Planit Drives Digital Marketing for the Auto Industry

Planit Agency
February 26, 2015
Planit Drives Digital Marketing for the Auto Industry Featured Image

ICYMI: One of our longtime clients, Ashton Menefee, marketing and advertising director at Valley Motors, was recently featured in the Baltimore Business Journal, where he shared his thoughts on how important digital has become to the auto industry.

As the focus of auto marketing and advertising has shifted from print and TV to digital, auto manufacturers and dealers are investing a lot of money to reach consumers—at both the national and regional levels—and they need to make sure their efforts are paying off.

And that’s where we come in. Planit has been a leader in digital marketing for more than two decades, and we’re proud to have put our expertise to work for dealers like Valley Motors and brands like Acura.

Bringing more BOOM to Acura

In 2014, the Baltimore Area Acura Dealers Association reached out to Planit to help it connect with local consumers. In this region, we found that the Acura dealers were not only competing with traditional luxury brands such as BMW, Lexus, and Mercedes, but also with more “mainstream” brands like Honda, Toyota, and Nissan.

After a thorough messaging analysis of all the brands, we concluded that in order to meet the Acura dealers’ goal of selling more cars and gaining market share, we needed to not only address the message, but also the medium. So we developed a bold, high-impact campaign that focused on Acura’s attainable luxury and recommended increasing the investment in digital marketing—think online videos, banner ads, and web and mobile development—to more effectively meet consumers where they already are.

The result? “More BOOM for your buck.”

In its first quarter, the BOOM campaign was so successful that neighboring dealerships in Virginia and Washington, DC, came calling to get in on the action, leading to a huge presence throughout the mid-Atlantic region. (Sound familiar? You may have read this article we posted last December, which highlighted the importance of customer location in the campaign we designed for Acura.)

With digital as the driving force behind the campaign, the results were tremendous, with increases in website traffic, click-through rates, online ad conversions, and—most importantly—Acura sales.

Stay tuned for more. This year we’ll be launching BOOM 2.0, with digitally rendered online video spots for specific Acura models.