“The new driving force of your business” is the omnichannel digital promotion campaign developed and implemented by Doping Creative Agency for Avangard Motors LLC, the authorized distributor of Mercedes-Benz in Armenia. The aim of the project was to boost sales of Mercedes-Benz Sprinters.
During the COVID-19 State of Emergency, Avangard Motors LLC developed a limited-time leasing offer for its commercial vehicles (vans). The offer was valid through May 1-20, 2020, and included special conditions, such as 20% discount, 0% deposit, and 0.01% annual rate.
The company needed a digital advertising strategy to promote the deal and drive sales. So, the task was: to sell X Mercedes-Benz Sprinters with a leasing offer in only 2 weeks.
3 days before the launch Doping Creative Agency developed an omnichannel digital promotion campaign for the offer, as a result of which 105 leasing applications have been received and 70 sprinters were sold with a total worth of $1.720.000.
The whole digital marketing of the campaign was held by DMS – Digital Marketing Services.
Generate sales
During the state of the emergency situation, the majority of people and businesses had financial difficulties. Several industries like production and service were completely shut down. The company offered a rather generous deal on its Vans. The company aimed to hold the deal on its commercial vehicles for 16 days. The goal was to sell 50 sprinters in total. The advertising budget for this project was 2000$ – 6550$.
Mercedes Sprinters are big but not too big to disturb the traffic, they are efficient and elegant. These vehicles are a great option for companies that produce and deliver their products. In Armenia, such companies are production factories (e.g. meat, dairy, furniture etc.), breweries as well as agricultural entities. Avangard Motors (Mercedes-Benz) was particularly interested in companies that produce and distribute metal and steel products, as such companies need reliable and durable vehicles to transport their products. So, the owners and procurement officers of such companies were chosen as the primary target audience. The advertising team of Digital Marketing Services identified Facebook, Google, YouTube and LinkedIn as the main channels to reach them.
In addition to company owners, we created a custom audience using email addresses and phone numbers. Lookalike audiences have been developed based on this custom audience and also website visitors. For Google search ads after extensive keyword research, we opted for search queries like buy Mercedes Benz sprinter, commercial vehicles. As for display ads, we used in-market and affinity audiences. On YouTube, our targeting was based on the topics of the videos. We set up advertising on videos about sprinters and vans, for instance, reviews of Mercedes-Benz sprinter, so when the viewers are learning about their sprinters, they are also presented with an opportunity to purchase one.
To make these targeting efforts more effective, we employed retargeting. Through these retargeted ads on Facebook and Google display, we managed to return the website visitors back to the website to finish the purchase.
We ran one general ad on Facebook, which was a link ad with a video thumbnail. Also, we managed pre-roll ads with Facebook partner websites and YouTube in-stream and Facebook in-stream advertising.
Considering that a purchase of nearly 20,000$ is an executive decision and most c-suite employees of big companies are on LinkedIn, we used LinkedIn Message ads to inform them about the limited deal on Mercedes sprinters.
The combination of a precise promotion strategy, clear content, and thoroughly targeted advertising led us to 70 sprinters sold with a total worth of $1.720.000. The data for each advertising channel are below:
| Channel | Planned Clicks | Actual Clicks | Budget | Reach |
| Google Ads + YouTube | 7,440 | 10,841 | $ 780.14 | 7,302 |
| LinkedIn Summary | 1,000 | 1,923 | $ 300 | 2,654 |
| Facebook Summary | 10,000 | 24,783 | $ 973.21 | 328,960 |