How an out-of-the-box social campaign showed an off-road powerhouse in full focus
INEOS Grenadier and Thyga have won the Automotive category at The Drum Awards for Digital Advertising. Here is the award-winning case study.
INEOS Automotive sought to raise awareness of its first 4X4 vehicle, the Grenadier. Over the course of the Grenadier's manufacturing journey, it had built a large and loyal global community of fans and customers.
The Hard Way Home campaign showcased the first three actual Grenadier customers receiving their Grenadiers with a handover that was totally unique. Each customer collected their Grenadier from one of the world's remotest locations and drove it… all the way home. The objective behind the campaign was to increase brand awareness of the Grenadier, showcase its off-roading capabilities, and drive database sign-ups to push continued vehicle orders.
Thyga, a sub-agency brand of SHARE Creative, was tasked with creating a digital advertising campaign for The Hard Way Home initiative in the UK and Germany to drive awareness through impressions and video views, consideration through traffic, CTR, and website visits and action through database growth and leads.
The campaign spanned six weeks, from February to March 2023. Grenadier was the first model for INEOS Automotive so it was all about elevating the levels of brand awareness, driving traffic to the site, and establishing its position in the market.
When reviewing the creative, we needed to ensure the final cuts were optimized for social. So we split the campaign creative into five films; a 30-second teaser film, an eight-minute hero film and three 15-second cut-downs. The teaser was made to showcase the best moments of the drive, create suspense, announce the date of the full film, and invite people to watch it when it drops. The hero film displayed the vehicle traversing incredible terrain, demonstrating the 'Grenadier Spirit' of the drivers and showcasing the product features at work.
The Grenadier audience isn’t just a normal audience. They’re adventurous. Ready to go where others can’t. So when it came to targeting - it was about looking for those characters. We targeted adventurers, an audience we’d built from historical campaign results for the UK and Germany, and combined them with brand tracking survey insights which left us with a social user pool, researched to be the most likely audience to buy a Grenadier.
But we knew we couldn’t depend on just automotive audiences. So we expanded our search and turned our attention to their sub-interests that better defined potential buyers of the 4X4 market. Hiking. Camping. Hunting. Fishing. Mountain biking. Audience segmentation was implemented to determine which interests performed better, feeding the campaign optimization for better results.
When it came to objectives, we focused on two areas. Reach; to achieve success, we knew we needed to target the highest proportion of our adventurer audience in each market and Frequency; to create familiarity and saliency. Users who engaged with the hero film were retargeted with consideration content, encouraging them to get more information about the Grenadier. Meanwhile, those who visited the Grenadier website were met with action-phase retargeting, urging them to subscribe to the Grenadier email list. This segmented retargeting approach ensured relevant touchpoints, improving lead quality and increasing conversion potential.
The campaign ran in three separate phases across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn platforms and optimization through audience segmentation, ad formats, and creatives and channels helped enhance results.
The digital advertising campaign for The Hard Way Home initiative saw impressive results across the board:
Awareness
We over-delivered with 1.7X more video views than forecasted as the audience reached was more engaged, and we had a higher view rate than planned. An 8% increase in brand awareness in the UK, and a 6% increase in Germany, compared to the control audience based on the Meta brand lift surveys *This increase, as a result of the campaign, is 2X more than the automotive benchmark. We also found on the brand tracking survey that 'unaided' brand awareness and 'top of mind' brand awareness figures rose by 1% in the UK, a difficult thing to achieve with relatively small media budgets, and aided brand awareness in Germany increased from 11% to 15%. The knowledge and positive rating by users of the Grenadier also rose dramatically post-campaign. In the UK, Grenadiers' rating increased to be similar to that of BMW and Mercedes.
Consideration
During the campaign, we saw a 93% traffic uplift across the UK and German websites. We also saw a lasting impact of the campaign, with weekly traffic in the period after this being 10% higher than before the campaign. At the same time, we saw a 40% increase in brochures and a 36% increase in saved configurations. Considering users who save a configuration or download the brochure are 11X or 3X more likely to order, seeing a significant uplift in these conversions was extremely positive.
Action
As expected, The Hard Way Home campaign saw the most significant monthly database growth in May, almost 2X the YTD average. The campaign saw a huge uplift in the volume of leads generated through the UK and German websites (+152%). This was due to the significant increase in traffic volume and the conversion rate (+31%), leading to one of our most successful 5-week periods of lead generation in the previous 12 months of Grenadier activity.