The marketing challenge at Addax, and one for you too!

It hasn’t always been easy, as before we took up the challenge in 2021, there was no marketing department to speak of! And even when there was, the other member of the two-person marketing team had a second job to do within the company. One of us also managed Addax’s internal sales.

First things first

It’s like this. We don’t do marketing for fun. Our goal is to support the business and make sure that the commercial teams have everything they need to promote and communicate our product to the markets. This methodical and professional approach to marketing has not stopped the team from being creative or making the experience fun, on the contrary, with limited means, creativity has been a top priority.

The first task has been getting the basics right. The material that we develop – such as technical sheets and the website – is really about getting the end user to understand what an Addax is, and what it does. This includes an explanation of the different applications it can handle, its USPs and where they can find a dealer when they want to buy one. Everything done aims to support our business activities.

For sure, we’d like to get more followers on our LinkedIn page and reach a certain number, but if we had to choose between reaching the number of followers or reaching our sales targets, we wouldn’t hesitate for a second … the sales goal would win every time. It doesn’t really matter how many followers you have if you’re not successfully selling your company’s products.

Getting the basics right

Before, marketing was done by whoever needed something. It was just an extra task that the internal sales representative did when he had time. The result was that we could almost start from scratch, with a blank sheet of paper. Of course, the business has a long wish list of things it wants and needs. And so one by one at every sales meeting, we present our latest support material and tools. Sales sees this and really appreciates the fact that the marketing story is being built one story at a time.

We know we’re not there yet. We know we have a lot of work still to do, especially as we haven’t really involved our distributor network in our marketing activities, but that’s the fun part … we can make the brand into what we want it to be. Our aim is to work more closely with our dealer network. We feel there is still a lot of good potential there, especially if the job is done in the right way.

As a first step, Addax has set up a dealer platform alongside its website. This extranet – which requires a login – is a closed platform containing images, presentations, a video library and other technical and commercial information. The next step, is to visit dealers and hold alignment meetings to discuss activities, see what they are doing and what more can be done to support them.

We want to work more closely together. For example, there are always questions about whether Addax can support this or that event, or help pay for gadgets. So we’re working on a more formal agreement to spell out what we can do for them, and what they can do for us.

We really want to make it feel like a partnership rather than two parties doing their own thing. And to do that we need to make a human connection. Of course, we see emails and the like from them, but we haven’t yet spent a lot of time together as yet.

The advantage of this is clear, because we definitely have a different relationship with those partners who have actually visited the factory and had a kick-off meeting here. We get to know them and they get to know us.

It’s time for you to be more creative: the Addax challenge

To reach out and build this Addax family, we are asking both dealers and users to share photos of their (and/or their customers’) Addax EUVs at work. It’s a great way to show people how strong and tough it is, and how adaptable it can be in all kinds of situations.

It’s not a competition, so the quality of the pictures doesn’t matter … but if you can take your best shots and tell us where the photo was taken, and add any other useful information, that would be great too. And don’t forget to include #Addaxworks.

In return, Addax will share more pictures of the different configurations of Addax EUVs leaving the factory. We’re curious to discover where they go, where they end up and what they become. After all, seeing them in action and working hard is what it’s all about.