How Caterpillar Builds Social Media That Actually ResonatesHow Caterpillar Builds Social Media That Actually Resonates

How Caterpillar Builds Social Media That Actually Resonates Transcript:

Jeff White: Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White and joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how are you doing mate? 

Carman Pirie: Man, I’m excited for this show. I think it’s going to  be a good show. 

Jeff White: Me too. Is this entirely because of references and relations to previous jobs when you were a child?

Carman Pirie: No. No. And to be fair, I think I was in my early twenties when I had the job that involved some of the industrial engines that may be talked about in this podcast. But no, I just think it’s like a really great brand. 

Jeff White: A loved brand in the industrial space and beyond. 

Carman Pirie: And beyond for sure. And we’re talking about how that social media presence comes to life. So I’m like, yeah. I’m into it. 

Jeff White: Yeah, me too. So joining us today is Jenni Gritti. Jenni is the Senior Marketing Communications Consultant at Caterpillar. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Jenni. 

Jenni Gritti: Oh, hi. Thanks for having me today. 

Carman Pirie: Jenny, it is awesome to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us. 

Jenni Gritti: This feeling is mutual. 

Carman Pirie: And yeah, like I said, must be an incredibly exciting brand to work for. I know that most listeners will have at least know of Cat, probably have the logo imprint in their mind, but maybe give us a bit of background about yourself and what you do there. And give us a bit of an introduction, if you would. 

Jenni Gritti: Yeah, sure. Certainly. Yeah, so Caterpillar is one of the most loved brands in the world. I can’t go anywhere without somebody seeing me wearing a Cat t-shirt and starting a conversation with me, showing me their tattoo, talking to me about a piece of equipment their grandfather had, all of those things and that’s what I love so much about my job is that I get to tell those stories, and I do that through social media for Cat Industrial engines specifically. So a lot of people probably think about Cat and they think about big yellow construction equipment, as you rightly should. But, a lot of us probably don’t realize that cat engines go into machines that aren’t just cat yellow machines. Irrigation pumps, we’ve got shredders and grinders and big machines, small light towers, portable air compressors, you name it. So it’s very exciting because there’s a challenge of being able to spread awareness about that, that people may not have already known for such a well loved brand. So it keeps me on my toes. 

Carman Pirie: I bet. 

Jeff White: How did you end up there, Jenni? You’ve been there, what, seven years now? 

Jenni Gritti: Yes. Yeah. Seven awesome years and hope to have many more.

Carman Pirie: Alright, so let’s talk about how we tell that story then, because so many people would be envious of the fact that you have such a well-known brand and they’re like, look, you don’t need to tell many stories. It’s already done. But I appreciate that you are trying to broaden the understanding of what it is that Cat does.

Given that this brand does resonate so strongly with the people that actually do the work. I’d be curious, what is the content that resonates so strongly with those people? What have you really found that you lean on over the years as being the key? 

Jenni Gritti: Yeah, I’ll take it even a step back from that and to say we’ve got different audiences on different channels, so we talk to different people on LinkedIn than we do on Facebook or Instagram. So we’ve got OEM decision makers who have to consider our engine, if that’s good placement within their equipment. That’s a totally different audience than what I’m trying to reach on, say, Instagram or Facebook, where it’s more kind of the owners and operators of that equipment that do have Cat engines inside them. And if we’re blowing the picture out, bigger in terms of Caterpillar as a whole, right? It’s more the owner operators on those channels as well. And so it really comes down to content that speaks to our audience because we understand them and we talk the talk, and we walk the walk and we understand what it’s like to be them. We understand their challenges, we understand what makes them laugh. We understand what keeps them up at night. And, not every post has to be this monumental, deep moving piece, right? Sometimes we can laugh and have fun. We should laugh and have fun, right? And so there is a mix of that. But I will say overwhelmingly, educational entertainment will always trump the types of topics that do really well with our audiences. 

Jeff White: Jenni, how do you get to that under that deep, innate understanding of the point of view of those, what are effectively some disparate audiences? Like, how are you learning what they truly want to hear and love and and want to hear from a brand like Cat? 

