Introduction

Tremec Electric GT (TEGT), a pioneer in the electric vehicle conversion system world, asked if Find Your Friends (FYF) could help them use social media to grow awareness for their wildest project of 2024: custom building the world’s first EV Porsche Safari. We were introduced to the company, industry, and project 6 weeks before SEMA, the world’s biggest car convention where this one-of-a-kind car would be revealed in person. Find Your Friends knew next to nothing about the car industry. Fortunately for TEGT, diving head first into uncharted territory and adapting quickly is our sweet spot specialty - so we decided to swan dive in. FYF had under 2 weeks to do a social media analysis, competitive analysis, develop a creative strategy, build a 30 day content calendar, manage the on-site videographer, and start rapidly editing content for various pillars we hypothesized would resonate with attendees of SEMA, the world’s largest car convention. Tremec Electric GT saw Find Your Friends as a nimble, fast working team that could create a volume of content that capitalized on trends and best practices without tarnishing their brand identity or sacrificing content quality.

In 30 days, we:

Created 31 videos
Increased engagement 33x and total views 25x
Generated 307k views
Reached 121k new accounts
Maintained a 4% engagement rate
Collaborated with 6 other legendary car brands
Increased leads from potential customers (calls, emails, DM’s, etc.)

TEGT’s goal: EV Porsche Safari Car Mockup (courtesy of 405 Motoring)

About Tremec Electric GT

Tremec Electric GT offers EV turnkey powertrains for specialty car builders and the aftermarket vehicle conversion industry. Their systems mostly live in 911, 912, and 964 Porsches, but they recently collaborated with AC Cars for the release of the AC Ace Electric.

Being this early to the EV market comes with a few obstacles. Trying to turn the gas-guzzling classic car die-hard to an electric vehicle early adopter is a disruptive process. If people haven’t driven an EV car, they’re going to have doubts. There was an opportunity here to educate the car world on all things EV: how TEGT’s EV installs work, the R&D process, addressing various consumer concerns and more. Here are the 4 key parts that made this project a success:

1. Understand The Consumer - Be Their Friend

We used insights from the car industry along with TEGT’s best & worst performing pieces of content to help guide our new creative strategy: create a behind-the-scenes TV show as the EV Porsche Safari was being built. After creating content pillars, we had a clear plan to successfully repurpose content from 15+ previous shoots. After sifting through this footage, FYF’s creative direction helped the on-site videographer work more efficiently and reduced TEGT’s hourly videographer costs.

Reed, FYF co-founder, enjoying an event in the car industry after studying it for 6 weeks straight

2. Gather Reliable Data

After onboarding, we realized TEGT had recently been using an AI Instagram-growth system that flooded the page with fake engagement. This looks good from afar, but it’s not best practice – it can cause a page to get shadow banned and doesn’t contribute to overall algorithm-alignment. We promptly shut off the system, shedding almost 3,000 follower robots. This helped us know what pieces of content were resonating with the audience we wanted to reach - and a plus to know we gained 1,500 real followers through our efforts.

3. Become One With The Community

TEGT had some great product sponsors for this car build, which meant there were some potentially huge opportunities for collaboration posts. We had to come up with content ideas that would be on brand for TEGT, fit in with our 30 day content calendar and also be on brand for the partner we intended to collaborate with. Baja Designs, our biggest sponsor (338k followers), historically had successful posts using content that resembled a music video. We mimicked their top performing style of content, added a spicy hook, and weaved it into our 30 days till SEMA car-build story.

This post generated 1,400 likes, 163 shares, 70 saves, and 55k views - a huge number considering TEGT had just 33k followers at the time.

4. Tell A Compelling Story With Valuable Takeaways

We made TEGT’s lead car builder, Denim, a “star” on the show. Viewers were encouraged to comment on his techniques. Occasionally we would use these comments as an Instagram Sticker for an upcoming reel. They were along for the ride.

Our original focus and key performance indicators were specifically for Instagram, but once we get going with a client it’s hard for Find Your Friends to not offer a bit of lagniappe (which means “a lil’ somethin extra” down here in New Orleans). Our goal was to post 20 times. We posted 31. Through this process we reached more than 200,000 new users across all social channels. We added in Facebook and Youtube Shorts in the 4th quarter because this project was too cool for the world not to see.

More FYF lagniappe - we figured out how to enter Denim into SEMA’s Battle of the Builder’s competition on Tremec Electric GT’s behalf. Harry Mack (rapper - 2.3m followers) was stoked and freestyled for a film crew in front of the EV Porsche Safari

Overall Results

Our first 30 days with Tremec Electric GT was a huge success. TEGT built the world’s first EV Porsche Safari just in the nick of time. Denim placed top 10 in SEMA’s Battle of the Builder's Young Guns division competition (Top 40 overall). We hit all of our benchmarks and drove into SEMA 2024 with a whole lot of buzz surrounding us.

How We Increased Tremec Electric GT’s Instagram Engagement by 3300% in 1 Month