An izmocars Case-Study

The Ford of Ocala Success Story

"With collaboration between Ford of Ocala and the Izmo Rainmaker team, we have seen a remarkable increase in our customer retention, resulting in an increase in our ROI."

Tegan Dover - Internet Manager
Ford of Ocala

In the 3 months that Ford of Ocala has been live with an izmo redesigned website and the inception of izmoRainmaker Services, their website has yielded an increase of 2,433 more visits per month, Sales increased 116%, and bounce rate decreased to almost 7%.

Ford of Ocala has been in operation for over 15 years, the dealership is a family owned dealership and is operated by the Deardoff Automotive Group. Deardoff Automotive Group also operates Ford of Clermont, Central Florida Lincoln Mercury, and Island Lincoln Mercury, Jaguar and Land Rover dealerships.

The Challenge

Bruce Deardoff, CEO of Deardoff Automotive Group, in an interview earlier this year, said his company cut its monthly ad budget from $280,000 to $120,000. This meant that Ford of Ocala was tasked with cutting their annual advertising spending in half.

Ford of Ocala was spending more of their advertising dollars on Radio, Newspaper & buying leads on line, as well as paying for positioning on pre-owned car websites. But Ford of Ocala was not optimizing their own website to bring in more traffic, leads and ultimately more conversions directly to the dealership. It was time to rethink where their advertising dollars were being allocated.

The cut in advertising dollars would have resulted in less newspaper, radio and purchasing of leads from Autotrader and placing their pre-owned vehicles on Cars.com for a position fee, resulting in the dealership and the website continuing to see a decline in leads, conversions and sales.

The dealership considered a couple of different website marketing companies, one which was recommended and supported by Ford Direct, but ultimately they didn’t find this as an effective alternative for many reasons including budget, as izmo and the izmoRainmaker Services offered the best solutions to their needs.

The Solution

In May of 2009, Ford of Ocala’s newly redesigned izmoWeb site went live with a new look and user friendly feel. At the same time, Ford of Ocala was introduced to izmoRainmaker Services, this service provides many alternatives such as, Website management, generating traffic, leads and conversions, on page and off page dealership marketing with branding, and social networking with blogs and press releases, campaign planning, community involvement and Search Engine Optimization.

The Results

Ford of Ocala is no longer using Autotrader to purchase on line leads, (a savings of $2,500 a month) and has cut back on their spending for paid positioning with Cars.com, as well as limited spending on Radio and Newspaper Advertising. In the 3 months that Ford of Ocala has been live with an izmo redesigned website and the inception of izmoRainmaker Services, their website has yielded an increase of 2,433 more visits per month, with an increase of 47%, going from 4,985 visits per month in April 2009 to 7,232 in July 2009. They have come up in page rank from a 3 to a 4, increasing their presences on the internet, where they were only appearing on the first page, but now they are on the first 4 pages. They have Increase their number of sales within this time from 24 to 52 sales per month, over 116 %, with an added increase of 32% in page views, and a decrease in bounce rate of almost 7%.

Lessons Learned

For Auto dealers, Internet marketing offers the best ROI with the least TCO. In challenging times, this is where the dealership presence needs to be the strongest.