Kyle Clements (00:00):
Folks for episode number 67 of The Rental Roundtable we had on Dave Timone at Luby Equipment, their six location group. We talked about all things marketing, particularly video marketing and the importance of that in the equipment space. And that’s how it’s really an untapped opportunity for equipment rental companies. We talked about social media and a deep dive, and LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and the different things you need to do with one piece of content, how you can put into the different channels and how they all differ in different areas. And lastly, we talked about AI and how he’s using AI in marketing to save a lot of time for pushing out more content. So if you’ve thought about marketing and equipment rental, if you want to learn more about video marketing in particular, you really enjoy this episode. Everyone. Welcome to The Rental Roundtable, episode number 67.
Kyle Clements (00:42):
We have on Dave Timone from Luby Equipment. Dave, welcome to the show. Hi, Kyle, how are you doing? Good to have you on. So you’re the marketing director at Luby Equipment. We’re going to talk about all things marketing today. On Don Hunley, who I know you’re friends with before, had an episode on that. But really talk about the video marketing side in today’s episode, which I’m excited to talk about. So Dave, just to kind of get us started, love to hear about your background, what you’re doing now, and even going back 10, 15 years. How did you get into the equipment space to begin with?
Dave Timpone (01:13):
Okay, great. Yeah, so I guess I started out at a Bobcat dealer, one of the largest Bobcat dealers in the country gateway dealer network. And at the time they were Bobcat of St. Louis. A friend of mine was working there and just said, Hey, we were looking to hire a marketing person. They didn’t have that position at all. So I was kind of coming in blind and I went to school for marketing. So really just excited to get into that space. And really, it was funny, when I first started there, the owner was like, yeah, we don’t do a whole lot of marketing. And then once I started digging in, really they were just kind of pressing buttons. So they had, Bobcat has a list of direct mailers you can sign up for. So I mean, they were spending a lot of money on marketing. They just really didn’t know that they were spending a lot of money. I mean, I think also one of the first things I did was like, why are we spending money on Yellow Pages? So we got rid of that right away. But yeah, it was, and then just kind of touching on, I guess getting into the video space from there. I mean, I always knew that video was something that we needed to do.
Dave Timpone (02:33):
And I actually looked back recently on one of the first videos that I did, and I remember going to the job site and it was just a customer running a breaker, and they were just taking out a driveway. And I got there, and this was probably my first year of being at Bobcat. And he said, all right, I’ll give you time to set up. And I said, okay. And I grabbed my iPhone out of my pocket and I just started shooting video with a phone. I mean, that’s all I had, and that’s all I knew. I knew that this was something we needed to get into. It just never really, it didn’t click until finally I started doing it years down the road. But I would get audio testimonials a lot of times. And then finally I’m like, well, I need to put the guy in front of the camera.
Dave Timpone (03:21):
It makes more sense having somebody on camera talking about the machines. And then I guess fast forward down the road and really how I got into the video side of it, we hired a company to come in and do video testimonials, video marketing, and I was in charge of the project management. So I would go around and I’d get the customers, I’d line up the customers and then coordinate the job. And so from there, I would go out and also I would be on the job, I’d kind of see what these guys were doing. I would kind of study the questions that they were asking, and they did really good work. And then when it came time for us to basically re-up the next year with this company, I went to our owners at the time and I just said, Hey, if you guys want to go this direction, I’d be willing to take this on. Because they’re presenting, they’re going to do 12 testimonials, one a month for us.
Dave Timpone (04:25):
If you want, I’ll do 40, I’ll, I’ll blow it up in house. I can be on these job sites. If you need me to go to Nashville tomorrow and go shoot a video, I can go do it. I’m also going into the mindset of I’m not just going out there to get one piece of content. I can get 5, 6, 7 pieces of content while I’m on a job site. So that’s kind of been every time I go into these testimonials or these videos, that’s what I’m looking to do. I’m looking to maximize content. So they said, yeah, let’s do it. Bought me a drone and learned how to fly a drone, and it kind of took off from there. And then coming on board at Luby, I brought those same skills here. And the biggest thing for me when I first started there, it’s just you got to get the buy-in from the sales reps too, because they’re the ones that have control over what customers would be good to go out and see. And so from an early on, and some salesmen are much better at it than others, I get a call from one salesman all the time, Hey, I got this customer, he’s out here doing this. It would be a great video, let’s go shoot it.
Dave Timpone (05:45):
And then I think really tying it into rental, that’s kind of my goal too, is to promote rental through video, whether it’s customer job, site, videos, anything like that. So I mean, that’s kind of the gist of it. I mean, video marketing is part of my job that goes along with everything else, but it is one of the things I’ve always kind of gravitate to when it comes to promotion, when looking at how can we promote this, my mindset, it does go to video marketing.
