Gateway Bronco delivers rugged Ford Broncos at the intersection of vintage American craftsmanship and modern American performance. The founder scours barns across the country looking for original, first generation trucks and then works to restore and modernize them.
O’Malley Hansen Communications joined the company at launch in 2016 to quickly raise awareness and get an edge on established competitor builders. We needed an aggressive plan to reach consumers and validate the brand’s expertise. Sponsorships and showings at car shows and traditional PR outreach played important roles helping us reach the auto community, but social media gave us some of the best return on investment via strategic targeting to Bronco enthusiasts and potential buyers.
We made Facebook the priority, given its robust ad platform. We immediately defined our target audience and developed a tone, style and cadence of shareable content to best appeal to them. We populated our page with beautiful Bronco imagery showing original and end-state product, took our fans on a journey when the founder drove cross-country in his ‘73 Bronco, and amplified our media placements. We backed up organic posts with fan acquisition ads to build our community and boosted select content for reach, engagement and brand awareness.
In just a couple months, we designed a community of 50,000 hyper-engaged Bronco fans and potential buyers with organic engagement rates around 20 percent and paid post engagement rates over 10 percent – less than $0.05 per engagement. Through real-time monitoring, measurement and refinement of our targeting, we were able to blow past competition online to help our client quickly grab market share.