A multi-location automotive group with a familiar problem: every store marketing on its own, and a whole that added up to less than the sum of its parts. One coordinated digital strategy changed that — and the group increased leads and sales.
A dealer group looks like one business from the outside. From the inside, it usually markets like several small ones. Each store runs its own campaigns, manages its own listings, and answers for its own numbers. Nobody owns the group's presence as a whole.
That structure produces three predictable problems — the kind every multi-location group runs into, and the ones this engagement was built to solve.
Spend split across locations means no single campaign has the weight to compete properly. Each store buys a little of everything; the group buys nothing at scale. Waste repeats at every location because no one can see it in one place.
Listings, location pages, and reviews maintained store by store end up uneven. Some locations show up well in local search; others barely show up at all. Shoppers get a different impression of the same group depending on which store they find.
When several locations chase the same queries in overlapping territory, the group bids against itself and its own pages fight for the same rankings. The shopper was going to buy from the group either way — it just paid more for the privilege.
We didn't strip the stores of their local identity. We took over the coordination layer: one plan for how the group shows up in search, spends its budget, and handles its leads — applied to every location.
Each location got its own footprint — built out and maintained to the same standard, targeted to its own area. No store left invisible, and no store left to ride on the group's name alone.
What one store learns, every store gets. Messaging that converts, targeting that wastes money, offers that pull — tested once, applied group-wide. A single store has to relearn everything alone; a coordinated group never should.
Leads from every channel and every location flow into one pipeline, with one team answerable for it. When the whole group's lead flow sits in one view, problems get caught instead of buried in one store's spreadsheet.
That's the result, stated as plainly as we can state it. We don't publish figures for this engagement, and we won't dress the outcome up with numbers we can't show you. Where we do publish numbers, we publish them in full — you'll find those engagements on our success stories page.
What we will say: the gains came from coordination, not from any one clever campaign. The group stopped paying to compete with itself, every store became findable in its own market, and budget moved toward what was proven to work. That's the whole trick — and it only works when someone runs the group as a group.
Even if spend stays allocated per store, strategy shouldn't be. Pool the decisions — what to bid on, what to build, what to stop — and the same dollars go further.
If two of your locations can serve the same shopper, they need one plan for that shopper — not two competing ones. Internal competition is the easiest waste to cut and the hardest to see from inside a single store.
A strong group name won't put a weak location on the map. Every store needs its own presence in its own market, held to the same standard as your best one.
Results across locations only improve when someone is accountable for all of them at once. If lead flow lives in a different tool at every store, nobody actually owns the number that matters.
More on how we work with dealers and dealer groups on our automotive page.
Tell us about your footprint and we'll show you what a coordinated strategy would look like across your stores.