How Honchō PPC is leading the way and helping automotive clients outperform the competition

Since winning our first automotive client back in 2016, Honchō has embarked on a fantastic journey. From this, we have already established ourselves as a proven and authoritative automotive search marketing agency. We continue to push the boundaries for performance and innovation through our continued investment and expertise.

Specialising in automotive, Honchō has powered themselves with the technology and skills to tackle the challenges that the entire automotive sector faces – whether that challenge be:

• The obvious need to hit sales and aftersales targets
• Understanding the role of leasing versus purchase
• Adjusting to the rise in interest of electric vehicles
• The major challenge that manufacturers now face with WLTP
• The impact that Brexit has had on car buyer’s purchasing behaviour

However, in face of all of the above, there has definitely been some fantastic wins and opportunities that Honchō have supported our clients in achieving. PPC in particular, has played a huge role in tackling the aforementioned challenges.

So, what role can PPC play in Automotive Search marketing?

One of the main benefits of automotive PPC is the flexibility and immediacy of the channel. For example:

• If you need enquiries, PPC can drive traffic to your site instantly and as long as you are targeting the right keywords in the right geographical locations, you will see enquiries straight away.
• You might for example, have technicians working at a specific dealership aftersales department who are not busy so you can create dedicated campaigns to fill up those empty booking slots.
• You have a special 7-day 0% APR offer coming up which you need to utilise PPC to broadcast that across your ads to drive up engagement and interest.

Effectively, whatever the challenge, Honchō can support anyone from: dealership groups, leasing companies, used car supermarkets, manufacturers, small local used car dealers with 20-50 cars, as well as aftersales/servicing garages.

So how has Honchō helped our automotive clients stand out from the crowd and overcome their challenges?

Firstly, we like to understand your whole business and the daily battles it faces. Typical challenges could range from:

• Needing to increase sales in a particular postcode/location
• Aligning PPC activity with offline marketing
• You have surplus stock of a particular model
• Understanding what your competitors are doing
• Maximising the opportunities that you have already seen success within

Hosting workshops, meeting your team, conducting research as well as account audits, all help us to fully understand your strategy. We can then establish with yourself, which metrics matter most to you and ultimately help us to recognise how we can support you on your journey. This not only helps us work towards the same goal but ensures that the whole marketing channel is considered and not just viewed from a silo PPC point of view.

Once the workshops have taken place, that’s not the end of our support, however. We like to ensure that a high standard of service is maintained throughout the whole process. Often overlooked and not considered as part of the performance, we believe that maintaining a constant line of communication with clients is pivotal to unlocking the full potential of an account. This could be maintained through emails, phone/skype calls, weekly reports with commentary, as well as face to face monthly reviews and QBRs.

In terms of performance, we have continued to invest in our tech stack and efforts towards those within the automotive industry. One of those tools is our very own SMART Feed technology. This purpose-built tool allows us to actively market every single car you have in stock whilst handling all offers and promotions programmatically, allowing for a seamless and accurate approach from ideation to creation.

To further support this, we can overlay our SMART Feed technology with our advancements in bidding strategies through the use of scripts and automation. What this does is allow us to think about those all important touch points with clients – our ads. We spend a lot of time crafting ad copy and testing various ad variations to ensure our ads achieve the best possible click through rates and conversion rates. Again, utilising our SMART Feed technology allows us to accurately test incorporating exact Used Car prices into our ads for example. We can then A/B test the results against ad variations including OTR price savings versus Monthly Payments with APR, for example.

Finally, as a certified Search and Google Partner agency, we have the power to tap into the insights of our Google, Bing & Facebook Agency Account Managers. This means that our client accounts ultimately benefit from their hands-on support and early access to BETAs. Having access to these types of resources really allows us to grasp a competitive edge into our client’s industries and ensures our clients remain ahead of the industry curve with the latest campaign formats.

Check out how we have used our expertise amplified by SMARTFeed technology to increase the conversion rate for our automotive clients.

So, there you have it. Hopefully, this has given you a little insight into the way Honchō can support our automotive clients’ success in their industry.

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