ConectUS Wireless Appeals to NASCAR, Creates Marketing Strategies to Increase Partner Sales

NASCAR is more than an advertising opportunity for ConectUS Wireless.

The sport represents a way of fostering a sense of community for partners and customers, said Neil Farquharson. He’s head of digital marketing at the company.

ConectUS has worked with NASCAR veteran David Starr and several channel partners to develop and implement branding and marketing strategies that lead to incremental sales, while keeping community in mind. At this year’s Channel Partners Conference and Expo, four-time NASCAR winner Starr will explain why associating a company’s brand and business services to sporting events like NASCAR is effective. The conference session is “How a NASCAR Driver Revved Up Our Channel Partners’ Branding.”

ConectUS’ Neil Farquharson

“The old-fashioned sales funnel doesn’t work anymore,” Farquharson said. “We’re trying to create content that’s interesting for our target audiences. We’re not actually trying to sell to them, per se, because the sophisticated audience these days wants information. They want to come to their own conclusions. They want to make their own decisions, and only when they are ready will they make a purchase.”

He added: “American audiences are very sophisticated now. The majority of our target audience are interested in technology. We felt that NASCAR really fit the bill in both cases.”

The Anti-Pressure Campaign

Farquharson emphasized that ConectUS’ goal was to create engaging, interesting content that its target audience would want to keep coming back to. Whether it was watching videos or reading blogs, company officials didn’t want the media campaign to feel as if they were putting any pressure on partners.

“Whenever we have this kind of content, we noticed that our target audience will go on our branded website more often. They’ll look for our content, they’ll remember our name, they’ll mention us,” Farquharson said.

Beyond that, why is the ConectUS audience is responding well to NASCAR?

“NASCAR makes you feel this sense of belonging.” Farquharson said. “My own personal feeling is that America is a little bit more polarized. But when you go to an event like this, I feel we’re all friends. Everybody’s smiling. Total strangers are nodding. People are being so supportive of one another. I feel that NASCAR represents everything that’s good about the unity of feeling that comes from public togetherness.”

The audience may not feel advertised to. However, ConectUS does what successful companies do best with their marketing campaigns. They appeal to emotions.

“I mean, even when we do talk technology, we don’t like to talk about the number of megabytes that something has. We can tell customers a nice story, a story about how their life would improve by using this device and then just occasionally throw in the fact it will save them money, too,” Farquharson said. “We tend to get them far more immersed and engaged than we would have done if we just hit them with a data sheet with all the feature sets.”