How We Help Caterpillar Support Equipment Owners

Caterpillar: Can you help us support our equipment owners?

Simantel: Don’t worry; we’ve got you covered.

When you buy equipment at Caterpillar, you’re not just buying equipment (this will make sense in a minute.)

As long as Caterpillar has been in the biz, customers have been their No. 1 priority. The most obvious evidence of this is their dedication to innovation and providing their customers the best equipment out there. But there’s also a whole other side to prioritizing their customers. Caterpillar doesn’t just sell equipment and send you on your way. They make sure every customer has the resources to keep their operation on track. That’s where “the ask” came in.

The Ask

While we’re not engineers, we are really good at speaking to customers and understanding their needs. So, Caterpillar reached out to us to develop content to support Global Construction & Infrastructure (GCI) equipment owners in their new purchases.

And we were given a few goals:

Goal 1: Educate the customer to help their business succeed and to promote repeat purchases.

Goal 2: Increase technology adoption to optimize customer fleets and improve technology sales.

Goal 3: Grow service awareness to increase sales of attachments and maintenance parts.

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The Idea

What Caterpillar provided: A spreadsheet with article and video ideas for each machine type.

Simantel’s job: Take these topics and run with them.

While we knew it was essential to focus on Caterpillar business goals, we also knew that being effective meant focusing on Cat customer goals. So, we studied up on the Cat construction industry customer and came up with a list of main objectives (which would later serve as a great framework for our content).

1. To keep their jobsite safe
2. To keep their equipment maintained
3. To be as productive as possible
4. To control their business costs
5. To run a successful business

From there, we crafted a content philosophy to reach the customer: This content needed to be intentional, sustainable, shareable, relevant to the equipment the customer owns, and sales-minded but not sales-focused.

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The Execution

Working with Caterpillar, we decided on four main messaging vehicles.

Videos: These cover “get to know your equipment” basics as well as maintenance instructions and safety tips. We also dive deeper with how-to videos focused on topics such as technology and work tool attachments.

Articles: Each article complements a video or serves as stand alone content and varies in length, depending on the topic. No fluff, no writing long articles simply for a Google algorithm.

Email: We established an “email journey” with content that drives readers to articles and videos.

Webpages: A main hub page links to all of the content and is categorized by machine type so that readers can easily navigate right to the information they need.

The Results

So far, we’ve produced more than 900 pieces of content. And we’re far from done!

This isn’t a “set it and forget it” type of thing. We continue to work on new content to help Caterpillar meet their customers’ needs.