Kyle Clements (06:22):
So just to make sure I understand, when you started at Bobcat of St. Louis, they were advertising in Yellow Pages. What year was this? So it would’ve been like 2011, 2012.
Dave Timpone (06:34):
So yeah, I mean, can you believe that?
Kyle Clements (06:36):
That? Not 1980 1011.
Dave Timpone (06:39):
And it was expensive too. And so traditional marketing, I mean, for me, it’s a thing of the past. I mean, we still dabble in some radio here and there, but always, if we’re going to do anything like that, I always say, first of all, it needs to be in a rural area where we’re talking one or two radio stations are available. And then I always want the salesman to put his cell phone and everything on there. That way we can at least track it in some way. I mean, the ROI is so hard to track on traditional marketing, so I’m a big proponent of digital marketing in that space.
Kyle Clements (07:19):
So you took them from Yellow Pages to drones in a couple years, right? I mean the drone stuff, everyone’s becoming more used to that, but it sounds like you probably pretty early on that on the drone movement too. How did you start to see that?
Dave Timpone (07:32):
In a sense? I mean, like I said, it did take a while because we hired that company. I would say it was probably close to 2018, and then I got into it more on 2019, 2020, and really kind of took it from there. So it was a little bit later in that timeframe, but I was going out and shooting. They did finally buy me a camera, not just had my iPhone, but I was shooting just regular shots with my camera. And then finally I was just picked up. I think the first drone I got was one of our salesmen. It was just his drone, and I just started flying it. And I mean, they’re so easy to fly. Everybody’s always like, oh, I wish I could learn how to do that. I’m like, it really doesn’t take very long. It’s not very hard. I mean, there is something to it, right? When it comes to shots and what you’re going to set up and everything, but they’re pretty easy to fly.
Kyle Clements (08:27):
I think it’s funny when they asked you to set up on the job site and you’re like, alright, set up. You pulled your phone out of your pocket and ready, ready. But sometimes, yeah, it’s like, okay, ready? It’s been five seconds. But sometimes those more organic, grainy iPhone videos become feel more authentic and potentially gain some traction. So what’s made you gravitate more towards the video side? There’s a thousand things in marketing, right? You’ve already mentioned some of the old school Yellow Pages, radio ads, et cetera, but what about video marketing in rental has resonated with you and why does that work in this space?
Dave Timpone (09:04):
I think probably from the start, I mean, I always thought the customers, number one, I want to showcase our customers. I want to give them value as well. I mean, that’s kind of my goal going into it. And number two, relationship with the customer. You’re continuing that relationship building on that relationship, and then it’s really just you’re seeing the results too. I mean, you’re seeing the consumption. People consume video more and more and more, and it’s getting even more, right? Every year it’s the number one. I mean, I think it’s 80% of people online are consuming video content on a weekly basis. So you’re seeing more and more and more of it from the rental space. Again, for me to go out and I find out there’s a job site of, we have a dozer and an excavator running on a rental site, so I can go out and I can go shoot, get that overview of the site.
Dave Timpone (10:10):
That’s one piece of content. I could also get an interview with that customer talking about why do you rent? What’s the benefits of you renting? Why do you rent from Luby equipment particularly, what do you see the benefits of that? So you’re getting all those soundbites, so you could take that 32nd clip and you could run an ad off that, and then obviously organically you just blast it out. I mean, I’m putting it on LinkedIn, my personal LinkedIn, our business, LinkedIn, YouTube, YouTube shorts, TikTok, I mean literally everywhere I can put it, right? Instagram. So yeah, I mean it’s also attention and it’s free. So I mean obviously they’re paying me to do it, but to put out this content, it’s free organic content that you could put out. So I’m seeing success as far as organics. LinkedIn is probably our best avenue. We’re reaching the right people on there just because, I mean, I built a network on there too of industry people on there for myself. And then so in between my account and Luby’s account, we’re reaching a pretty good amount of people on there.
Kyle Clements (11:29):
So video content on LinkedIn is currently your best channel. I mean, how often are you posting? How often should people be posting if they’re getting into video and they’re starting to post on LinkedIn? I mean, what have you guys found effective mean? Do you want the Gary B answer? I want the doubt with the Dave T answer.
