Successful Online Marketing Comes Down to More Than Just a Good Website.

Labyrinth Show just How they Helped Crown Rentals Successfully launch into the Vehicle Rental Market.

Crown Rentals (cars and light commercial vehicles) is a great example of how our solutions don’t just stop at designing and building the website, but extend onwards from the site going live to include a host of ongoing marketing services.

When Crown initially approached us to build their website, it was immediately apparent that online marketing was going to be absolutely crucial to the success of their whole business venture. As a brand new company in the rental business they knew that they’d have to do things smarter in order to create market interest and over come brand loyalty to their competitors. With a relatively high cost of entry into this market, certainly at the upper level they were pitching at, they had to make significant inroads into the market as quickly as possible.

Unlike many websites, Crown’s website was always intended to be the major point of sale - to be the place where all vehicle bookings were to be made. Fortunately with prior experience in this industry sector, and a tried and proven vehicle booking engine, Labyrinth was able to design and build the booking engine to meet Crown’s precise requirements.

Building the website to ensure functionality, usability and booking conversions to achieve the best possible results became phase 1 of the project.

Phase 2 involved getting potential customers to the website i.e. online marketing. Labyrinth conducted an in depth analysis of the most relevant search terms and then established a range of Google Adword campaigns, targeting both specific geographical areas and specific promotional campaigns.

Setting up a serious Adword campaign in a field as competitive as the vehicle rental market is no mean feat and involved literally hundreds of advert groups and individual Adword adverts. To optimise Adword performance and to increase ‘relevancy rates’ (to reduce Adword costs), a large number of specific landing pages were set up (only accessible by the searcher clicking through on an Adword advert).

In many cases, because campaigns targeted different geographical locations (countries and regions) , search terms had to be modified to reflect that market’s usage. A good example of this is that here in NZ we tend to use the term ‘4wd’ or ‘Four Wheel Drive’ for off road vehicles, whilst in Australia they tend to use ‘4x4’. Similarly, when working with one of our other clients, depending on the market being targeted we might use, ‘camper van’, ‘mobile home’, ‘RV or recreational vehicle’.

Right from the outset the Adwords generated significant website traffic. Labyrinth then helped Crown to identify the best ways to maximise conversions i.e. to improve the percentage rate of people booking against total number of visitors. This involved analysing the actual vehicle offers themselves and between us coming up with strategies that had the best appeal to market, and which set Crown apart from its competitors in some way - giving the company a real point of difference.

In addition to Adwords, Labyrinth also actively managed Crown's online Yellow advertising, arranging front runner deals, designing and placing banner adverts and running a very targeted and successful cost per click (CPC) campaign.

As is our general practice, once we have established the right foundations for ongoing online marketing, we encourage the client to gradually take over the management of these areas themselves. This ‘set up, guide and assist’ policy has been extremely successful in Crown’s case, and they now manage most aspects of their ongoing marketing extremely well themselves, with the company continuing to make great inroads in their market sector.

Of course, like all clients, the management team at Crown know that we are always close at hand for whenever they need our strategic help again!