US Auto is an automotive dealership with locations across the country that focuses on delivering valuable vehicles to consumers across a plethora of demographics. Cox Media Group Local Solutions and US Auto go way back. We've been helping them deliver novel marketing solutions since 2010 — back when radio ads were the key strategy in client acquisition for car dealerships. After helping them develop spectacular radio ads for years, we've since moved into the digital space to help them create hyper-relevant campaigns and keep pace with their competitors in the competitive car market. Currently, Cox Media Group Local Solutions helps US Auto handle marketing for all of their locations across the south east. Read on to see how we were able to boost US Auto's calls by 345% while reducing their CPC by 28%.

Marketing Goals

While audio ads are still relevant in the audio industry (see our whitepaper "The Power of Digital Audio Ads" to learn more), car dealerships need a local digital presence to compete in the modern car economy. According to Google, search interests for the phrase "car dealerships near me" has doubled in the past three years. And, with local search becoming an integral part of every retailer's search strategy, we approach brands with multiple locations in a novel way. We treat every location like it's a new campaign.

Since US Auto is spread across the south east, each location exists in a unique town with its own demographics and people. We dive deep into the data to see how each location can best serve its audience, and we build campaigns around those demographics. Currently, US Auto is served by the Athens team. But, since they're one of our oldest clients and they've grown massive during our time with them, we've had them meet Mike Anderson's team and Hondo, and our search analysts get on the phone with them monthly to measure campaign success and create clear, consistent channels of open dialog.

US Auto's goal is simple. They want to dominate the local search space and grow each location into a Goliath in the local community. That all starts with smart local search strategies and finding ways to incorporate business information on every digital space possible. And, of course, we leverage intelligent social media campaigns — including lead-gen ads and dynamic inventory ads. Social alone has skyrocketed their overall site clicks, resulting in more traffic and fewer campaign frictions.

The Results (a.k.a "The Metrics")

In 2017, we ran a large-scale marketing strategy model that helped forge US Auto's current marketing message and overall campaign strategy. Between Q3 2018 and Q3 2019, calls shot up by 345%. This is largely thanks to Josh from our search team, who's remarkable understanding of local SEM combined with his patience and experience in the market was able to help US Auto boost their local SEM capabilities. Josh leveraged our Google rep and historical data to make some profound and awesome changes to their marketing model — including working with data-driven analytics to help segment audiences more accurately and produce hyper-target ad campaigns.

Here's the amazing part. Not only was Josh able to create tons of new calls, but he actually spent less doing it. CPC is down by over 27% during that same period. That's smart marketing!

Data is King

Results don't make themselves. We believe that data and transparency are the King and Queen of our marketing campaigns. We share everything we do between offices and leverage the talent of our entire nationwide branch of marketers to make systematic, smart marketing moves for our clients. We sit at their office at least once a month and comb through their data and their vendor data. Every month, car sales change. We use that data to create month-by-month campaign changes (both broad and granular) that help us create budget-friendly campaigns that generate tangible leads.

This goes both ways. We use their data to make smart marketing decisions, but we also send our marketing data back to them via our dashboard. This lets them pick the right cars to showcase and understand modern consumer demands. We also share results with them. If they don't feel like a particular ad is on-message or has an ROI that works for them, we can quickly scale back those campaigns and experiment with novel new ideas.

Do You Want to Grow?

At Local Solutions, we're extremely proud to build these long-term relationships based on honesty, integrity, transparency, and (of course!) results. Are you ready to grow faster in your local market? Contact us today.