Dave Timpone (11:52):
Well, I mean I try to post daily. I think it’s, is it hard? Probably not. I mean, I should be putting out content daily and then Luby equipment is the same, should be daily content. I mean, I think you should be, again, probably daily would make sense. If you did five times a week, I think you’re probably in definitely the upper percentage. If you’re doing five times a week and you got to come up with the stuff, you got to have the content. You can’t just so just post a post, right? You want to put out good quality stuff. So yeah, I probably think about posting and what I’m going to post. I mean, it’s throughout the day and it might be an idea that just pops in my head, okay, I can reuse this. I repurpose stuff a lot too. I mean, you can have a video that you did if you want to promote in Deco Breakers.
Dave Timpone (12:55):
I could go back and be like, oh, I shot this video two years ago and I could take this and I could repurpose it. And maybe whether it’s different music or different shots. So that is the advantage I think you have with compiling your own video content. You have all this library stuff that you could basically pick and choose like, okay, I’m going to put that back out. I mean, I don’t think people are going to, I’ve never had a comment to say, oh, I saw this one already. I mean, they don’t really watch it that closely that they’ll probably remember that that’s the video that they saw six months ago or whatever, right.
Kyle Clements (13:31):
Yeah, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that. Do you find that the personal LinkedIn outperforms the company LinkedIn and gets more engagement that way? It does.
Dave Timpone (13:44):
I think part of that is just because of my network. I’ve built a network, so obviously when I was at Bobcat, I built the Bobcat network. I went on Bobcat corporate, and I added everybody I could find.
Dave Timpone (14:01):
So when I was posting that content, I got engagement. So the first thing I did when I came to Luby is I already kind of had the connection at Takeuchi because we actually sold Takeuchi. They sold Takeuchi at Bobcat. So I had some connections from there that I brought over, and then I obviously went in, I added a lot of case construction is the other equipment that we sell at Libby. I went on and I started adding everybody from Case. And so I do get a lot of engagement on my personal page, but the other thing I do is I always tag if I am running a video on case, I’ll tag case. They’re actually very good at engaging with my personal page and Libby’s page. Usually they’ll go on and like it. Obviously if you’re a regular poster on LinkedIn, the algorithm does, it goes up, it gravitates when you get your stuff, when it likes and comments and everything when engagement, it puts some fuel on the LinkedIn post.
Kyle Clements (15:07):
Yeah, that’s what I’ve heard is, and that’s my experience too. But the individuals who post get more traction than companies in it, the algorithms have weighted more towards individuals. So I’ve seen that. And obviously a lot of people don’t do this very well. I think one person does it well. Everyone knows Elliot Vigil, right? He’s out there every day with his video content, and that’s how you get your name out there. This is my experience, but I want to get your perspective. Do you feel like rental companies aren’t really doing a good job on video marketing? It sort of feels like an untapped channel for a lot of these groups.
Dave Timpone (15:37):
Yeah, I think so too. Yeah, I would just say we sell to a lot of rental companies. I think some of ’em do a good job on the social media side. But yeah, I would say there’s definitely some opportunities for video, whether because just touching on the company that I’m helping out a little bit, Denali, some of the stuff that, well, they offer delivery and a lot of these smaller companies are doing delivery and I mean they even offer free delivery within a certain mile radius. So that would be something to where if I’m them, I’m taking shots of loading equipment and maybe even just delivering that equipment to a customer, that would be an easy delivery day. We do a lot of that actually at Luby. If we’re loading, if I see somebody loading a machine up in the yard, I’ll maybe run out there and take some shots of them tying the machine down and just leaving the yard.
Dave Timpone (16:39):
I mean, it’s literally just delivery day, right? Another rental machine going out to so-and-so customer. That would be something that I would look at. That would be an easy thing to do. Just some simple walkarounds of the advantages of an excavator over this size. Why would I want this size fitter or this size fitter if you have two of those machines in the yard? One thing I did talk to the owner at Denali, so I think he has a case machine and he has a Takuchi machine. So you could kind of tell that what’s the difference between these two machines and why would maybe talk about the benefits of both, but one has a rollup door, one has a swing out door. I mean, that’s an easy thing to talk about, and maybe that’s something that could be a little bit of value to a customer. And that’s the other word I always go back to is you want it to add value. So if you could add value to a video or a customer, how do you go about doing that? So yeah, I think that’s an untapped market probably with these rental guys,
Kyle Clements (17:58):
It seems like a lot of it, it’s not doing anything crazy, just documenting the normal work. You’re delivering a piece of equipment, you’re probably explaining to a customer at some point differences between the two different models in your yard. We just record that in a sense. You’re not, we used to work with previous companies with software for car dealerships. I think about the balloons and the car people, and it’s like,
Kyle Clements (18:22):
That’s marketing. It gives you your attention, but I don’t know, do I really want to see that when I’m trying to make a big financial decision on what car to buy? Maybe. But I think more interesting is how do you add value? Because I’m a contractor, I’m a homeowner renter, I’m going about trying to solve problems on my job site. How can you help educate me? Even videos on hey, basic stuff, if it breaks down, what do you do? And it’s not crazy stuff. I think a lot of it’s just recording stuff you’re normally doing. So I guess my question is for a lot of the rental companies, some people you work with do this pretty well, but a lot of people probably aren’t fully tapping into the video side of things. How do you get started if you’re an independent one or two location group and you’re listening to this and saying, Hey, I want to do some more video marketing. Do I need to go buy a drone? Can I use my iPhone? What are some basic things I can do to get started on this? And
Dave Timpone (19:14):
I think you really could use your iPhone. I mean, I would start with an iPhone. You have a camera in your pocket. It’s probably a little better camera than I had in 2012 when I pulled it out of my pocket. Right now you’ve got a 4K camera and video in your pocket. So yeah, I would probably start with just that delivery, loading up a machine delivery, maybe highlighting some employees. That would be a good thing. Talking about your employees and maybe getting their story a little bit. If you want to go to a job site and get a few shots of the machine running. I mean, you could literally do, you could do a testimonial. I mean, on an iPhone if you wanted to get a quick, I’ve had sales guys that have done that and sent it to me. Usually it’s not the best quality, but it works.
