On the set of the Engine Performance Expo. Photo courtesy of Total Seal.

Motorsports companies are making big gains by adopting education-focused marketing strategies.

In many ways, reaching customers has never been easier for motorsports companies thanks to global online networks and social media platforms that have been nearly universally adopted. Yet, in other ways, reaching potential customers remains a huge challenge. It’s hard to cut through the clutter. Plus, there is plenty of marketing research available showing younger generations tend to filter out traditional advertising pitches. They place a high value on authenticity and social virtues that may seem slippery to grasp for marketing purposes.

One way savvy companies have navigated these waters is by incorporating more education, instruction, and training content into their marketing plans. These usually take the form of how-to videos, podcasts featuring industry experts, DIY articles posted on websites, and hands-on demonstrations at trade shows, but there are other creative ways businesses are meeting the challenge. 

The upside for this type of approach can be huge. Showing the potential customer how to install a part the correct way, or sharing insider tips for better performance, can not only lead to a sale, but cut down on dissatisfaction and returns by customers who may otherwise have gotten in over their heads. It’s a great opportunity for building customer loyalty: “They showed me how to do this, I’m sticking with them.”

“The truth is, an educated customer is the best customer,” said Randy Neal  of CWT Industries, a manufacturer of balancing machines and equipment in Norcross, Georgia. “Education is the only way to sell. If you have that car salesman mentality, jumping up and down around the parking lot, ‘This is great!’ blah, blah, blah, no one wants to see that crap. People want to see product, they want to know they’re making a good investment, and what they’re really looking for is, ‘Are you going to be here? Can you support me?’”

Motorsports-oriented companies have been dabbling in educational and instructive content for some time. It’s not a new concept. But in recent years, more companies are taking advantage of technological advances and investing greater time and resources into creating their own informative content to reach customers.

“Three years ago, we started a podcast,” said Lake Speed Jr. of Total Seal, Phoenix, Arizona. “We sit and interview a respected engine builder. The idea was, let’s let these guys tell their story, how they got to be where they are in their career, their thoughts on engine technology, and they can tell other people about what their experience and perspective is about ring seal. Because ring seal is about way more than just piston rings—it’s honing, it’s the oil you use, it’s the design of the piston. A lot of different things come in. So we began that as a way of being able to make the top minds in the industry more accessible to everyone else. It went really good right from the beginning. People really liked it; we got great feedback about it.” 

Holley is one of the industry giants that has raised its investment in how-to content across its many brands. “Holley has been content marketing for over a decade.” said Mark Gearhart of Holley, Bowling Green, Kentucky. “We have a dedicated video studio, social media team, and our in-house digital publication called Motor Life.”

A rich library of educational content is also a great vehicle for driving customers to a company’s website. “We launched our blog TheToolbox.com as an educational tool for our customers to answer common customer questions, provide in-depth details about products and explain common issues they encounter when working on their projects,” said Kelsey Bugjo of Speedway Motors, Lincoln, Nebraska. “Today, our blog is packed with how-to videos, automotive tech articles, and expert advice to help you with your project or race car setup. We’ve leveraged our 70-plus years of performance parts expertise to compile hundreds of technical articles in one easy-to-reference place.”

Show and Tell

Our sources for this article listed a wide spectrum of motivations for why they’ve adopted a stronger educational/instructional approach to their marketing operations.

“It’s been our approach even before we went digital. Our catalogs used to have technical articles in them. It’s kind of always what we’ve done as a company,” said Vince Roman of Burns Stainless, Costa Mesa, California. “We’re not promoters. We’re not flashy salespeople. We’re technical people, and we’ve always wanted to help others enjoy their hobby or their sport. It’s a natural outgrowth of who we are as a company.

“With our product line in particular, what we like to tell people about is the theory of how exhaust affects engine performance,” he continued. “Number two, in terms of tubing, we want to educate them on the different types of tube that are available, what tubing is appropriate for what application. And lastly, fabrication techniques and how you actually work with it.”

