A major challenge for automotive marketers at major brands has always been understanding how their national campaigns and brand activity feeds potential customers into their local dealership partners. Moreover, knowing what activity is getting those customers to arrange a trip to a dealership where they drive out with a new vehicle.
This was a challenge Mazda needed solving, with hundreds of dealerships across the country it was vital to have a joined-up strategy that connected large-scale branding activity to sales on a local level. Mindshare worked alongside Mazda to execute a cohesive plan to optimise their localised marketing via digital channels, this included using call tracking technology from Infinity.
Fresh from their win in the Best Local Campaign at the European Search Awards, we spoke to Mindshare’s John-James Harrison about their victorious campaign with Mazda, and why call intelligence played such a pivotal role. Buckle up!
Infinity: What was unique about this campaign?
John-James: The overarching goal of not only managing dealer’s Paid Search but improving on it, then taking group learnings and applying them across the network. Doing a campaign like this on such a scale is also unique too. The campaign included an inventive use of multi-domain bidding to balance the cleanest SERP with an element of choice to the user. We incorporated as many signals as possible into our strategy for maximum optimisation and began to link the online journey to the offline, where Infinity’s call intelligence was an instrumental part.
Why was it so important to have a local focus?
JJ: The goal was to transform the existing dealer activity into a highly coordinated structure that would bring them more leads and drastically reduce the overlap between themselves and Mazda UK’s activity. This was only achievable by using signals inherent in a user’s search to offer them a SERP that showed only the most relevant ads possible.
Why was Infinity's call intelligence an important part of this campaign?
JJ: Calls are arguably the strongest lead a dealer can have, and being able to track that back to an individual keyword allows us to reliably demonstrate the value of our activity and optimise that activity to increase leads. Add to this Infinity’s platform, which gives us a level of insight we didn’t have, along with other conversion metrics to further demonstrate the value of our activity and optimise it.
Going forward, how are you looking to use call tracking alongside your other marketing channels?
JJ: We’ve recently expanded Infinity out to our display activity and we’re looking forward to utilising it in a similar way to search.
What were the important results you achieved with this campaign?
JJ: A 105% increase in traffic to dealer sites, a 420% increase in web leads, and a 250% increase in phone leads, combined with a dramatic drop in Mazda UK’s national costs.
Step into the driver’s seat
To find out how to execute a similar campaign for your automotive brand or dealership, start a conversation with us today. If you like, you can even take a look at some of the solutions we offer to the automotive industry.
If you’d like to learn more about ideas for top quality automotive marketing campaigns, download our automotive marketing best practice eBook. It includes ideas from leading minds at a wide range of automotive brands and digital agencies.
