National brands must frequently balance national-level campaigns for driving brand awareness with local-level campaigns, for driving sales directly to local dealers and retailers. For most, it is this combination of creating awareness and interest and then following up with local marketing that eventually results in sales. National campaigns rarely directly translate to sales, because consumers still have to do significant research for local availability, purchase locations, etc.
Localizing national ads is often difficult but becomes essential as brands work to keep ads coherent across dealers. At the same time, local flyers and paper ads are expensive and often have limited success for high-value purchase items such as vehicles.
With Adcombi’s Hyperlocal ad technology, advertisers can change that, by delivering local advertising as part of the national ad campaign – with full respect to dealership service areas.
Dealer Areas by Location
In almost every case, dealerships and franchises have location restrictions for sales and for advertising. This makes advertising at a national level complex. However, Adcombi’s hyperlocal technology simplifies this immensely. We can set location by geotargeting and by polygon targeting, enabling us to target ads based on zip code. In most cases, no zip code has more than one dealership – meaning that if ads are restricted by zip code, all ads reflect the correct dealership for the location.
We achieve this with polygon targeting, which allows us to have a high level of geo-accuracy rather than a single latitude/longitude point and a radius.
Sales-driven national campaigns
Localizing national ads creates significant opportunities for sales-driven marketing, at a local level.
For example, Adcombi currently works with a top motor brand, which has roughly 250 dealerships across Germany. As an automotive retailer, each dealership is its own organization, completely independent of the brand itself. The national brand wanted to incentivize dealerships using advertising, by giving a budget to the local dealerships based on previous quarter sales. Adcombi was selected to deliver the technology to localize those ads.
The campaign was pre-built with advertising campaigns per car. Dealerships could independently allot budget between car models and ads. So, one dealership might choose to distribute ads evenly across every model, another might highlight its’ top selling model and allocate 80% of the budget to that, etc. The full campaign delivered a lot of freedom to individual dealerships – allowing them to use advertising budget to drive sales in a way they saw fit.
In addition, each ad pulls custom data from the local dealership. So, while the ad shows a campaign for the vehicle model, it shows the local dealer’s finance and lease options, route and directions, or even number of models in stock.
Creativity with ad localization
With every ad linked to a dealer and every dealer linked to a location, the brand was able to use creative approaches to solve buyer problems. For example, electric cars frequently create concerns surrounding travel distance on a charge. The brand built a campaign tracking how far its electric car could travel from the dealer – with destination photos and the car model. So, we served ads sharing how buyers could drive from the dealer to the Eiffel tower on a single charge – or from Munich to the Adriatic Sea.
Hundreds of ad variations
Combining local information with specific car data meant that we delivered hundreds of ad variations across a single campaign. Of course, the brand also used multiple ad types. For example, it served in-banner video, with HTML5. The videos were general national ads per car model, but the banner displayed local information such as dealership location and financing details. Essentially, bringing the best of both worlds together. And, the brand followed up with individual landing pages per brand, so that someone clicking on an ad always went to the local landing page.
Localizing national ads creates opportunities to deliver sales-driven ads at a national level, with full respect to dealer service areas and locations. Plus, serving ads using polygon targeting and zip codes creates opportunities for creative approaches to ads, like we saw in our sample case.
If you’d like to learn more about how we can accommodate dealer locations in national-level campaigns, contact us for more information.