Jenni Gritti: Yeah, I’m not going to  lie it took a while to tease out and figure out, but data is your best friend in these examples, right? And so there’s a mix between marrying your business and marketing strategy to what the data is telling you and finding the magic in meeting somewhere in the middle and between those types of things, right? You’re always going to  be answering to the business. You’ve always got goals that you need to be moving forward for the business. But, in 2026 customers can smell BS a mile away, right? So they’re not wanting to be sold to, nobody wants to be sold to. Who among us here wants to be actively sold to, right? Nobody. It’s really looking at, okay, what content resonated in the data? What type is that? What are we saying in those messages? How are we saying it, right? But it’s also looking to say, who are we trying to reach and what’s most important? Because we could boil the ocean if you tried to reach everybody under the sun.

So it’s a matter of prioritizing those audiences that you want to reach, understanding what your data’s trying to tell you, and then looking at those two together and painting a picture that moves your business goal forward while still talking to that audience in a meaningful and authentic way.

Jeff White: Are you testing messaging? Are you…

Jenni Gritti: Yeah. Split tests. My favorite thing, my agencies are probably tired of me saying, you just test it. Just test it. Because, one thing that has humbled me in my career is that I don’t know anything apparently. I could have a hunch as to what I think is going to  be a hit, and it could be completely wrong, but the thing that we maybe created off the cuff a little bit. Does extremely well. I’ve been humbled enough to know that the data’s going to  tell me what the answer is, and so that’s where split tests come in and we have a mantra of just let’s try it and see, let’s try it and see it. The risk is low, we’re talking about social media organic posts here.

I’m not talking about big giant launch campaigns or anything like that. We can test and see and figure out what that is, and you have to have a long enough timeline to be able to do that too, right? If you do it in one week or one month, that’s not enough time for our sales cycles, which could be up to two, three years, right? So we’ve gotta give six months of try or a year a try to see if this is working? Is this resonating? And then making that decision while also at the same time, conversely, being flexible and being able to turn on a dime. Should we need to.

Carman Pirie: I would think you’re probably looking for some leading indication that’s working rather than having to wait two years to test the final result of everything.

Jenni Gritti: You’re right. You’re right. Yeah. And because it doesn’t make sense to wait that long for every single thing. And of course there are leading indicators. It’s really going to  depend on what’s important to you and your goals, right? So some things could be engagement rates, but we know. At least from my world, engagement rates are going down because people are more passive when it comes to social media, right?

People aren’t liking things anymore. They’re not commenting anymore because it’s a very vulnerable place to be. People can see what you like, people can see what you comment, and that kind of opens yourself a little bit more than maybe you want to. And so now it’s about shares and saves, right? So engagement rate isn’t necessarily the metric that it used to be, right? So while that would’ve been a leading indicator for some things, now, in my world, we’re looking at the shares, the saves, the user generated content, those types of things that tell us whether or not it’s working. 

Carman Pirie: Understood. We’re recording this just a day or two after the reported passing of a famed cartoonist and a controversial person as well. Scott Adams, and I am not coming on this podcast to suggest I’m a fan by any stretch. But I did hear a quote attributed to him in the past 24 hours that said being something like, being exactly right and catastrophically wrong feels exactly the same in the moment. And I was like you know what? I don’t have to agree with everything the guy said or whatever to find this pretty telling quote and it’s true, right? And just what you said, like apparently I don’t know anything. I gotta split test everything. 

Jenni Gritti: And I’ve been doing this my whole career. So I like to think that I know I’m the expert in it in one sense, right? But data will do that to you, won’t it? 

Jeff White: But then again, being the expert means knowing that you have to test things. Your hypotheses won’t always be correct. 

Jenni Gritti: You’re right. And that’s, it’s a maturity and a realization that took a while to get to. I’ll be honest. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, absolutely. I can appreciate that. I am curious, what’s been the biggest surprise? Anything that jumps out in your mind as a, I thought was going to  be an absolute flop and it was a slam dunk or vice versa. I thought it was going to  be a slam dunk and it flopped. 

