Summary
In a year, Nissan India achieved a 66X ROI, 27 million search impressions, and a robust digital presence. Powered by automated location-based search optimization, our marketing-to-commerce software played a pivotal role. Nissan sought an innovative solution to enhance their digital presence and attract buyers to dealer partners. Our effective data management and local digital strategy increased dealership discoverability, bolstered brand reputation, and locally acquired over 25% of digital retail sales, making a substantial impact.
Challenge
In a pandemic-hit world and from there onwards, Nissan needed to strengthen its consumer touchpoints. Considering traditional approaches, as well as conventional consumer behaviour took a hit, Nissan needed to ensure constant consumer connection and smooth customer experiences. Nissan's inaccurate digital ‘search' performance, and unverified, and inconsistent information triggered consumer inconvenience, disappointing consumer experience, and loss of business opportunities.. These complicated things as physical consumer behavior changed. Consumers shifted from directly visiting the store to searching online first, in troubled times. Consumers are increasingly populating the internet and have been using virtual touchpoints. Focusing on last-mile digital capabilities, through a partnership with SingleInterface, Nissan identified the opportunity and assessed how dealerships could cleanse digital information, connect with customers, book test drives, and answer various questions. This new approach allowed Nissan to move from a brand-focused high-level strategy to a location-specific targeted, affordable, measurable last-mile strategy, toward successful outcomes.
Objective
Nissan aimed to bring its brand and dealerships closer to consumers, and offer smooth consumer experiences. To achieve this, it leveraged measurable Hyperlocal Marketing, to become accessible online in uncertain times. This allowed Nissan to track and analyze all touchpoints, and evaluate consumer engagement at dealerships through parameters such as web traffic, views, search impressions, lead form submissions, clicks for calls and directions, chats, and the resulting contribution to revenue and ROI. These were captured through digital business listings and location-level webpages, for every dealership. SingleInterface helped Nissan with an innovative digital product portfolio to efficiently manage its virtual ecosystem and craft a unique local digital strategy. This approach increased the visibility of Nissan's digitized dealerships, enhanced the brand's reputation, enabled accurate and timely interactions, and drove better local conversions. It all led to better online-to-offline (O2O) customer acquisition foot traffic, engagement, and local revenue opportunities.
Strategy
There's a massive audience pool on digital platforms, easing it for brands to reach their target audience, and also be able to measure their performance. Hence Nissan, in partnership with SingleInterface, assessed various digital avenues, and took a digital-first approach, to engage with consumers and offer customized and relevant communications. The aim was to leverage changing consumer behavior along with the power of local ‘search' to create seamless ‘phygital' customer journeys. A unique digital strategy was built at a local level that helped Nissan improve organic digital search rankings and get discovered by consumers who were looking for easily accessible car dealers online. Nissan's data was cleansed, verified, and updated for each location and used to expand social and digital reach to influence consumers, and published across apps, maps, search engines, voice assistants, and social platforms in real-time. Some of these include Google, Google Maps, Facebook, Bing, Yahoo, and several others. The competent product portfolio enabled Nissan to increase the discoverability of their dealerships, run local campaigns and offers, furnish various location-specific business details, engage through capabilities such as AI-powered chats, improve brand reputation, and acquire more consumers locally.
Data
Hyperlocal Marketing and the last mile consumer connect is powered by trackable data-driven marketing. Through this, Nissan started updating its digital listings and location pages with approved, verified data and business details, achieving improved online search rankings and encouraging consumers to digitally engage with dealerships and express purchase intent through views, search impressions, clicks, chats, and form submissions. All this data was tracked through CRM and was visible on SinlgeInterface's advanced yet user-friendly dashboard. This highly granular data offered actionable insights and helped Nissan assess local consumer behaviour, leading to relevant actions on Nissan's part, to offer a better consumer experience, form stronger consumer relationships, and eventually access growth opportunities
Solution
To rank higher in local digital search results and stay relevant, SingleInterface created mobile-optimized, local-search-optimized location pages for each Nissan dealer location with relevant content featuring key highlights for specific business locations such as phone numbers, directions of the dealership, special business hours of operations with respect to the protocols and more, set during the pandemic. A Multi-users framework enabled a collaborative approach that allowed Nissan's National and Local marketing teams at a dealership level to efficiently manage and promote events/campaigns at a local level. Access was provided to respond to reviews for all business locations and customer reviews were integrated with their CRM to track and engage with customers locally. To further power the digital existence of business locations, photos, and social posts were added to the local digital listings, making these more search-friendly and consumer-oriented. Visibility, exposure, and access are key for any business today and customers want their personalized purchase experiences now more than ever. Keeping this in mind, SingleInterface introduced our AI-powered automated Chatbots, ensuring that Nissan's local dealerships could engage with customers directly from the Google My Business Listings and helped to bridge the gap between information-seeking customers and the dealerships, giving them the opportunity to answer questions fast, communicate their offerings, and convert these queries into sales for dealer partners.
Results
With the efficient use of advanced technological capabilities, Nissan, powered by SingleInterface, converted the challenge of operating in uncertain times, into an opportunity by harnessing the power of local search. The frictionless online-to-offline journey provides a seamless experience to users and hence results in an exponential increase in revenue. Based on this initiative, Nissan India was able to achieve the following results in a span of less than a year: 17X - Growth in Searches for Nissan India dealerships Overall click-to directions increased to over 435K, contributing to a 60x increase in dealership visits. Overall click-to-calls went up to over 535K, contributing to 57x more calls at the dealerships 57X - Growth in Leads and messages 0.5 Million - Consumer interactions with Nissan Dealerships 25% - Overall contribution from SingleInterface's hyperlocal marketing capabilities Nissan's towards the digital retail sales%