Kyle Clements (20:07):
It feels more trustworthy almost. I know the high production studio, you’re almost a little skeptical. The paid advertise, paid actor, the iPhone grainy stuff is someone’s more real,
Dave Timpone (20:19):
Right? Yeah. I think some of it, when I go to these sites too, they’re like, okay, is there anything you want me to do? I’m like, no, I want you to work. I want to see the machine working in its element.
Dave Timpone (20:30):
When I’m asking them questions, I’m not really trying to steer them in any direction. I’m just basically asking him, tell me about your company. What do you guys do? And then it’s kind of getting into what do you like about the machine? Tell me a little bit of the benefits that you see of the machine. And it’s usually five or six questions. But yeah, I think you can do it to a point. And then from there, if you really are seeing results and want to get into it a little bit more, that’s where maybe you look at, maybe I should bring somebody in to do a few different things as far as video content. But yeah, I think that’s always the other side of it too. You can tell these companies what they should do and they’re not going to do it because a lot of it’s they don’t have time to do it or they don’t think about it as my mind thinks about it all the time, right? I’m like, oh, this would be a great shot here. You should do that. So I think that’s whether a marketing person in my case is going to offer that, right? I’m going to say, okay, here’s what you need to do with this, this, and this. And then a lot of times they’re just like, well, how much is that going to cost? I’ll just pay you to do it instead of having me do it, right?
Kyle Clements (21:53):
Yeah, it’s definitely not a natural thing. Our marketing, every time we’re at a visit customer or wherever he is, always take pictures and videos. I’m always like, you have people who just really like to do the work, and anything that takes away from the work is painful. I love maybe you love renting equipment or talking to customers and now you got to spend two minutes recording a video. It’s two minutes, but that’s not how people think, right? And people can accept that support. I think that’s why it’s also good to partner with groups who can do this for you. You mentioned on some of the different channels. So let’s say, okay, I got my videos. I’m on the job site, got some testimonials. Then where do I post it? You mentioned LinkedIn. What other channels I’ve been working, do you do any paid ads, running traffic towards these videos? What channels have been the most effective?
Dave Timpone (22:44):
Yeah, so I think everybody’s kind of gravitating towards the short form video and even the platforms are too, and even in YouTube’s case, they have YouTube shorts now.
Dave Timpone (22:56):
So you’re seeing a lot of the short form videos I think are performing a little well as far as engagement. So usually what I do is my mindset is I’m going to get a one to two minute testimonial. That’s usually the max is probably, if you’ve seen any of my testimonials, they’re usually about at the maximum minute and a half. Usually they’re closer to that minute. I usually like to take little bits and pieces of that too. So if I find a little spot where that customer says, oh, this is great. They said, I love working with lube equipment and because our sales rep X has done an awesome job, I’ll take that little soundbite and I’ll store organically post that too. I’ll put that out on LinkedIn, YouTube short Instagram reel, Facebook reel, TikTok, and then I’ll run an ad on that. Usually, I’ll run ads. If I see something that is performing organically well then I’ll say, all right, I’m going to put a little money towards that. And a lot of the ads that I run are going to be on Facebook.
