As one of the leading farming equipment manufacturers in the world, Case IH North America connects with a broad group of customers, all technically savvy but not all social media-inclined. Its audience also includes younger, next-generation agriculture pros that are more socially savvy.
As their agency partner, Designory helped Case IH North America use Instagram to both showcase its social media community in offline settings for wider reach within its established customer base – and allow younger fans and future customers the opportunity to engage with the brand on a platform they are familiar and comfortable with.
Reaching farmers offline with Instagram slideshow.
Over a year ago, Designory used the Instagram API provided by Shoutlet to create an Instagram slideshow app on Facebook for Case IH. Case IH had started an Instagram campaign called #IamCaseIH for customers to tag photos of their Case IH equipment in action.
Last summer, Case IH took the slideshow on the road as one part of a social media ‘wall’ displayed at their major trade shows — the fall and winter farms shows. It was the first time Case IH included a social media component in their farm show exhibit. For the shows we took the API a step further and designed and developed a larger slideshow format that could be displayed in real-time monitors onsite. All show visitors could view the live posts and followers could find their own posts as they appeared within the feed. The slideshow also included custom exclusion filters that allowed admins either onsite or remote to exclude images from the display.
Reaching agriculture students through Instagram slideshow and contest.
This fall, our team updated the slideshow again for use at the National FFA Convention — a four-day convention for the high school and college students who comprise the FFA, a student-led leadership development organization for students in agricultural education. The new version of the Case IH slideshow was created for a new Instagram hashtag contest that was only going to run during the National FFA Convention in Louisville, Kentucky, the last week in October.
Case IH handed out Steiger tractor key chains (their largest tractors) to convention attendees with a request to post photos of the keychain at the convention, using the hashtag #TractorTag14. The slideshow of the posts was displayed live on monitors at the show. After the show was over, Case IH chose the top 10 posts and promoted them for 3 days of voting using the Shoutlet contest module to determine the three final winners.
The contest has ended and winners are being notified. The submission period ran for four days, and the subsequent voting period was open for three days. 60,000 adults and students attend FFA, and there were hundreds of Instagram posts and new followers added over the seven days of submissions and voting. Social posts were also published on Facebook and Twitter, driving additional clicks to the contest voting page with a large volume of retweets and favorites. Engagement rates on Facebook ranged from 9% to 11.5%.
For Case IH, Instagram a key component to engaging multiple audiences.
Much of the online community is younger than the typical customer profile, so the slideshows and contests are a great way to elevate their voices, and let them show their brand loyalty, passion, and knowledge. Case IH has a longtime commitment to supporting the education of future farmers and ‘agvocates,’ and they were looking for something that would reach this audience and demonstrate this commitment to their established customers as well. The slideshows have done just that by putting their content out where even fans without a social media account can appreciate the beauty of a red tractor.
View source version on shoutlet.com:
www.shoutlet.com/blog/2014/11/case-ihs-instagram-strategy/
Samantha Arnold
Senior Project Manager at Designory