO and SEM campaigns
More on SEO and SEM: We optimized the two webpages using Moz. After the pages went live in November, you can see how our long tail SEO efforts (orange line) helped increase overall web traffic (blue line) in the subsequent months.
We complemented our social and SEO campaigns with a paid search campaign. For an almost negligible fraction of the company’s yearly marketing budget, I generated 1,596 clicks ($0.40 CPC) across six months. Although low in quantity, the clicks were high in value. Users generated by the campaign had a 54% bounce rate and viewed 2.27 pages/session. Both metrics were a little higher compared to the site’s average traffic but significantly lower than other acquisition channels and industry benchmarks.
Takeaway: At this point, we can probably drop the word "integrated" from "integrated marketing". All marketing is integrated. As a result, it's important to understand the full spectrum of a marketing campaign in order to connect with customers and audiences across multiple channels.
Get in touch: If you're looking to maximize your marketing efforts, shoot me an email.