Dave Timpone (24:08):
So Facebook has really lost a lot of organic reach, but it’s still a free post. If you put out a decent, pretty good content. I mean, it’s still going to get a pretty good reach if people are engaging in it. But I’ve noticed on Facebook, usually I’m going to have to put a little money behind that ad in, and it’s not a whole lot of expense to do, but that way you can target to, you can pick your areas. You can pick somebody that likes skid steer loaders or track loaders in a sense. You can even put some rental keywords in there too. But yeah, the short answer is everywhere, anywhere that allows you to put content out. If you got a good piece of content, you want to put it on all these platforms,
Kyle Clements (25:02):
And once you get the content, then you can spread it out. LinkedIn sounds like for individual posting, they’re getting organic traffic. They have Facebook. I’ve experienced that too. You do need to spend money on there. I guess why Zuckerberg has 40 houses, but you don’t have to spend a lot of money, but enough to kind of get the traction there. Are you seeing anything on TikTok? Have you gotten any traffic from TikTok yet?
Dave Timpone (25:24):
Yeah, I mean you can have zero followers on TikTok and get thousands of views. So it’s kind of crazy. I mean, I started my personal TikTok page just to kind of post some videos here and there, and I just posted one of two dozers running, and I literally probably have three or four followers. I just started my personal page and it got up to about a thousand views already. So I mean, you don’t need the actual followers on TikTok just because as long as the algorithm sees people are engaging in it, it’s going to push it out mean. So I’ve noticed that on some things that we’ve done. I mean, some have done really well. I mean TikTok too. A lot of people are posting goofy stuff that usually does very well. I kind of still stick to the professionalism. I’m just taking a clip of some of our better performing ones are, it’s either equipment running a 32nd shot of equipment running or it’s maybe it’s a clip of that person talking over some B roll of equipment and that it allows you to actually add captions in tiktoks very easy.
Dave Timpone (26:36):
The editing tools in TikTok are very user-friendly. So that’s something too where I could upload, I could go into Adobe. I use Adobe products usually for editing Adobe Premiere. So I could basically take that video in Adobe Premiere and I can upload it to TikTok and then I could kind of play with it in TikTok and edit and add some speed ramps and some different things. And then obviously the music and tiktoks, you can grab anything. So to be able to grab that professional or any type of music you want, and then you could actually pull that back out. So then I’ve been doing that, so I’ve been downloading it from TikTok and actually posting it onto the different platforms.
Kyle Clements (27:18):
Interesting. It’s interesting, you take one video and then you present it in different packages based on the channel. So Facebook, you’re running ads, LinkedIn, you have to have a lot of connections, but that’s free and you get a lot of tracks from an individual page. TikTok, you don’t have to have any followers at all. Different LinkedIn, but it could go viral if you, and that’s more engaging sort of funny thing. Are there any other channels that you’ve seen success with? I mean YouTube as well. Have you seen traffic there?
Dave Timpone (27:46):
Yeah, so YouTube long form still works on YouTube. So in terms of rental, I mean if you wanted to get into that, you could actually get into, maybe you could have a sales rep talk about the benefits of rental or these are the benefits of, we could even get into rent-to-own if you want to talk about sales reps from that standpoint. But you could play with the long form on YouTube. So yeah, I’ve been seeing some pretty good success on really with YouTube is how tos, right? And what can you do from there. On the rental side mean even we could even bring in service as a dealer. We could say, this is what we do when this rental machine comes back in, this is how we inspect it or go through the machine. So there’s some difference, I was kind of thinking about that too.
Dave Timpone (28:53):
A rental company and a dealer. I believe that it’s almost two different customer bases in a sense. The dealer in my mind, we’re working with a lot of current customers. These are people that have bought equipment from us that maybe need an excavator. They have a skid loader like, oh, I need to run an excavator. So they’re going to call us. They have the relationship with us. Maybe it’s attachments like, oh, I need an attachment for this job. I’m going to call my sales rep, or I’m going to call Luby equipment. I have the relationship with a rental company, and I could be wrong just because I don’t have the data, but I believe it’s more that you’re probably homeowners and even people that just are not contractors that are just, or they might not have any equipment and they need to rent something. So I guess I probably need to do a little bit more digging around that before I state facts that I don’t exactly know. But I guess I have more of a grasp on R at Luby that it’s current customers, it’s people that we’ve done business with and then from the rental side and at Luby, some of our sales reps, we do promote a lot of our rental guys that they buy from us. If we don’t have it, we’re going to push ’em to them, say, Hey, go check out Denali or go check out Expert Rentals. They have this machine in stock. So I think it’s a partnership there too. Yeah.
