Cummins

Challenge

Cummins became aware of an industry challenge in the heavy-duty trucking industry in that there is a shortage of diesel engine technicians. Furthermore, demand for diesel repair work for truck dealers has volatile spikes and valleys that aren’t predictive and aren’t tied to seasonality. Cummins decided to launch a program that allows diesel engine technicians to sign up as independent contractors who can view and accept repair jobs within their area via a mobile app (basically, Uber for mechanics). The client approached PriceWeber to develop the branding for the program as well as materials, including advertisements and design/content of a website. PriceWeber was also tasked with developing media tactics for disseminating information of the program out to potential technicians. The program launched in March of 2019 as a 3-city pilot (Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Denver), with the goal of going North American-wide in 2020. Truck dealers are able to sign up for the program and submit labor requests through the app, and then registered technicians are able to browse the jobs and accept any that appeal to them.

Objectives

The primary objective was to get at least 80 technicians registered for the program in each of the 3 markets by the end of 2019. The client informed us that while typical advertising metrics such as clicks, impressions, time on site, etc., would be nice to see and could be considered secondary objectives, our success would be purely measured by the number of technicians that we were able to get registered in each of the 3 markets.

Solution

We identified our primary audience as diesel engine technicians. Since the opportunity wasn’t a full-time job with benefits, the ideal candidates were individuals who were fresh out of trade school who could learn more about diesel repair work while generating some income and affiliating themselves with an industry leader like Cummins. Experienced technicians who are either recently retired or nearing retirement were also considered a primary audience subset since they would be receptive to the flexibility of choosing what work they wanted to accept and setting their own schedule. We developed a new website with Cummins’ partner ADP WorkMarket. We targeted these groups through a mixture of IP-targeting, Facebook Newsfeed ads, LinkedIn ads, job board websites, job aggregator sites and Google AdWords.

Results

From mid-March to the end of July, the program generated 495 registrations from technicians. By market, this broke out as 120 from Denver (150% of goal set for all of 2019), 117 from Phoenix (146% of goal set for all of 2019) and 103 from Salt Lake City (129% of goal set for all of 2019), with the remaining 155 being from markets that are scheduled to go online in 2020 (there wasn’t a goal set for the additional markets as registrations from these areas were seen as icing on the cake.) This means that the overall goal of 240 registrations in 10 months was surpassed by more than 200% in only 5 months.

While awareness and education were highly secondary goals in comparison to the level of registrations, the program did generate just over 41,000 visits to cumminsflextech.com, with an average time on site of exactly 2 minutes and 30 seconds.

From a cost-efficiency perspective, this comes out to $121 of media spend per program registration and only $1.46 of media spend per website visit.