Dashboard Doubts Digital PR Case Study | Automotive SEO Agency

Dashboard Doubts - Digital PR campaign for Group 1 Automotive designed to illuminate and engage

Group 1 Automotive – an international Fortune 500 automotive retailer – has been working with Honchō since 2016.

We created an online quiz that tested people's knowledge on common car dashboard signals and achieved over 170 links to the page from high authority publications.

CHALLENGE

With a reputation for excellence and a commitment to customer satisfaction, Group 1 Automotive is always seeking ways to engage and educate its audience.

We created the campaign 'Dashboard Doubts', designed to uncover how well drivers know their dashboard symbols, whilst providing an education aspect through an online game. By creating a fun and interactive piece of content, we knew we would earn coverage and links to connect with target audiences.

We also knew that through quantitative research, we would uncover the answer, while simultaneously driving (pun intended) traffic to Group 1’s website to further the education of their audience, whilst improving rankings.

Dashboard Doubts - Automotive Digital PR Case Study

STRATEGY

The first step in the campaign was understanding the baseline. We conducted a survey among 2,000 drivers nationwide to understand their familiarity with dashboard symbols. The results were eye-opening: despite an overwhelming 8 in 10 respondents claiming confidence in their knowledge of these symbols, the average British driver could only recognise and identify 45% of them.

The next stage of our campaign with Group 1 involved creating an on-site game. Users were challenged to match the correct dashboard symbol with its name. Not only did this engage the audience directly on Group 1’s site, but it also provided journalists with valuable data as well as an asset worth linking to in order to complete their stories.

STRATEGY

Our technical SEO strategy was underpinned by the ultimate goal of improving the user experience and making it super easy for search engines to crawl, index and rank content.

Our immediate focus was to get the basics right and achieve excellence in building strong foundations, using our knowledge of the automotive landscape. Once the performance of the site was significantly enhanced, it was time to unlock more advanced strategies.

PERSONALISED EXPERIENCE

We built a feature which allowed users to see a more personalised used car inventory, dependent on their location or where they were accessing the website from.

With a constantly changing inventory and new cars being sold and uploaded all the time, we created an automated solution to manage and ease the process. When new pages are added with listings, they now just automatically populate with unique content that is aligned to the users’ questions and interest for the specific model.

We aligned user needs with the taxonomy. Based on our extensive research of the automotive landscape, we identified new opportunities within the used car search results. Benefits to the end customer from these developments are that they can refine their search and find the right car model for their needs.

We optimised the CDN caching set-up, allowing us to enhance the performance of the site significantly.

RESULTS

Increased brand awareness with 175 pieces of media coverage in major publications such as The Telegraph, Yahoo! News and MSN.
172 high authority backlinks contributing to organic performance, on sites including The National, The Herald, Bournemouth Echo, Daily Echo, The Argus and Oxford Mail.
This campaign was seen by over 203 million people and Group 1 Automotive saw a 23.8% increase in website traffic, with a high average engagement time.
We improved keyword rankings across a range of branded &campaign relevant terms, placing them at position one in most cases.

Working with the Digital PR team at Honcho has been fantastic, and seeing the results from their campaigns is a real delight - especially Dashboard Doubts. With this campaign in particular, the team really took the initiative to create something valuable that journalists felt the need to link to, which resulted in almost all the coverage including a backlink to the game. Not only were the team able to produce excellent results, but an amazing interactive quiz on our site which was our top performing on-site article at the time! When it comes to industry trends and what’s in the news, the team knows how to jump on this and create great campaigns that resonate with readers.