Client Challenge
With increasing levels of low-cost competition and customers not seeing the need for premium products, Arco needed to differentiate itself and prove to customers that its expertise in safety and higher quality products was not a ‘nice-to-have’, but a necessity. With low-cost alternatives flooding the market, many customers looked for the cheapest way to buy Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) that still met regulatory standards.
Solution
Challenger helped Arco leverage the value of its premium quality offering, which customers were not fully appreciating. Arco developed messages with data-backed commercial insight that highlighted a powerful and disruptive idea. The safety regulations H&S managers relied on were exposing them to significant risk and these managers had failed to calculate the true cost of inadequate PPE. Arco used this insight to build a Challenger marketing campaign.
This approach shifted their messaging from leading with Arco’s reputation as experts in safety, to instead focus on their customers’ unrecognized risks and urgent need to be working with experts — leading back to Arco’s differentiator and a deeper partnership.
Rather than educating customers on how Arco's products were more thoroughly tested and reliable, the new messaging led with why organizations needed to question the standard of their safety equipment — and the costs of being wrong. They crafted an insight that showed how 40% of certain safety products that claimed to meet industry standards were actually unsafe for employees to use, and how use of them could lead to severe personal injuries and potentially cost the company millions.
Armed with a powerful message, Arco realized they also needed to reach customers earlier in their learning journey, when they first researched online. Using the Challenger Content Strategy framework, Arco disrupted the existing learning journey, which centered around researching product specifications, by educating customers about the unknown risks of safety regulations and their related consequences.
Results:
Through a combination of insightful and strategically placed banner ads, pay-per-click, and email marketing, Arco directed prospects to a specially designed microsite containing an emotionally powerful documentary, an accompanying report and a diagnostic tool enabling prospects to calculate their personal level of risk.
The insightful messaging and Challenger choreographed online learning journey improved Arco’s user engagement and acquisition, and now leads to sales conversations no longer focused on the lowest price. Arco has seen extremely promising results from their Challenger marketing campaign, which they believe are strong leading indicators of future sales success:
- Achieved 44% higher site visit conversions than the B2B benchmark
- Higher frequency and quality of leads, sustaining millions in revenue
- Invited by Government to help shape the future of H&S in the UK
- Arco’s Challenger marketing campaign also won the International B2B Marketing Award for Thought Leadership
Quotes
“The Challenger messaging and marketing approach has allowed us to engage prospects in a different way, disrupting their current learning journey to better leverage our differentiators, and ultimately generate stronger leads we would not otherwise have attracted.”
Lee Morton Head of Brand & Proposition Development
Quotes
“The Challenger messaging and marketing approach has allowed us to engage prospects in a different way, disrupting their current learning journey to better leverage our differentiators, and ultimately generate stronger leads we would not otherwise have attracted.”
Lee Morton Head of Brand & Proposition Development
Before Challenger
- “Arco has an extensive range of quality PPE products, a highly ethical supply chain and the UK’s only accredited testing laboratory to ensure our products are the safest around. We are the Experts in Safety.”
After Challenger
- “Independent lab testing found that 40% of non-metallic footwear and 30% of rigger gloves failed re-testing despite carrying the official CE mark. Simply trusting these markings and choosing these products increases your company’s liability and puts employees at serious risk.”
