For those of us who follow the Japanese Iseki‘s activity in Europe know that the ISEKI product line has been distributed in the UK and Ireland since 1996 by Ransomes Jacobsen operating out of their facilities in Ipswich Suffolk.
The new ISEKI company will remain in Ipswitch. The new company’s main interest will be to increase market share and sales in the UK & Ireland markets. Not a big surprise, but the new managing director will be the former President & CEO of Jacobsen, David Withers.
Kazuya Tani the European Managing Director of ISEKI said “This is an exciting time for ISEKI we will be investing more in marketing and promotions of the ISEKI brand and want to see a wider acceptance of our products through expanding our markets served and getting more share from existing customers. The commitment of ISEKI to the UK Market will be significant and we trust that the market will react positively to this approach”.
This will be a nice challenge for Iseki and David Withers. Iseki’s market share in Scotland in 2016 was 5% among the new tractor purchases (John Deere was the #1, New Holland #2, Massey Ferguson #3).
In 2015, the British tractor market was dominated by these manufacturers:
- John Deere – 29.8%
- New Holland – 19%
- Massey Ferguson – 11.8%
- Case IH – 9.3%
- Claas – 7.1%
This will be a really nice challenge to build awareness, trust, and demand for Iseki’s tractors and mowers. Will they use content marketing or influencer marketing to generate awareness and trust for these products?
I believe content marketing is a great solution to educate prospects and generate leads. A well-composed content can also help you to deliver quality leads. They will be more likely to be shared. The shareability of contents became a serious issue in the last couple of years as the content creation speeded up while the content consumption did not follow this change.
In this content tsunami, we have to find the way how to gain attention and interest for our products and services.
Marketers like Iseki should bear in mind that if they want to reach more decision makers, they have to come up with content that people like to share:
- Practical value: does talking about your product make people look good and help people help others?
- Emotions: does talking about your product generate emotions?
- What is the story of your product that people want to share?
- Engage people in ‘micro-moments’ when they are the most open to impressions.
Unfortunately, the current Iseki UK website is not really supporting these business objectives.