Kyle Clements (30:36):
Earlier you mentioned around performance and your understanding. You mentioned like, oh, this is performing well, this isn’t, what are some of the metrics you look at to understand performance? Because at the end of the day, you want it to be an ROI. You want to be able to track that through harder with the yellow pages than where we are today. But when you look at the top key metrics rental companies should be looking at when they’re running ads or putting organic videos out there, what do they look at?
Dave Timpone (31:04):
I mean, engagement is probably one of the top ones for me. Just because yeah, you can pay money and get people to look at stuff all day, but you do want to see some engagement. You want to see some comments and some likes and some shares. Obviously you want to, if you’re running an ad, where are you running it to? Are you running it to a landing page? Are you running it just to your generic website? I probably, I build out landing pages usually for Libby and I run it to a particular page on our site. So are we getting form fills? Are we getting phone calls off that site? So you can track all that with a pixel. Are you actually getting the return Facebook ads? I still go back to, I do see, I run ads, yes, I want to get convergence. Of course, that’s the end goal, but are you branding, right?
Dave Timpone (32:03):
That’s the other thing. You still want to be branding your product and being in front of that customer because it’s hard to track. It’s always hard to track that final phone call that customer picks up the phone and then they call, if you’re a smaller rental company, hopefully you’re asking, Hey, how’d you hear about this? And even Luby, I mean, I’ve always said we need to be asking that question, right? Because hard for me to measure exactly what I’m doing without that aspect of it. The phone calls, I mean obviously Google and Google My Business or whatever it’s called now, those listings can at least you can track organic clicks to call on there. You can track on Google ads that’ll give you how many people are calling off your ad and everything like that. But yeah, that would be the main thing. Conversions and engagement are the two main things for me. I don’t get into a whole lot of the views and stuff like that. I mean, looking at TikTok, I’m only doing TikTok because it’s free and because I’m getting branding out of it. I mean, I don’t feel it would be very hard to measure any kind of conversions off that. I mean, it’s branding and that’s the main thing.
Kyle Clements (33:22):
So I think it’s a lot of nuance here. You’re in some sense, here’s the one video of the one testimonial at the job site, but then you slice it to different channels and TikTok really it’s very top of funnel. We’re not looking for conversions. That same video is just top of funnel. Now that other video on a Facebook ad, you may be trying to drive more traffic and have a higher bar. It’s interesting because a lot of people kind of put video marketing or marketing, digital marketing to one box, and it is, but there’s a lot of nuance into what your objective is. And I do think if you’re trying to convert leads, I mean, would you agree that you really need to have a landing page ass designed for conversions? You don’t want to just be sending people to your main website. You need to be driving conversions, right? Yeah. Can you talk about why landing pages are important?
Dave Timpone (34:05):
Yeah, I agree. And I actually click on ads just to see sometimes even our competitors, I’m like, where are they sitting? And a lot of times if I click on it, I’m like, alright, good. It’s going to just some page with a bunch of information that you don’t need. So yeah, what I found, at least on Facebook, I’ve dabbled in running ads to where you fill out a form on Facebook, keep ’em on Facebook. I think that would work with some of these rental companies. I do think there is something there to actually keep, people don’t want to leave the platform that they’re on usually.
Dave Timpone (34:46):
And you see that when you measure how many people are going to your site from Facebook, usually they’re going to your site for five seconds. It’s not very long. So yes, I think there’s something there that you could for me, on the sales side, I don’t want to do that. I want send them off to a landing page. So to your question, yes, you want to basically build out a page, whatever you’re running an add-on. If it’s a rental equipment on let’s just say a larger excavator or larger equipment, build out a page that’s geared towards that equipment. Maybe have those three pieces that you have in stock on that page with clear call to actions. You want to have, rent me, rent it, get a quote. You want to have four or five call to actions. You want to have a form on there. You want to have your phone number on there so that way you’re at least sending them to a page that is a lot higher conversion rate that you’re going to see there instead of just sending them to your main homepage on your website. So I would imagine most companies are not doing that. They’re just sending them to a page on their site or to their homepage on their website. So I think if they put a little thought into that, I think they’re going to see some conversions go up from there.
Kyle Clements (36:12):
But we’ve seen another space that we’ve been in, but everything’s the same. You change the bottom of funnel landing page and let’s say you were getting five leads per day, it’ll double 10, and you’re like, nothing changed, but the page is more streamlined. And it’s crazy. People are like, how did my business double? It’s like, well, the point of decision where they’re deciding to give information, you make that as clear as possible. And if you really get into this, you can do a lot of AB testing to really streamline this. But there’s also off-the-shelf landing pages, templates you could buy. There’s partners out there and you could design yourself, you can use, there’s a lot of different ways to do it, but biggest thing is try anything besides whatever your generic, don’t just send ’em to your homepage unless you’re just trying, again, top of funnel awareness. You don’t care about a conversion. If you’re tracking for conversions, you need to have a design landing page, right?