Jenni Gritti: Yeah. I will say something that was surprising. I had a hunch, but I wasn’t aware that it would do as well as it did, this is tangential to Caterpillar. So I manage two brands under the Caterpillar umbrella and Perkins Engines is one of those. And with that brand, we had seen in the comments and getting a lot of feedback that our engines are just named like a string of numbers and letters. They seemingly have no sensical rhyme or reason behind them. And this kept popping up over and over again. How do I get ahead of that? How do I raise awareness around this? And so I grabbed one of my sales guys who has an engineering background. I said, Hey, could you help me make a video real quick?

It was a PowerPoint, a little cameo of his head on there just talking about why we named the engines the way that we do. Every time I post it, it just goes through the roof, every time, every single time. I could hit the easy button if I wanted to get some engagement rate really easy, I could just throw that video out there. It has performed so well. And again, that’s because I looked at what our audience was saying, the trends, the pattern, and took a creative approach to it, right? And really found that solution. So that was very surprising and it’s still surprising because we are still using that and it’s still doing extremely well.

Jeff White: I love the reuse part of that. 

Jenni Gritti: Yes, and that’s the thing that as social media professionals, I’ve talked to a lot. And there’s this, for whatever reason, we want to always do new stuff, probably because of the nature of where we are on social media. Attention spans are gone. All these types of things. But what you may not realize is those people, they’re not as invested or as close to it as us. And so you can reuse content and actually talk about testing. I have been testing, reusing content, and it’s performing even better, the second and the third, and sometimes the fourth time around, right?

You gotta space it out. You can’t be, throwing it right next to each other. Maybe take a new approach. Just show me your wording, but essentially it is the same post repurposed three times that builds and builds on itself. And again, humbling myself, right? I would’ve never done that in the past.

Jeff White: No. Each one must be unique and special. 

Jenni Gritti: Yes, we have to. And it’s no, don’t do that to yourself. Every social media professional I know is wearing 30 hats and doing 18 people’s jobs. So let’s make our lives just slightly easier on ourselves, right? Let’s reuse that content when we can.

Carman Pirie: What do you, as you look at how social media is evolving, and you mentioned even the shift in an engagement and how thinking about how people are actually valuing the content and what signals indicate that they’re seeing that value. I’d like to hear your thoughts on where you think things are going in the next 12 to 24 months with social media, in terms of its impact on industrial brands.

We talk a lot about SEO being less important now because of AI, and the shifts in attention span and everything else that’s happening under the sun doesn’t just impact SEO. It also, of course, impacts social media. What are you seeing as the macro trends impacting your work right now?

Jenni Gritti: Yeah, AI, you nailed it, right? And that’s everybody. And it’s not unique to me, but I will absolutely say a really interesting study came out the other day. And I’m not going to  be able to attribute it properly, so my apologies I’ll try to think of it shortly here, but there was a study that recently came out.

It was three months worth of analyzing LLMs like GPT, Perplexity, and I cannot remember the other one. I think it was Google. And they took over 230,000 prompts and posts from these and analyzed them. It really came out to show that yes, Reddit is still the number one place that feeds into these LLMs, but guess what number two was? LinkedIn. LinkedIn is now a number two source for AI search results in a zero click world where nobody’s going to websites anymore. And I say that a little bit, tongue in cheek here, it’s really given me pause and I’m really starting to… Not that I didn’t already look at things under a microscope, but now it’s having these implications that I’ve never had to think about before. And yes, I’ve always dealt with SEO and that’s something, right? But what does this mean? How do I adjust my content? And I wish I had all the answers for that. And to be fair, I’m still figuring that out through testing and things of that nature. But the other side of that coin is AI. And AI slop is making my job a lot harder because. I’m now going back to where I was about a decade ago in fighting the good fight about the importance of social media, particularly in organic, and I will say it’s a fraught place right now. A lot of us leave more exhausted by coming out of social media, skimming through LinkedIn or Reddit or Instagram.

