Bolstering Social Presence and Marketing for a Car Listing and Sales App

Project Overview

Bumper, a platform for buying and selling vehicles, was established by two entrepreneurs in Manchester with a goal to simplify and reduce the costs of car transactions across the UK. Despite having agreements with various car dealerships and verified purchases, the user base needed a boost to ensure business viability. The key challenge was the infrequent nature of car purchases, questioning the stickiness of an app that is only needed sporadically.

Problem Statement

Bumper needed to significantly expand its social presence, enhance its app store presence, and run efficient digital marketing campaigns with a limited budget. The platform was struggling to compete with giants like eBay, Gumtree, and Auto Trader and needed innovative strategies to increase its visibility and attract more buyers and sellers.

Approach and Strategy

App Store Overhaul: Our first step was to revamp the app’s visuals and rewrite the copy with App Store Optimization (ASO) in mind. We created compelling ‘above the fold’ content and modernized the preview screens on the App and Play Stores. The goal was to improve conversion rates and attract relevant users.

Social Growth: Given the constraint of internal content creation and no budget for digital advertising on social channels, we needed to think outside the box. We targeted audiences on competitor social accounts and used automation software to engage with posts that complied with our whitelisted criteria and avoided blacklisted restrictions. We launched a secondary campaign targeting our users with direct messages that encouraged specific actions, with the aim of qualifying a lead twice before using an organic call-to-action.

Digital Marketing: We recommended using the remaining budget from the app store project to run ads on Gumtree, a competitor platform. We repurposed the app store images to create Featured and Spotlighted ads on Gumtree, highlighting better value price points than those found on Gumtree. Although we initially planned to run a parallel Google Ad Campaign, budget constraints led us to shelf this idea.

Results and Conclusion

Our campaign, which ran for 4 and 8 weeks, helped us identify the right copy and imagery for Bumper to use moving forward, and we gained valuable insights about user needs in London and Manchester. The innovative strategies and careful budget allocation allowed us to increase Bumper’s visibility, attract more relevant users, and position the platform as a viable alternative in the competitive car sales market.

The case of Bumper demonstrates how a focused strategy and creative solutions can help businesses overcome their challenges and achieve growth.