The marketing department is headed up by Russell Brown, who has been with the company for more than 15 years. The marketing department has three main aims:
- To support the business by providing sales leads from appropriate marketing channels
- To drive after-sales leads and revenue with customer communications about servicing offers
- To ‘own’ the brand and ensure it reflects the Lovett family ethos of excellent customer experience
The challenge
Before using Mediahawk, the marketing team knew the business had lots of phone calls coming in. However, there was little understanding of what marketing activity was driving these enquiries. They also suspected many leads weren’t being captured – but had no way of knowing for sure.
A lack of detailed reporting meant they were unclear how well their phone calls converted into sales. The gaps in reporting meant that they couldn’t accurately attribute sales to marketing campaigns, so recognising their true return on investment (ROI) was a challenge.
More information about how calls were being answered was also needed to improve the customer experience.
The solution
Russell and his team knew that call tracking software was going to give them the insights they needed to answer their questions. They decided to use Mediahawk for three main reasons:
- To understand where their inbound phone calls were coming from, and how effective their marketing activity was at generating enquiries
- To improve their marketing strategy and ROI by accurately linking marketing activity directly to revenue
- To get insights into how effectively each site handles calls, and how well they look after customers
Russell adds: “We wanted to use Mediahawk because their solution was easy to deploy, and they came with an excellent reputation for helping automotive dealer groups to better understand and adapt to changing consumer behaviour.”
The results
Once Russell had implemented Mediahawk, the insights came thick and fast.
“We quickly gained an understanding of what was working from our different marketing channels,” he says, “and in particular what was driving traffic to our website. Over time we’ve been able to modify our marketing strategy based on the hard data Mediahawk has provided.”
Attributing leads
Using visitor level call tracking on their website, and static numbers on their offline campaigns, allows the Dick Lovett marketing team to capture the source of every enquiry, measure each stage of the sales journey, and link the revenue back to their marketing efforts.
Russell says: “We do this by looking at our phone channels and, by using Mediahawk’s sales matching, we can see which channel has had a part to play within the sales journey. This allows us to keep a much closer eye on how our budget is being spent – which is especially important with the likes of PPC and Autotrader.”
Interestingly, Mediahawk has shown Russell and his team that each brand has different levels of success from their marketing channels.
Russell says: “We are always striving to improve our understanding of our marketing capabilities and Mediahawk call tracking has helped with this, especially thanks to the integrations with other marketing platforms such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, and Facebook.”
Capturing lost leads
One of Russell’s key areas to target has been on what he describes as the “leaky bucket”.
“We know we can generate lots of sales leads,” explains Russell, “but they can leak out during the sales process. Previously, we had no means to check this. Now, with Mediahawk, leads are automatically added to our lead management system as soon as a phone call comes in, or if an online enquiry is made.”
This has resulted in a significant increase in the number of enquiries they’re now capturing and following up on.
Customer experience
Delivering an unrivalled level of customer service is one of the key values for the Dick Lovett brand.
With Mediahawk, the team can more effectively support and nurture each lead as they progress through the sales funnel – something that’s been especially useful as consumer behaviour rapidly evolves.
Russell explains: “Mediahawk’s data has played a key role in how we have reacted to the changing consumer, because it has allowed us to make proper strategic decisions. One crucial learning from the Covid-19 pandemic is that the phone has not reduced in its importance as a response channel. If anything, it has increased.”
With an increase in phone leads, making sure every enquiry is being properly dealt with becomes essential for maintaining the Dick Lovett brand ethos of superior customer service.
“Our current focus is on understanding how many of our telephone leads make it onto our lead management system,” says Russell. “The results have not necessarily been what we would like or expect to see. But they have given us a great starting point to tighten up our lead management.”
He concludes: “Working with Mediahawk is always a pleasure. They have that rare combination of excellent and swift customer service along with a proper understanding of the challenges we face as an automotive retailer. They are continually innovating to find solutions to our challenges and also help us keep abreast of challenges that we’re not yet aware of.”
