Polaris Industries goes full throttle on social media innovation
- Summary:
- What lessons has the social media team at Polaris Industries learnt in 2014 in their efforts to be bold and inventive online?
This week, Polaris Industries celebrates its 60th birthday. As the manufacturer of the first modern snowmobile, back in 1956, the company has chosen ‘innovation’ as the theme for its festivities, which culminated yesterday with CEO Scott Wine ringing the Closing Bell from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
As he prepared for his moment in the spotlight, Wine said:
The ringing of the Closing Bell, he added, was a time to reflect not only on the pioneering achievements of the past, but also on the opportunities of the future.Innovation is the lifeblood of this company and we have an incredible global team of nearly 7,000 employees relentlessly focussed on driving innovation in everything we do.
If it is to make the most of those opportunities, then the $3.8 billion company, which manufactures a wide range of snowmobiles, motorcycles and all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), will need to go full throttle on social media innovation. And as supervisor of social marketing communications at Polaris, Holly Spaeth is very much in the driving seat – so how is she bringing innovation to the company’s online conversations with customers?
Sometimes, she says, it’s just a question of being bold and inventive. Of seeking what works and what doesn’t. Speaking at Oracle OpenWorld in September, Spaeth offered several examples of the kind of experiments that she and her team have run during 2014, the results they’ve seen and the lessons they’ve learned.
Lesson One: Hang out with your audience
In mid-September, Spaeth found herself spending a weekend in a field in Tennessee, listening to country music star Dierks Bentley, with 13,000 owners of Polaris’s RZR off-road vehicles. The company’s Camp RZR events, where RZR owners gather to race, trail-ride and enjoy nightly entertainment, may not be to everybody’s taste – but they are a great source of highly ‘sticky’ social-media content and drive huge spikes in social activity, according to Spaeth:
Not only did we create ‘moments’ with 13,000 loyal fans that we could turn into content online, we also broadcast highlights of the event to a much wider audience, so that we could have them understand how Polaris feels about building a relationship with them and why they should feel really good about owning our products or aspire to owning them.
Lesson Two: Learn to speak their language
Snowmobile enthusiasts have a vocabulary all of their own. To them, “ditch banging” means riding their snowmobiles through ditches or ravines, usually at high speed. So when Spaeth and her team were set the goal of doubling, year-on-year, earned impressions on Facebook for the Polaris Snowmobile brand during the 2014 Winter season, they appropriated the phrase “Let’s bang ditches” for their content.
The slogan was a big hit with target audiences: by January 2014, the team had raced past its goal to 123 percent. Says Spaeth:
What’s so important [in social media] is to operate more as a person, and less as a brand. It’s pretty amazing what you can do when you pay attention to your consumers and speak and act like they do.
Lesson Three: Play relationship games (but in a good way)
Every year, Polaris’s Indian Motorcycle brand (which it acquired in 2011) participates in the famous biker rally held in Sturgis, South Dakota. In 2013, the company had a significant media budget to promote its all-new line-up of Indian Motorcycles models.
In 2014, by contrast, the company had less new product to announce and reduced its media budget accordingly – but Spaeth and her team were still expected to hit the same targets as 2013 for social-media activity.Their solution was to launch a competition on social media channels that incorporated gamification. They named this campaign ‘Unlock a Legend’: if the Indian Motorcycle Facebook page reached 1 million fans by the 2 August deadline, fans would be entered into a giveaway for a new motorcycle. Says Spaeth:
Most of the time with giveaways, people don’t want to share, because they think [more entrants] will hurt their own chances. Here, they needed their friends and family to get involved in order to unlock the giveaway.
We actually hit a point in July where we had a ‘talking about this’ number equivalent to that of Harley-Davidson. We have 730,000 fans, they have over 6 million. They’re one of the top ten most recognised global brands – and, number-to-number, we had as much conversation as they did, because we were being smart online.
Measuring ROI
By the time Sturgis 2014 opened on 4 August, Indian Motorcycles had achieved a 57 percent increase in non-paid impressions from Sturgis 2013 and a 29 percent increase in engagements.
Building the business case for social media is never easy. While most marketers accept that social media is important to their company, only 15 percent say they can demonstrate its impact using quantitative approaches, according to the 2014 CMO Survey. In other words, proof continues to lag spending.
But according to Spaeth, it might be time to take a wider, deeper view of the business case for social media and the return on investment (ROI) it can offer:
If you’re a marketer, you can always just say ROI is about selling more product. It’s always going to come back to retail, retail, retail. Sell, sell, sell. That’s ROI, right? But there’s not going to be a clear, direct path to get that sale with social and there are always going to be bumps along the way.
So for us at Polaris, it’s about looking at the task in hand a little differently. A lot of what we think about, when we think about ROI, is what we can achieve by paying more attention to our consumers. It’s not just sell, sell, sell – it’s about building aspiration. There’s real value in that.
Disclosure: at time of writing, Oracle is a premier partner of diginomica.