Racers are by nature a competitive bunch, and any company that can help them find an edge is going to earn fans. “I would rather see someone buy the right product, not just a product. To me, that’s the main mission behind it,” Speed explained. “People will work hard to come up with the money to be able to go racing, and they put all the time and effort into building the engine. If you’ve done 85–90% of it already, man, if you knew you could get way better results if you changed how you did that last 10–15%, just by simply choosing something different—choosing a different ring, choosing a different honing method, maybe choosing a different break-in procedure or lubricant for that process, and it would yield upward from a 2–5% increase in output? Yeah, give me some of that.”

The technical side of motorsports rarely sits still for long, so there are constant opportunities to report on the latest techniques. “We’re just trying to put out the most current information,” Speed continued. “It’s easy to go, ‘Oh, this is how we did it 20 years ago.’ It doesn’t take any effort to do that. You’re not going to create any kind of controversy doing it that way. But the reality is, if you only follow the recipe from 20 years ago, then you’re going to have to use those same ingredients from 20 years ago. Which means you’re going to get the same result from 20 years ago. What we’re saying is, ‘Hey, we actually know what the recipe is for what’s winning today. We’ll show you how to do it, we’ll tell you where to go buy those parts so that you can make what’s now, not what was 20 years ago.’ That’s one of the big advantages of Total Seal working with so many of the professional teams at the highest level.”

An educational focus can also be an effective tool for customer retention. “We, along with most other brands in the space, sell highly technical products,” Holley’s Gearhart said. “It’s our job to inform, educate, and help drive buying decisions through all forms of digital communication. It’s a delicate balance of surface to advance level education that allows customers to gain confidence and make the best decision for them. Depending on the delivery method, content can vary in length. For example, YouTube long form video views have been growing over the last decade as virtually all new TVs come with the app preinstalled. When sitting down to eat dinner, people don’t want to jump through a series of three- to five-minute videos and this allows us to really get granular. But if you’re browsing Instagram, TikTok or YouTube shorts, the content has to be quick and to the point, but normally has a call to action back to a longer video, article, product page, etc. Content is also a great way to reduce calls into your customer service team.”

CWT Industries employs videos and other content to educate the customer, but its go-to strategy is a lot more hands-on. “You can talk until you’re blue in the face or you can visualize it through videos. Or, we actually do something a little different,” Neal said. “A lot of times our clients will call up and they have an initial inquiry, and they’ll have a few basic questions, and we’ll certainly try to answer those. But what we’re always willing to do, if they are bonafide in their interest, is send them a flight ticket and fly them to our facility. We have the only dedicated curriculum set up for balancing. The mission statement is to bring them in and let them know just what they are getting into and understand that it is not as hard as they think. They also get to see how our machines are manufactured. It’s a totally different approach. We started that in the last three years. We do it to the extent that if the customer comes down and we’ve made the presentation, and he says, ‘Well, it’s a little more than I want to bite into,’ we say, ‘Thank you very much. We appreciate the opportunity.’ And we send him back home and pre-pay everything.”

Tracking Sales

Sharing knowledge is beneficial to the racing community in general, but ideally all those clicks, likes, and views should lead to sales. Our sources report considerable success in educational content moving the sales needle.

“You can look at the number of podcast and YouTube views each month,” Speed said. “That correlates directly to the number of email inquiries we receive about products. And the number of email inquiries about products directly correlates to sales.”

For CWT Industries, the time and resources devoted to flying the customer in so they can personally observe the in-house manufacturing of the company’s balancing equipment from raw materials to finished product has paid big dividends. “Of all the people we’ve ever flown in, and this is over a period of three years, I’ve only had 4% who’ve delayed—not cancelled—the sale,” Neal said. “Most of the time the people who do go through this, they’ll commit while they’re here, or they’ll go home and give it a little thought and then call back in a week and pull the trigger. The success rate is well worth the cost of marketing.”

