Case Study: How Performics used Paid and Organic Search campaigns to help Mercedes-Benz, SA launch the new X-Class

Creating, growing and educating an exciting new market, and shifting consumer behaviour in a highly competitive space.

PERFORMICS, SOUTH AFRICA

Consumers don’t think about media channels and marketing messages, just lifestyle needs and personal preferences. Performics translates those needs into more effective media buys and more engaging content to deliver the right message to the right person in the right place at the right time.

It made sense for us to partner with the Mercedes-Benz team to help them redefine their performance expectations.

OVERVIEW

Mercedes-Benz South Africa launched their very first bakkie to the South African market, in 2018. As the brand was entering a well-developed bakkie market, their main objective was to drive interested users to the dealerships to test drive the new X-Class. We were tasked with advertising this new model, across Facebook and the web, with price-specific messaging to educate users around the Mercedes-Benz Agility Finance option.

Our efforts were split into two parts: the first was our paid social campaign and the second, our supporting SEO strategy, mechanisms and results. Both aspects contributed to the success of our overall digital media campaign.

PAID SOCIAL

We set out to bring the right people into Mercedes-Benz outlets to test drive the new X-Class Agility

• The main KPI was lead generation.
• We were also required to leverage social media advertising to generate these leads.
• Later, we would improve the quality of leads generated to save the call centre time and money in their pre-screening process.

But, how would we achieve this?

Our paid social media strategy for the X-Class Agility Campaign was executed in a phased approach, to strategically move the user through the conversion funnel. We opted for this approach to measure whether or not users with a previous brand touchpoint were more likely to follow through with a form submission, in the hopes of implementing these learnings into our next campaign.

PHASE 1 — Interest-based targeting and understanding our consumer: The first phase used interest-based targeting around family, business, sport and agriculture. This ensured the brand reached their core target market of potential X-Class drivers, which they had already clearly defined instead of the mass market they were reaching previously.

“After working on and managing the Mercedes-Benz SA paid social campaigns for 2 years, we have grown and developed a great understanding of our target market, who they are, what they like and what creative evokes action out of them. Those efforts, combined with tried and tested experience across Facebook’s variety of creative, features and tools at our disposal have helped us formulate an efficient strategy.” — Amy Bryson, Paid Campaigns

PHASE 2 — Reaching our consumers where they were — through creative, targeted advertising: We generated brand awareness, using 6-second video ads. Our engaged viewers were collected into a custom audience bucket and remarketed to, with a link click ad, to prompt engaged users to visit the website. There they could educate themselves on the X-Class features and the Agility pricing model.

PHASE 3 — High-quality lead generation: The final stage of activation, comprised serving Lead Generation forms to collect users’ personal information and send these enquiries through to the Mercedes-Benz dealerships to make test drive bookings. Targeting on the Lead Generation forms were split-tested between broad interest-based targeting, as well as remarketing to previous video viewers and website visitors, from the previous phases. As a result, retargeting outperformed all other targeting and contributed to 52% of all successful lead submissions. Continuously targeting optimisation throughout the campaign, meant that all KPIs were met, and far exceeded.

“The automobile industry in SA is extremely competitive, so Mercedes-Benz SA has a great understanding that to remain top of mind, continuous creative and copy testing is vital. The brand needs to stay on trend, all the while remaining a luxurious and ambitious automobile brand”. — Amy Bryson, Paid Campaigns

Our campaign far outperformed our KPIs

Spend (until June, 2018):

X-Class Agility = $18,665 (R277,905,98)
Lead Generation = $72,905 (R108,5493,48)

But that wasn’t good enough on its own…

We put renewed emphasis on using an integrated campaign to improve lead quality, and drive the right people to Mercedes-Benz dealerships.

