Paid Search | Programmatic Display | Programmatic Video | Social Media Advertising | Search Engine Optimization
Challenge: Replace an automotive dealership’s current monthly digital marketing campaigns administered through a dealer preferred vendor (100% co-op reimbursed), and provide them with a more efficient and effective campaign through our agency (50% co-op reimbursed).
Solution: Provide the dealership with a lift more than 50% with the same or less budget than they used with the dealer preferred vendor.
Results: Dealership decreased monthly budget towards digital advertising after switching to Corkboard Concepts, saw increases well over 50%, and was able to use co-op dollars for other efforts, while seeing record breaking sales months.
Highlights
Monthly
498%
100%
Objective
A Dealer Preferred Vendor is a vendor that has been vetted by an automotive manufacturer. The vetting process is cumbersome, and local dealerships trust the manufacturer in making quality recommendations through the dealer preferred programs. These vendors’ products are usually able to be purchased with co-op dollars.
Co-op is a system that automotive dealers (and some other industries) use to help finance some expenses for local automotive dealerships. The way it works is, for every car sold, the manufacturer will provide a certain amount of dollars that can be spent on anything that manufacturer deems fit for co-op. In this particular dealership’s case, they were running digital marketing campaigns through a better dealer preferred vendor and receiving 100% co-op reimbursement. This means it was virtually free for the dealership to run.
When approaching this dealership, we had to show that although our products were only reimbursed at a 50% rate through co-op because we are not a dealer preferred vendor, we could still produce more exposure and ultimately sell more cars from the digital marketing campaign.
Our approach
This dealership in particular was a single rooftop, as opposed to one dealership that is part of a dealer group with multiple rooftops. This provided us the opportunity to create hyperlocal campaigns saturating the dealership’s backyard as well as “hotspots” where their target customers may be.
They have about 3-5 main competitors in the market which lead us to creating conquest campaigns. They also have another 3-5 secondary competitors which we incorporate in some of our keyword driven campaigns when it makes sense.
The budget allowed us to create a wholistic digital marketing approach that included Programmatic Display, Programmatic Video, Paid Search, Social Media Marketing, and some Search Engine Optimization.
The Results
Many digital marketing vendors fall victim to the cycle of running a monthly marketing campaign, then showing a report month after month that shows impressions, clicks, and click through rates. We at Corkboard Concepts, while appreciating KPIs like impressions, clicks, and CTRs, care much more about the sale of products with our customers.
In this case we wanted to ensure that while expecting to see an increase in overall online exposure we see an increase in car sales. Through our tenure managing the digital marketing campaigns for this dealership, they have broken sales records multiple times over.
Below is a graph showing what the dealership was spending and receiving from the dealer preferred vendor. It also shows what Corkboard Concepts was/is able to provide for them on a monthly basis. These campaigns fluctuate month to month based on dealership goals, but overall we were able to decrease their budget, save them money, provide them with greater online exposure which resulted in increased car sales.
Digital marketing agencies looking for the best ways to offer their clients value for money should look to click fraud prevention as standard. Widely seen as an endemic problem in the marketing industry, click fraud costs advertisers an average of 14% of their ad budget.
However, as we’ve seen from this case study, it can often be much more.