Strategies implemented by Nile Three have greatly benefited ProPride Hitch.
The Michigan-based company, known for its exclusive 3P hitches and other products, conducted a search for a marketing firm. That’s when ProPride Industries encountered Nile Three, a firm specializing in helping businesses maximize opportunities by approaching the needs of the customer with a hands-on approach.
“Nile Three has afforded us the ability to scale our marketing ads for a certain audience, allowing us to be aggressive with our ad-spend for targeted areas,” said Alex Miller, National Sales Manager at ProPride Hitch.
In today’s economic climate, it’s become increasingly more important – and more difficult – for suppliers to be in constant communication with dealers and distributors. The world moves faster than ever, and the pace of business grows exponentially by the day.
Nile Three has effectively helped “slow things down,” helping ProPride Hitch approach new opportunities with a laser-like focus.
“We physically cannot make every trade show, or be at every dealership,” Miller continued. “Our partnership with Nile Three provided us a road map to provide ads to every potential customer in those specific locations.”
Peter Fougerousse, VP of Digital Marketing at Nile Three, immediately recognized the challenges facing ProPride Hitch and quickly implemented strategies that produced immediate results. Soon, more dealers began approaching ProPride Hitch, showing incredible interest in the 3P Hitch.
“The dealers were seeing a campaign directed at the benefits of the 3P when it came to sales and profitability, while on the consumer side, we were targeting them with a message geared towards the benefits of towing with a 3P and eliminating sway,” Fougerousse explained. “The intention of this campaign, which is ongoing, is to create conversation between the consumer and the dealer. We have received numerous reports from dealers who are signing up to be ProPride dealers, that the strategy is working and that they recently started hearing from their customers, over and over again… the question of whether or not they should purchase a ProPride 3P anti-sway hitch.
“We have now signed up over 20 new dealers in a matter of a few months, and the campaign is highly profitable. It is also, in many ways, an evergreen type of campaign – since it is constantly targeting new consumers, based not only on their interests, but also on their behavior within the geographies where the dealers are located.”
Generating 20 new dealer leads within a few months may not seem like an astronomical number – because it isn’t, in the grand scheme of things – but those additions were incredibly important, given the niche market for 3P Hitch.
“ProPride Hitch was a unique case that we had never encountered before in the B2B marketing space. What made it different was the fact that they were attracting new dealers, primarily to a single product,” Fougerousse said. “To add an additional layer of difficulty, the product was one that has a high price-point within its category.
“The same product, when being marketed to consumers, is challenging because those consumers have certain prerequisites in order to be able to use the product. The product, itself, is the world’s No. 1 anti-sway trailer hitch. At the moment of this writing, that particular product is only applicable to bumper-towed trailers, primarily bumper-towed RVs.”
ProPride Hitch presented a set of challenges unseen by Nile Three, which made the challenge all the more rewarding for the marketing agency.
“Unlike the cases that we have typically encountered where a particular company has many solutions that they can provide to their business clients, we needed to impress upon prospective RV dealers that their customers had a demand for this high-end solution to trailer sway,” Fougerousse said.
“It immediately became apparent that it would be of great benefit to us, to use the customer base of the RV dealers in a B2B2C type of campaign. In this case, the number of dealers who we are targeting are few in number, however their customers are very numerous,” Fougerousse said. “In order to target the dealers, we used a proprietary system to connect those decision-makers at all the target dealerships with their personal social media profiles.”
The research led to more discoveries, which was the goal of the campaign. Through advanced social-media strategies, Nile Three uncovered other ways for ProPride Hitch to reach its target market.
“Once we mined the data, we started to target the dealers on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, showing them the benefits of selling the 3P hitch to their customer. Simultaneously, we targeted all consumers that matched the profile of ProPride customers,” Fougerousse added. “But we only targeted them when they entered from a distance within one mile of the RV dealers. This was indication to us that they were likely shopping for an RV. Best-case scenario, they were shopping for an RV at one of our targeted dealers. Worst-case scenario, they were already an RV owner and potentially in the market for buying a 3P directly from ProPride.”
In this scenario, everyone came out as winners, per Nile Three’s data. The campaign was “something that internally, we call a social engineering campaign,” Fougerousse said, noting that the purpose was to prompt one group of people to interact with another group, creating more B2B and B2C opportunities.
“The dealers were seeing a campaign directed at the benefits of the 3P when it came to sales and profitability, while on the consumer side, we were targeting them with a message geared towards the benefits of towing with a 3P and eliminating sway. The intention of this campaign, which is ongoing, is to create conversation between the consumer and the dealer,” Fougerousse said. “We have received numerous reports from dealers who are signing up to be ProPride dealers, that the strategy is working and that they recently started hearing from their customers, over and over again… the question of whether or not they should be a ProPride 3P anti-sway hitch. We have now signed up over 20 new dealers in a matter of a few months, and the campaign is highly profitable. It is also, in many ways, an evergreen type of campaign – since it is constantly targeting new consumers, based not only on their interests, but also on their behavior within the geographies where the dealers are located.”
With the help of Nile Three, ProPride Hitch has tripled its revenue, and knowledge of ProPride’s products is at an all-time high.