“We’ve seen a great benefit from creating educational content,” Bugjo said. “A customer browsing our website can find content that outlines the product details more in-depth, answer additional questions about a product, or explain common issues. Installation or how-to content is a wonderful resource for customers who are ready to install a product. All of this leads to reduced customer issues and improved experiences with our company.”

The customer loyalty benefit that can result from sharing educational content is no small thing. “When you’re helping someone—not just trying to sell them something—now their affection for the brand is much greater,” Speed said. “We have fans. Literally last night I ran into a guy who is a fan of the podcast. There’s nothing he’s going to have built that won’t have Total Seal piston rings in it because he is a fan of the podcast.”

“It’s kind of amazing,” Roman said. “All the time, people will just make mention of a YouTube video that I thought was a little trivial or not that exciting, but it provided a lot of information to somebody. I’ve never really gotten any negative feedback. It’s always been positive.”

No Half-Measures

Although our sources were enthusiastic about the videos, podcasts, how-to articles, and hands-on demonstrations they produce, a common thread we heard was the amount of effort and sheer work required to produce such content on a regular basis. 

“There is an employee dedicated to it—me. I spend a lot of time,” Speed said. “This isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s not something you can dabble with. It’s something you have to be strategic and make a decision and say, ‘We’re committing to this. We’re going to do it.’ It’s easy for a week to turn into two weeks, three weeks, a month. We have a new podcast episode every two weeks and have been doing that for two years. We have a short format and a longer format YouTube video every week. We’ve been doing that for almost a year. It’s a commitment to do that. You have to really work hard, build up content strategy, plan, have the resources in place to be able to have that level of production. It takes a while to get the pipeline filled with content so you’re not having to scramble each week. Once you have that, it goes pretty good, but it takes a lot of effort to get to that point.”

At CWT Industries, flying the customer in for a deep dive into the product requires cutting no corners. “This is full-blown first-cabin stuff that we intend the customer to get a feel for the depth of our company,” Neal said. “It’s one thing to have a mechanical device, it’s another thing to have application support.”

At Speedway Motors, producing the how-to content is a company-wide effort. “Determining what content to produce is a collaboration across the entire company,” Bugjo said. “Our marketing team works closely with our merchandising, customer experience, e-commerce teams, and many others to identify the need for content. Content ideas come from common customer requests or issues, projects our employees are working on, and many other sources.

“Speedway Motors is fortunate to have many in-house experts with technical knowledge in a variety of areas. Our employees are in their own garages working on their projects or racing on the weekends. We lean on all of our experts to provide their insight and expertise to help our customers. We have a team dedicated to content creation that works alongside these experts to produce content from videos to how-to articles.

“We use a variety of equipment to produce content, from lighting equipment to cameras and video equipment for producing video,” Bugjo continued. “We also have our own in-house shop/studio space that we use for creating content and building our own projects.”

Roman at Burns Stainless acknowledged the work that goes into educational content, but also believed that sometimes it’s counter-productive to overthink the process. “One thing I’ve found when looking at other podcasters and other people who put up videos, a lot of times the impromptu stuff is more valuable. You have to think about it, obviously, but I’ve kind of found that too much preparation makes for a poor video. There’s a balance there that I try to strike.” 

“The advice I would give a company is, if the DNA of your company goes along the lines of what we’re talking about, and it feels right to you, and you’ve got the right people, then go for it,” Speed said. “I wouldn’t ever tell someone to just ‘give this a try’ if it’s not something they believe in, because it’s too hard. It’s way easier to buy ads. My life would be way easier if we just had an ad budget, and I could just go buy ads and pay a creative person to come up with stuff, and just say, ‘We like that, we don’t like that.’”

Fortunately for racers, Total Seal and other companies are choosing the harder path and creating rich educational resources that will be useful for years to come.

Sources

Burns Stainless
burnsstainless.com

CWT Industries
cwtindustries.com

Holley
holley.com

Speedway Motors
speedwaymotors.com

Total Seal
totalseal.com