John Clark Motor Group is a family run and owned automotive business representing many well known brands across Scotland. With 37 branches, over 1300 employees, and sales exceeding 720 million GBP, John Clark Motor Group remains one of the UK’s top 20 motor trade businesses.
The business believes that their relationship with their customers goes far beyond the initial purchase of their car, van, or motorcycle. It is hugely important then to deliver on their promises and offer full transparency to deliver an exceptional experience.
We had an informal chat with the Head of Digital Manager, Steven Watters about today’s business challenges and developments.
Hi Steven. John Clark Motor Company is firmly established in Scotland, from coast to coast. First, how would you describe this market, as compared to the rest of the UK?
The current market is very unpredictable, and it is difficult to spot specific trends at present. Used car sales remained strong which meant our digital showroom became even more important.
What’s happening in car retail right now, from your perspective?
There is too much going on to mention any specific item. There has been a lot of investment in digital systems and new technologies in the past 12 months which made the automotive sector a very exciting place. Many manufacturers, web suppliers, and car buying sites are all working hard to improve consumer journeys online.
There are also more collaboration and integrations between suppliers which enables many more online possibilities. All of this makes my job even more interesting in the midst of this digital transformation.
All our digital marketing is managed inhouse. We manage everything from running Google Ads, Search Engine Optimisation, and Social Media advertising internally. We also have a Digital Presentation team that manages our vehicle photography and with the adoption of Phyron’s video-based ad solution in June 2021, our used car presentation has improved a lot.
That’s interesting. How far have you come with that?
We started with our Motorchoice franchise which has around 300 used cars. They stock multi-brand used cars which was an ideal business to test the Phyron technology with. The trial went smoothly from start to finish and we have decided to roll this out group wide.
You´ve got some 2,400 cars in stock, so that’s a lot of video ads to be generated. What do you see as your main challenge?
If you had asked me a couple of years ago, the main challenge would have been to raise the quality of the car images. But we recognised the importance of attractive images and video 2 years ago and we have made great progress to improve the quality since then.
Before that, nearly 35 percent of our used vehicle adverts did not have any photos at all. Today, 90% of our used vehicles have 20 good quality images and a video and this has become a group standard.
How do you measure the results?
Ultimately, it’s always about conversion, selling more vehicles and selling them faster but it’s also about making creating awareness and engagement with our customers. We measure a lot of digital KPI’s such as daily visits, time on site, used car pageviews and conversion rates to name a few.
Do you have any interesting figures to share?
Since adopting Phyron, our video views have increased by 21%. At the end of October 2021, we had a total of 9860 videos created since we went live. Due to the fact that our Phyron videos are also shared on Auto Trader, the number of unique visitors who played these videos rose by 33% since we went live.