As the automotive industry is constantly innovating and changing in the digital landscape, Cox Automotive is the only company in the world offering automotive dealers a complete set of solutions. The family of brands under Cox Automotive’s umbrella strive to be a powerful, innovative partner that provides data driven results. From content creation to the management of email and organic social media across 8 brands and 80+ sub-brands/locations, Carbon and Cox Automotive’s partnership went from 0 to 60 in just a few short months.
Carbon worked closely with multiple brands under Cox Automotive to improve, create, and/or build digital content.
Social Media: Carbon was responsible for developing the monthly content calendars including both asset and copy creation as well as scheduling/posting all organic content. Carbon then was responsible for monitoring all organic social media posts across Facebook and LinkedIn and managing all engagements and responses on posts and direct messages. In addition, Carbon developed branded content including custom branded templates with dedicated areas in either the design or copy to plug and play information. These templates were then updated and used weekly to promote auctions.
Custom “Content Engine” Software: Carbon is working together with Cox Automotive to develop first a proof of concept leveraging Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Our multi-phased approach will help develop a custom software application that takes existing inputs and matches them with existing content from Cox Automotive. These matched pairs will then be exported into a file compatible with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud email service. Partnering with Cox Automotive, the goal is to prove our concept in Phase 1 to later implement fully in Phase 2.
Email Strategy / Management: Carbon supported 7 core brands under the Cox Automotive umbrella that required email management. Carbon also worked with an additional brand, vAuto, to develop specific email journey recommendations and strategy.
- Leveraging content provided by Cox Automotive, Carbon was responsible for building each email in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, ensuring all images, copy, and links are populating correctly before deployment. Carbon also ensured emails visually came together before sending for review.
- For two of the seven core brands, Carbon was responsible for over 80 locations nationwide that needed imagery, copy, CTA, and recipient updates. Carbon built and implemented new email templates across all locations quarterly.
- Email management also included the build of specific journeys in Salesforce, as well as, manual reporting for all email campaigns.
Results: Organic social media posts that leveraged recommended ‘thumb stopping’ content such as GIFs and videos received a combined total of 2130 post clicks, 5266 engagements, and just under 12,300 impressions. To drive more traffic to weekly digital auctions, Carbon recommended boosting sale posts on Facebook be promoted. By boosting the weekly ‘Sale Start’ posts, reach, engagement, and clicks all saw a positive increase in performance with minimal spending. Over 60 days, Carbon boosted 6 ads that received 4x more reach, 10x more engagement, and 11x the number of clicks compared to organic posts. These posts also received 118 website clicks compared to 18 clicks in the previous six un-boosted posts. Similar to the automotive industry, Carbon and Cox Automotive’s digital and strategic partnership continues to evolve, together striving for innovation and data driven results.