Gateway Auto Goes “All In” to Dominate the Fargo Market
The Challenge
Gateway Automotive in Fargo, North Dakota, consists of a Hyundai/Nissan location, a Chevrolet/Cadillac store, and a clearance center. In the growing city, Gateway was working with a plethora of third-party advertising vendors to try and get ahead of the competition:
“Previously, a majority of our budget was spent on third-party advertising, such as CarSoup, Cars.com, Autotrader, Team Velocity, CarGurus, and then a few Facebook posts that we would boost.”
But Gateway wasn’t seeing the results that all those efforts should have garnered. When its team discovered 9 Clouds, they saw an opportunity to unite their marketing budget into a comprehensive strategy:
“Since then, we cut out almost all of the third-party vendors and just kept Cars.com to drive the used-car market.”
The Solution
This auto marketing case study explores how 9 Clouds crafted a tactical approach to Gateway’s online marketing needs.
Starting in the fall of 2016, 9 Clouds took over:
- Online lead tracking and digital strategy
- Email marketing
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Online content marketing (including blogs and landing pages)
- Google AdWords and Facebook ads
- Social media support
- Reputation management
In addition to working closely with our team to craft each month’s plan, Gateway has allowed our creative content strategists to take outside-the-box inbound marketing approaches to the store’s content.
Gateway’s willingness to go “all in” with 9 Clouds’ strategy and embrace the long-game inbound approach to automotive marketing has already put the store in a dominant position in the market — and we’re just getting started.
The Results
In the first stages of our long-term SEO strategy for Gateway, we’ve already made significant strides. Of the 126 keywords we’ve identified, we hold a top-ten ranking for 85.
In less than three months, Gateway saw improvement in the ranking of important local keywords on its homepage, blog, finance pages, and more. That included getting the number-one national and local ranking for highly competitive search terms like “Fargo auto dealers” and “Fargo ND car dealers.”
While this auto marketing case study pulls data from only a few months of our partnership with Gateway, we’ve already started to see slight increases in Facebook and AdWords clicks, as we test the market to devise the best strategy for the Fargo area. Email marketing for Gateway also has an impressive average open rate of 22.3%.
In addition, Internet leads have increased by 42.6% from October to December 2016, allowing vehicle sales to increase over the same period by 57.6%.
The early signs have exceeded expectations, and Gateway is eagerly looking to the future:
“The best part would have to be the [9 Clouds] team and how easy it is to work with them, coordinate our strategy, and implement it quickly. I hope we continue to see success in the digital market and keep topping all of our competitors in that aspect — all while not using third-party companies.”
Want to Learn More?
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You can find another auto marketing case study here, learn more about what we believe in our manifesto, or see the latest automotive need-to-know information on our digital marketing blog.