Dave Timpone (37:00):
Yeah, a hundred percent.
Kyle Clements (37:01):
The other topic I want to talk about briefly is be a last topic is AI and how that has changed marketing, maybe broadly marketing for you for rental companies, maybe video marketing as well, but how are you using AI today and to streamline the marketing efforts you’re working on?
Dave Timpone (37:18):
Yeah, so ai, I mean, I would say the number one, the biggest thing is time, right? It’s saving me a lot of time utilizing ai, and I guess just one way I use it, that ties in with rental and video marketing. So let’s just say I go out and get that customer testimonial. I go to the job site, I get the one to two minute testimonial. I probably have 10 minutes audio or whatever. So I’m cutting all that down. So I could either take that 10 minutes of audio, I can pull all the full audio out, and I can plug that all into, the main one I use is Chat gt. I could plug that whole transcript into chat gt and I could say, all right, create a blog post based off the transcript of this audio. So it gives me great organic content because I’m putting in organic content into Chat gt, and I’m basically saying, strip this down and create a blog post based off this.
Dave Timpone (38:20):
The one thing I will say just to be careful about is you do need to go through there and I mean, it’ll spit out a great blog and give headers, give everything, right? And you want a call to action, put a call to action on there, put a call to action on there. So I think, but you need to go through it because it does, every once in a while it’ll kind of get a little funky with the wording of it. But yeah, I use it quite a bit. I mean, I use it for some of my, when it comes to posting, how much I post some of the copy. I won’t use it verbatim, but I’ll maybe type something out and say, okay, I like that. But it’s almost like I was thinking about it the other day. It’s almost like another person to say, Hey, can you look at this and tell me if this looks okay?
Dave Timpone (39:09):
Is there anything you would change? So I think that’s the way I use it is I’ll plug it back into chatGPT and say, maybe create some multiple versions of this and it’ll spit out five or six different versions of my copy. And I’ll say, okay, I like this piece. I like that piece. Maybe I’ll take this, maybe I’ll take that and maybe I won’t take anything. Maybe I’ll be like, you know what? I’m just going to stick with what I have. So I think it’s just another avenue that you can actually bounce some ideas off of and you can really get into. I mean, even when it comes to, I dabble in some website stuff, WordPress, if you want it to build a website for you, it’ll build a website for you. I mean, if you say, I want this all in HT ML, I have these services with my site, and it’ll spit it out. So I mean, I’m probably scratching the surface on what it can do. I think most people are, but yeah, it’s another tool. And I think most people are using it probably in marketing space right now. I would think that most people are probably using it. I mean, I’m mainly using chat gt. I know there’s a bunch out there that I’m not even looking at too. Is there anything that Kyle, that you’ve used that you see that’s helping you?
Kyle Clements (40:30):
Yeah, I mean, it’s crazy. Our marketing guy, we have nine different tools. He’s the guy who does it more than me, our whole company. We use ChatGPT as another person. I think it’s important though, for us, I don’t use it. I won’t be like, Hey, can you write me a blog post? And then they do the critical thinking. It’s more like I’ve written it, I’ve spent the time, right? As a normal thing, can you improve it and tweak it, right? So I think that’s where you get dangerous. You can really tell, I got an email from someone last week. It was, I’m not going to out them, but it was very clearly a chatGPT written.
Kyle Clements (41:05):
Very long, multiple M dashes. I’m like, I’ve gotten emails from you that are usually two words, and I actually appreciate the two-word emails. I know that is you and are we just sending chat ct, sending emails back and forth? I hope we don’t get to that point in the society, but I wonder if we’re not that far off already.
Dave Timpone (41:24):
The other giveaway, I always see the dashes, right? The dashes. Jack GD loves the dashes, and yeah, I easily try to go through there. And I guess going back to the blog thing, obviously if I’m putting in organic content, I’m hoping it’s putting out that organic, because you do obviously want that organic, because if you think about, I do think about even on the rental side, you’re going to say, all right, write a blog on the benefits of renting a skidsteer over a track loader, a tire machine or a track loader. Compare the two and how many times has that been put in chatGPT, right? So you could be putting in, and then if you copy and paste that, are you just putting out on content that’s already on Google because somebody else has done the same thing? I mean, I guess you could say make this organic and plug in lube equipment or however you want to do it. But I think if you’re going to write yes, blog content and stuff like that, you need to make sure that you’re going through there and cleaning it up. And so don’t rely on just ai.
