Recently, Ford and the IAB unveiled a media mix study of the automaker's F150 launch campaign that revealed that online outperformed television for dollar-for-dollar cost efficiency. You may want to read that again – “online outperformed television for dollar-for-dollar cost efficiency”.
The campaign strategy was devised as Ford faced a daunting challenge: how to launch the newly redesigned Ford F150 during a rough economic period, while managing increased competition from other manufacturers. Chairman and CEO Bill Ford referred to the campaign as the most important one in the company's history.
Ford’s goal was to generate the maximum number of qualified leads by placing multiple Online messages in the market at one time. The campaign was so wildly successful that the Ford site registered 3,800 hits per second, sending servers crashing.
Traffic analysis from comScore indicated that nearly 50 percent of all Internet users were exposed to the F-150 online campaign. The study revealed that Ford earned a measurable 6 percent sales lift for the F150 just from exposure to the online ads, while clickthru tracked sales pushed conversions even higher. Visits to the Ford site had a strong correlation with sales.
The strongest correlation with sales came from search "the ultimate opt-in." Search is the consumer raising their hand. People who have done searches on those are more than 4 times as likely to buy than people who haven't searched those terms.
The multichannel strategy led Ford to sell more F150 trucks during the last day in March than a competitor sold all year, while also boosting ad recall 32 percent, favorable opinion of the product 13 percent, and purchase consideration 17 percent - a 20 year high for 12-month intent.
Does any of this sound familiar? Nextel has been doing almost exactly the same type of campaign for over two years now and continues to on a very regular basis. In 2002 their Online marketing efforts brought in 4000 New Customers, $400K in Unit Sales, and $3.4 Million in New Subscription revenues.
The building blocks of a successful online presence that Ford and Nextel used are the same for land mobile dealers. After your dealership has its own primary Web site you can begin to participate in Pay- Per-Click campaigns on the search engines for less than $0.25 per click. Remember Ford’s research: “People who have done searches on those are more than 4 times as likely to buy than people who haven't searched those terms”. That’s 180 degrees from the way most dealers market today. Most dealers still push info out to their prospects instead of pulling prospects in. When’s the last time you spent $0.25 to acquire a new customer? A postage stamp costs more – think about it.
Land mobile dealers should look at the total media landscape because consumer attention continually shifts. Research continues to reveal simultaneous media usage habits among consumers.
Besides being a great place to mount a mobile, what does a Ford F150 have to do with
radios? Not much except to provide yet another example of how the media landscape
is shifting more and more to the Web as the place to be found by your current and future customers.
To your success,
The Opt-In Wireless Team
To learn more about how Opt-In Wireless can use science, data and facts to develop an actionable marketing strategy and increase sales for your dealership, contact us today:
sales@optinwireless.com
Midwest Office 219.756.6227
West Coast Office 503.372.9029
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