Regional honda dealer association

Company profile

The client is a Regional Honda Dealer Association located in the South.

Challenges

The dealer association has multiple dealerships across the Southern region. Maintaining consistent messaging with Honda corporate while highlighting each dealership’s individuality is a persisting challenge. Although the association had brand and messaging guidelines from the OEM, implementing these effectively across the board while also standing out against other brands that were gaining market share proved to be a significant challenge, and they knew they needed expert advice. Additionally, the Southern region is highly competitive, with brands like Toyota, Nissan, and Hyundai battling to conquer the market. As a result, the dealer association requested our help in meeting Honda's corporate goals for the region and developing a bold strategy with meaningful methods to measure marketing success.

Our process

The dealer association had approached us in early 2016 to present their then future vision of their sales and marketing goals, as well as their expectations. We took the opportunity to assess their media plans and furnished a proposal.

To address their needs, we created a custom geo-targeting strategy within the three DMAs where the dealerships were located, aiming to cast a wide net and maximize reach. Specifically, we geo-fenced a few miles around each dealership and delivered ads with an optimum frequency. The campaigns primarily focused on attracting in-market car buyers who were interested in Honda, along with those researching other similar brands, including Toyota, Nissan, and Hyundai.

Furthermore, to sustain a strong establishment in the market, we geo-conquested competing dealerships, engaged users with custom creative, and retargeted them after leaving the dealership. We also continuously optimized creatives and A/B tested frequently to find the best performing iterations.

In addition, we proactively renovated our strategy, testing different tactics to improve walk-in numbers, click-through rates, and performance by creatives. Our team experimented with targeting inventory across different device types and publishers, examining how that could impact our relevancy. We also introduced contextual targeting to display hyper-relevant ads on automotive sites, which improved CTRs and increased recurring visits to the dealership’s website, eventually driving more walk-in traffic to their showrooms. After achieving success with our mobile geofencing campaign, the association enlisted our help on several other media channels, including Amazon display ads and video advertising.