It doesn’t give us that feeling that it once did of escape or those dopamine hits that we’re looking for. And so my mission and my goal is to show up in a meaningful way that provides value for my audiences because authenticity and that human touch, that human element’s going to  be further. What distinguishes you from your peers, from your competitors. And so I want to make sure that our customers know that we’re there and we hear them and we see them, and we’re not going to just let AI take over, right? Humans are still very important to all of this equation 

Carman Pirie: is prioritizing more direct re-engagement with followers and things of that nature, part of that.

Jenni Gritti: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Community engagement’s a huge part of social media, right? But again, because people are becoming more passive and not commenting as much, community engagement’s becoming a little bit more of a difficult play as well. So it is about showing up if somebody leaves a comment, that you’re engaging with that comment or being proactive and starting conversations in your comments, and that type of thing. Because you’re right, it’s not just about the post itself anymore, it’s the whole ecosystem, and you’ve gotta think holistically about everything. 

Jeff White: Are you finding it harder to, your comment about slop certainly strikes a chord with me because, it means that you may not be able to leverage some of these tools from, I’m thinking just from a content creation perspective, from an image creation perspective, maybe you can’t leverage those tools because you don’t want to be called out for creating or adding to the slop. So does it mean that you’re looking for new ways to create original content, or are you leveraging the tools potentially in a slightly different way.

Jenni Gritti: That’s a really fantastic question.

Carman Pirie: Wiser use of the tool so it’s better slop or more original is what you’re asking Jeff. 

Jeff White: More original slop. No, are you creating more original content to avoid being labeled as slop? 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Yeah. Or are you using the tools smarter so they create a better slop, I thought.

Jenni Gritti: Oh, yeah. I am very adamant about not contributing to the slop, so it is about how do I make this more human and how do I make this more meaningful? But I’m not going to  lie, AI and LLMs like copilot. Have been very influential in helping me be more efficient and getting things quicker, right?

So when it looks at the data and I get more actionable insights more quickly, or personas, I do a lot with persona work. So I build AI agents that are personas of my target audience, and then I go in and pressure test the content and say, Hey, does this even matter to you? I really try to do a gut check before everything that I put out into the world and say.

So why should anybody care? Why should anybody bother reading this or seeing this or engaging with it? And that’s where those AI personas have really come in handy to answer that. Here’s why this matters. Because I’m not an expert. I am not an engineer. I am not an owner operator as much as I would love to be of Cat equipment, right? I did one of those simulators and ended up tipping it over. So, not the actual simulator, right? But I am not one of those, so I can’t pretend to be those people, but I can use the extremely good data that we have. And first, it was first party and third party data. Take that in there, analyze it, and be able to pressure test that. So far, from what I’m telling is that it is improving the quality of the content there and the way that people are engaging with it. So it’s always learning, always changing, always improving.

Carman Pirie: What role does brand nostalgia for a brand like Cat Play in your approach? 

Jenni Gritti: It’s a fine line to tow. I will tell you that it’s incredibly important. We’re celebrating a hundred years, we’re just wrapping that up rather and to ignore that would be a huge disservice to all of our fans and our audience.

It’s what’s made us who we are today. So it’s, like I said, a balancing act. It certainly always performs extremely well. And I could pontificate on the reasons why I think that may or may not be, but I will say there is certainly a place for it. What you want to avoid is to get stuck in the good old days, right? Because times have changed. Things have changed. Emissions requirements require certain things, all of those types of things. And the fact of the matter is, what was a piece of equipment in the 1950s is not the same type of thing. That could be used on a work site today, while it could still run and it’s probably still a beast, right? There’s a reason why that can’t happen, and so we don’t want to get too far stuck in the past and bemoaning today, right? 

Carman Pirie: I hadn’t really thought of the dark side to that. That’s interesting. Yeah, I kinda hear what you’re saying and then, it’s one, it’s great for somebody’s, granddad to have owned a Cat bulldozer and all of a sudden they have some nostalgia for the brand, but they’re solving modern problems, different problems. 