Mercedes-Benz’ main objective, across social platforms, is to generate leads to encourage test drive bookings. These leads are sent through to the Mercedes-Benz call centre (called the BDC) for pre-screening. This prescreening process allows the call centre to better understand the user’s car needs and forwards all interested parties onto the respective dealership, based on where the user resides. From here, it’s up to the dealers to schedule test drives and potential client meetings.

Producing high-quality leads meant understanding the offline environment

The Mercedes-Benz call centre (BDC) communicated they were struggling with an influx of poor quality leads. This was a massive drain on the call centre resources, who were wasting time pre-screening users who were not eligible for, or interested in, test driving or buying a Mercedes-Benz. An issue arose whereby leads who did not answer their phone for the pre-screening, were not able to be directed through to a dealership. After 3 unsuccessful call attempts, each lead was closed. This meant that money was being wasted on advertising lead generation forms, and interested leads were being dropped, regularly.

As with every great campaign, we were required to analyse and adapt our solution

Mercedes-Benz South Africa, tasked us with establishing a creative solution, to balance the quality of leads versus the quantity of leads. Our paid social strategy to improve lead quality involved optimising the Facebook Lead Generation forms, in an effort to drive better quality leads through to the BDC — aiding in media efficiency for the paid advertising and time efficiency for the call centre.

Along with the usual personal information requirements, our solution was to implement an extra field, postal code, to the lead forms, so should the call centre not get in touch with the lead submitters, they could still pass the lead onto the respective dealership, based on where the users lived. The addition of this extra field, implemented in August 2018, resulted in an increase in lead quality, across Facebook and Instagram, month-on-month.

The Results?

We’ve attributed the ongoing success of our Mercedes-Benz paid social campaigns to understanding the data around our consumers, and utilising it effectively — but this campaign also showed us that simple changes could make a significant difference in performance. By geo-targeting our leads, we could ensure that the right people ended up at Mercedes-Benz for test drives, solving a major problem with a simple, strategic solution.

SEO

Our search strategy needed to support both the client objectives, as well as the paid search campaign we were running concurrently. We, therefore, aimed to increase organic traffic for consumers to see the new X-Class. We attempted to achieve this in one of the country’s

most competitive markets — and, in a declining economy. This was a formidable challenge, which required us to form a winning plan and get down to the basics.

Our approach

PHASE 1: ANALYSIS

After analysis between the master (German) and South African websites, we found that all copy was simply translated and implemented with numerous spelling errors, mistranslations and no search optimisation along the way. Some people may see this as a challenge, but we saw it as a massive opportunity and blank canvas which we could work off — as everything needed to change.

PHASE 2: RESEARCH

Through in-depth research, we found many generic gaps in the market, using keywords we could leverage in order to gain visibility on Google’s SERPs and, hopefully, clicks to the website. The rule of SEO is incredibly simple but tough to achieve, the more visible your website is, the higher your chances of clicks.

PHASE 3: AUDITING & PLANNING

We set out to do an extensive SEO audit on the site to help bolster our knowledge at the start. Here we looked at duplicate and missing tags, 404 and server errors, meta tags, content and the lack thereof, as well as targeted keywords. We then set out to evaluate the impact of each shortcoming within these areas, in order to help us prioritise actions, which formed part of our strategic planning.

PHASE 4: STRATEGIC EXECUTION

Keeping in mind that people search for things and may read things differently, country to country, we kept our copy in the same tone as the master site, but optimised and created new, fresh content — specifically for the South African audience. Through a process of building links, utilising the social campaign to support and doing extensive keyword and market research, we were able to reach our intended audience.

PHASE 5: REVIEW & RESULTS

This generated a massive increase in Google SERP results. The Mercedes Benz SA website is ranking first for 122 keywords, an increase for 39, when compared to January 2018. This increased visibility gave us the results we were aiming for, and more:

Omniture Organic Data (1 Jan — 3 Oct):

One Web: Mercdes-Benz.co.za

Contact us for more information on our performance-driven marketing, paid, organic, social and creative campaigns.