The Challenge:

A local car dealer selling luxury European automobiles including Audi, BMW, Porsche and Maserati needed to find a way to drive showroom traffic and sales during the summer months. The company had recently invested heavily in a new website, and also wanted to convert a higher percentage of site visitors into qualified leads and sales.

The Response:

With such a wide range of brands to sell—Volkswagen at the “everyman” range to $100k+ Maserati, identifying a target audience and a common message that would resonate with each was nearly impossible without fragmenting the budget and producing a variety of spots for each segment was prohibitive. So I suggested an interactive campaign called “What Kind of Car Would You Be?” that would allow consumers to identify their own segments.

The first step was developing a 10-question, multiple-choice survey that would live on the dealer’s home page. The questions focused more on lifestyle than anything else. Answers for each question were assigned a weighting and, working with their IT team, identified a selection of vehicles of various makes that “fit” their responses. I developed a 60-second radio spot and selected a mix of stations with little audience duplication, and bought a three-week schedule that averaged 100 GRPs per week.

The Results:

After measuring daily traffic leading up to the campaign, we were set to evaluate the impact of the campaign against daily site visits. While we anticipated some increase, we noticed that the site saw an increase of over 1100% of unique site visitors overnight! Additionally, nearly 80% of the visitors completed the survey (which of course included contact information), and time on site and page views increased.

At the end of the campaign, the dealership had set a record for vehicle sales in, and increased sales of BMWs alone by 30% vs. the previous period previous year.