Digital Marketing and Strategic Consulting - Car Dealership

How Mint Zebra Drives Leads for East Coast Toyota

At Mint Zebra, we drive digital marketing results with tools and strategies that strengthen brands, attract customers and yield proven results -- all while aligning your strategic goals with your budget.

Sales, Service and Lead Generation

ECT’s primary motivator is to sell and service their vehicles. When they invited Mint Zebra to help with that endeavor, we created a marketing strategy that would be streamlined and effective, and then carefully analyzed results so we knew exactly what worked and what didn’t. That’s the critical importance of metrics analysis -- the ability to improve results as you go.

We settled on two leading digital marketing vehicles for our initial efforts: Google Ads and Facebook Ads.

Facebook Phases

We ran three phases of this campaign.

Phase One

Phase One was a prospecting tool. Our focus here was to catch the eye of potential “window shoppers”, those with a general interest in Toyotas, but who were at the beginning of the sales funnel. Not necessarily ready to sign a sales contract, but curious. Our goal here was to drive them to the ECT website to learn more.

Phase One Results

With a fairly modest monthly media expenditure of just over $2,000, some 175,000 sets of eyes saw our ad (impressions) and we encouraged 1,350 viewers to take action by clicking to the client’s landing page to learn more. This resulted in a strong cost per click of approximately $1.60.

Phase Two

Phase Two was part of our lead generation campaign. Our goal here was to attract more serious shoppers and encourage them to make a commitment. They completed a contact information inquiry form so ECT salespeople could reach out to them directly.

Phase Two Results

More than 250 ad viewers filled out and submitted the forms, becoming serious leads. With a spend of just under $500, the cost per form completion totaled approximately $19.50.

Phase Three

Dynamic ads were promoted in ECT’s third Facebook campaign. This was a prudent (about $1,000 monthly) push to sell used cars. Viewers saw an array of these new-to-inventory used vehicles on ads that were updated daily. Interested readers could click on the landing page to learn more about ECT and the vehicles available.

Phase Three Results

Here, success was measured by viewers clicking on the larger ad with multiple vehicles, and then proceeding to the description pages of individual cars.

This resulted in approximately 16,000 clicks on the ad. 1,580 of those viewers clicked onto the vehicle description page at a per-click cost of .67 cents.

How the Phases Worked Together

Everyone begins as a shopper, especially when it comes to big-ticket purchases. So we started shoppers in the sales funnel with a soft-sell viewing experience for the curious. From there, we drove them to the website to encourage further exploration.

Phase Two, targeted after the initial campaign, but to the same audience, included a stronger call to action. In this phase, we wanted a shopper’s contact information and made more serious attempts to generate solid leads and to connect.

Phase Three worked to show off available inventory to entice users to visit the Wood Ridge location and make a purchase.

The Google Story

The Google Ads campaign was purely a lead generation strategy. By targeting specific keywords like new cars, Toyotas for sale in Wood Ridge, New Jersey, used Corollas, etc, the clicks became more valuable than passive Instagram or Facebook scrolling.

Google Results

ECT ran a larger ad campaign on this platform, spending about $58,000. We generated some 1.5 million impressions to get about one percent of those viewers to click on their landing page. Of those nearly 14,000 clickers, 128 of them converted by submitting contact information inquiry forms. This resulted in 50 more cars sold year over year.

Overall, the Facebook and Google Ads campaigns led to a 19.34% year over year increase in sales.

Driving Success

Get your big-ticket items into the right hands, turn shoppers into serious customers and convert your leads. If you do it right, you don’t need many clicks to turn a profit. This is one of the many ROI focused strategies you will find when you work with the savvy marketing team at Mint Zebra.

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“Mike is a true professional in every sense of the word. He has a very high sense of integrity, a customer focused approach in his communication, and works extremely hard to get me the results I am looking for. Mike provides one of the best experiences that I have had marketing my business, and I would strongly recommend anyone that wants a trustworthy, driven, and hardworking professional to hire Mike Esposito as their digital marketer. Simply put, he is one of the best in his field of expertise!”
Jeff Brown, General Manager East Coast Toyota

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