Fantasy football – but for cars!
What Car?
What Car?, Britain’s biggest and best car buyer’s guide, approached us with an interesting challenge. How can we get new and existing users of the site using the new car leasing comparison section of the site?
Our approach
We wanted to create a promotion that would allow users to see for themselves just how good the search functionality was on the new site. To do this we set users a challenge. We gave them a virtual budget of £1,000 and a brief to find 3 different cars to suit our 3 different virtual drivers.
Choosing your cars
It was essential to the client’s sales teams that the promotion didn’t take potential customers away from the site, so we ensured that the promotion was integrated into the site itself. All results from the new leasing search engine allowed users to click through to buy as well as being able take part in the promotion by adding cars to their ‘virtual garage’ with a simple click of a button. All this functionality was housed in an innovative slide-out panel which sat as a tab on the leasing homepage.
Simple integration
Key to the project’s success was to make the promotion as easy as possible to integrate into the site. We were able to supply the What Car? development team with a simple line of code to be inserted into the header of their pages for the promotion to work. This negated the need for us to take up any internal resource when planning and developing the activity – something we are always keen to do where possible.
The big advantage of this process (including the development of the competition tab) was that users could play the promotion on the site where they could research, add and shortlist their car choices as well as submitting their entries direct without having to revisit the competition’s external microsite.
The prize
To make a promotion as successful as possible you need a big prize. That part was easy – What Car? were proposing a free lease car for up to 3 years plus some great weekly runners up prizes.
Incentivised sharing
Once a user has submitted their entry into the draw they are encouraged to refer other friends to sign up by sharing a link that will earn them even more entries into the same draw. This link can be shared via Facebook, Twitter or directly emailed.
A complete solution
The competition website was run via a CMS so What Car? could upload all future challenges, run news stories and updates on prize winners themselves.
Supporting banner campaign
To help drive users from other Haymarket properties we created a series of banners to promote the competition. These ran on titles across the Haymarket portfolio.
The results
At the time of writing the Leasing Challenge has just been put live but already we’re seeing impressive results. By week 2, there were over 2,400 registered users and plenty of positive comment being generated on the What Car? Facebook page.