Jeff White: Reddit probably still thinks that those engines are the best 

Jenni Gritti: They do. Yeah. And look, they all are. They just serve a purpose in time and what they’re meant to do and what they’re meant to achieve. And the whole reason why these engines even get these upgrades or do these things is because our customers need them. It’s not our engineers sitting in a room going. What could I throw on the engine to make this go faster or this, that, and the other. It is customer needs and customer requirements that have to be met, this is what we need to do to make that engine or machine, or all of those types of things, right? It’s not pulling things outta the air by any stretch of the means. 

Jeff White: Given what you just said a few moments ago about LinkedIn being one of the best social networks for feeding into LLM models. What’s your favorite platform? 

Jenni Gritti: They’re all my favorite. They’re all my children. And I say that with a bit of a smile on my face because it’s true. I love Instagram for the visuals and the things that I get sucked into. Instagram’s starting to become more like TikTok as we know, and it’s starting to deliver more things that are outside of what your feed is. It’s very algorithm based and it knows what your preferences are and so it’s always serving new things to you. Maybe not things that you follow necessarily. But it’s always stuff for some reason that you end up watching the whole video or what have you. So I love Instagram for that. I love LinkedIn for upping my game in my career. I go on LinkedIn and while it is starting to turn into Facebook a little bit, I will give it that. And there is a lot of cringe on LinkedIn. I learn so much from so many of my peers on that channel. It is one of the most valuable things, and it is the channel that has made me better in my career. And then Facebook. Facebook, I just, I don’t even know what to say about Facebook, but it’s got its purpose.

Carman Pirie: I’m glad to hear you mention the LinkedIn cringe. I find it increasingly difficult for me personally to get past it despite its professional utility. I was encouraged a little bit to hear you speak about its AI usefulness may make me not want to throw the baby out with a bath water 

Jenni Gritti: oh, good.

Carman Pirie: I just find the cringe factor on LinkedIn to be beyond. 

Jenni Gritti: If you haven’t been to Reddit and looked at LinkedIn Lunatics or something like that, I think it’ll be a fun place for you to check out. 

Carman Pirie: You’re saying that’s a place for me. Okay. 

Jenni Gritti: You would certainly enjoy it because it’s an amalgamation of all that LinkedIn cringe and everybody kind of poking fun at it.

Carman Pirie: To be fair, that does sound up my street.

I suppose your specialty is understanding what people want to ingest via social media? So I shouldn’t be surprised that you came to that conclusion so quickly. 

There’s an awful lot of folks that work and try to manage a social media presence for an industrial brand that is not of the scale of CAT and does not enjoy the same brand equity. And frankly, it’s only one small part, maybe of the totality of what they have to do. I want to maybe close this episode by getting your advice. How should they be thinking about managing an industrial brand’s social media presence when it’s a little bit more about a minimum viable approach that they need to take in order to get the other things done.

Jenni Gritti: I’ve been in that role. I understand completely and it’s hard to know where to peel the onion. And I totally get that. I will say, I think I said it earlier, I think the most important thing you can do is know your audience. Know who your priority is, your target audience, who you’re trying to reach, and then ask yourself before you put anything out into the world, what’s in it for them? Why should they care? Because a lot of us get bogged down, I don’t want to call it busy work, but I’m going to  call it busy work. And things that aren’t going to be as impactful as things. If you would just maybe take a breather for a second. Focus on, like I said, really understanding your audience and answering what’s in it for them.

Because quality will beat quantity any day of the week. And so if you can, make the argument, which I will admit takes time. It does take time. But if you can at least work, maybe test one post a month and say, this is my place to experiment and I’m going to  experiment on this one post per month, and I’m going to try to reach this audience and I’m going to, try to ask myself what’s in it for them before I post it. And if I can gut check that and keep tabs on that every month and continue to look over that and see that evolve. Now you’ve got proof of concept, now you can go talk to your business. Now you can show them that this works, that quality beats quantity, and you can start to have those conversations with that data and then scale up from there.

Carman Pirie: Wonderful advice. Thank you for joining us on The Kula Ring today. It’s been great to have you on the show. This has been awesome. 

Jenni Gritti: Thank you for having me. 

Jeff White: Yeah, what an interesting topic and well delivered. Thanks so much. 

Jenni Gritti: Oh, thank you guys.