Kyle Clements (42:35):
The other thing I was going to ask about is we are starting to see, obviously everyone goes to Google, right? Searches for us. They’ll search for equipment rental software. We have SEO. We’re trying to rank what’s happening now where people are searching on chat ct. And the question is, how do you rank in chatGPT? We have now gotten leads that we can trace back the chat ct, and that’s a whole new frontier. It’s almost like when the search engines came out, whatever, 20, 30 years ago that people started to realize internet marketing was important. People are searching for things on chat pt, and that’s like a new lead source. And I don’t know how you rank for that or what you have to do to get involved in that. I dunno if you’ve gotten into that yet, but we’re starting to see that’s a real channel now.
Dave Timpone (43:16):
Yeah, I agree with that. And a fall victim that I do some searching and chatt PT instead of Google now. So one thing I saw, and it was about a month ago, and it was a very exact thing that I put in Google. So we had a used machine that we were trying to sell, and I don’t remember what it was in 2012. It wasn’t like a case branded, it was like an off-brand thing. So I was trying to find specs on it. So I plugged that exact machine into chatt, or no, I’m sorry, I plugged it into Google and Google actually spit out our listing because we were probably the only one. And it was an AI driven listing, and we were probably the only one that had that machine online. So it said, check out this machine from Libby Equipment Services. And I was like, is it doing that just because I’m searching it? And then so I had some other people do it, and it did the same thing. And I was like, that’s pretty cool. So to have machines listed online and then you’re being recommended as the dealer for that machine. So I don’t know, it is kind of crazy where it’s going to be going. I do see that the more and more, I mean obviously Google’s billions and billions of searches. ChatGPT is probably in the millions, but who knows where it’s going to be in three or four years.
Kyle Clements (44:47):
So yeah, it’s getting up there. I think they have 700 million users now on chatGPT. And we’re seeing leads from it that we don’t really know what to do with. I think what I’ve heard is if you own the assets, so we have some rental calculators, anything like that, those rank really well. So that’s helping us. But the other part of this is the Google ai. You mentioned that people aren’t clicking to the links anymore, they’re reading the Google summary and a lot it’s changing in digital marketing. But I do think, actually this kind of goes tied back to the beginning though, video marketing though. I think if you want to do AI stuff, that’s going to be hard to rank for. It’s going to be more complicated. We’re going to have to figure that out. But the video side continues to grow, right? And AI is not doing videos or people don’t want to see AI videos. I feel like that’s the case.
Dave Timpone (45:34):
Yeah, it definitely does. And if you’re putting out relevant content on all these platforms, they’re all ranking. I mean, if you’re searching for, you’re putting out rental keywords on a lot of your video marketing that you’re doing, YouTube’s ranking Facebook videos, people are searching not only your website, but all these other platforms are ranking. I did read the other day, I think Instagram, and I don’t know if Instagram I guess wasn’t ranking on Google before, but now their content and copy and everything is going to start ranking on Google as well.
Kyle Clements (46:14):
At times they are changing. But I do love the video marketing side. I think a lot of rail companies, that’s low hanging fruit, but we talked about with landing pages, even just creating landing pages for your content. I mean, there’s still big wins to be had by rental companies who work with professionals like yourself or other professionals who know this stuff. And most rental companies are not doing digital marketing really well. And I think that’s an opportunity for everyone. So Dave, I appreciate you coming on today. It’s been fun talking to you. We never had anyone talk about the video marketing side of equipment rental, which is really important. Final question, I have best career advice you’ve gotten or any advice that you’ve gotten in your career that’s helped save your success and what you’ve been doing?
Dave Timpone (46:57):
Best career advice. So I guess it just goes back to I do a lot of consumption when it comes to even podcasting. And I get a ton out of Gary Vanerchuk, Gary V, and I think every time I listen to him, it’s just, I always get something out of it. I always get, and it’s always create more, put out more content. So usually after I listen to ’em, I’m motivated, I’m on fire, right? I’m like, alright, I got to do this or I got to do that. So I think just overall in general, I mean if anybody has anything social media related and looking to do, how do I get started? How do I do that? I would say I would recommend go buy a book from Gary V. Go listen to him. He is putting out some of the best content out there for free. So that would be my go-to there.
Kyle Clements (47:54):
Content is king. A lot of it’s just around consistency, right? Like you said earlier, no one’s going to say, oh, I’ve seen this video before. People, you just got to keep being in the conversation. If you want to grow your business, you have to be top of mind the way you be stopping of mind, you got to be relevant constantly putting content out there. So it’s a game of inches consistency like most things in life. So it’s a good reminder, Dave. But thanks for coming on and appreciate you coming on the running round table today.
Dave Timpone (48:17):
Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
