Driven by an innovative website, PerformanceCars has solidly established itself as a trusted, premium automotive dealer group in Ontario's Niagara Region. Powered by eZ Publish, the PerformanceCars website is a core component of its marketing strategy, with easily updated interactive media content and automatically updated car inventory pages. As a result, it has become an informative and exciting destination for existing and prospective car owners.

Background and goals

Founded in 1964, PerformanceCars is Niagara's largest automotive dealer group, with 11 franchises and 7 used car locations all in the St. Catharine's area. In addition to selling new and pre-owned cars, PerformanceCars provides parts and services, including a fully-featured auto spa with detailing, full interior cleaning, paint protection and more.

A little over three years ago, PerformanceCars started a re-branding initiative from its previous Performance Group name. The PerformanceCars brand needed to be strongly associated with the group's knowledge, experience and customer care. However, its website was not a key focus and was built entirely in Flash, making it mostly inaccessible to search engines. In an effort to better promote its brand, PerformanceCars approached Internet marketing firm Site Position in February 2007. Its two main goals were to increase the visibility of its website and the activity around pre-owned vehicles. Achieving these two goals would help to capture more of a market that is increasingly looking to online media. This led to a technical partnership with Blend Interactive, an eZ Partner.

Project details

The website was given a complete makeover, including both content and design, and was also structurally re-built to run on eZ Publish. Among other reasons, eZ Publish was chosen for its power, flexibility and ease of use; its ability to generate sites optimized for search engines; and its native support for seamlessly embedding rich media with text and images. As Roseanne Morissette, Director of Marketing & Communications for PerformanceCars explains, most of the development was done within a 45-day period. The site was launched on August 20, 2007.

Features

A clean and functional design enables visitors to quickly locate the information that they need. Each franchise in the dealer group has a customized portal, although the entire site has a consistent look and feel. Videos enhance the interactivity of the website and rotating banners highlight customer testimonials. The wealth of information available about the cars, the franchises and even the staff help to solidify the PerformanceCars brand.

Previously, Morissette had to ask their design agency to make any website changes. After some basic training from Site Position and the help of the eZ Publish Content Management Basics book, Morissette was able to quickly learn how to edit and create pages. She is particularly pleased with how easy it is to combine the text, photos, Flash elements and videos from external sources (such as YouTube and Google Video) that make up a page.

External systems integration

The pre-owned inventory sections of the PerformanceCars website are seamlessly updated to provide site visitors with relevant, interactive and up-to-date information. Supported by an external service from Boost Motor Group, each of the dealerships updates pre-owned vehicle information on a regular basis, with extensive technical specifications, comments and pictures for each car. Twice daily, the PerformanceCars eZ Publish website synchronizes its information with the Boost database, ensuring that the website is always current. The database is also aligned with other sites such as driving.ca and Auto Trader to expand PerformanceCars' reach.

Marketing and organizational commitment

One of the most important factors in website projects is to secure organizational commitment, and PerformanceCars is dedicated to following its internet strategy. Morissette notes that people are interested in buying vehicles, and that will not change, regardless of the medium used. Over the past two years, the marketing department has scaled down its newsprint, radio and other traditional media efforts. Consequently, the website is an important component, although not the only component of the overall strategy. Marketing is still an integrated process, and the website has helped PerformanceCars to get more out of each dollar spent.

Performance measuring

Google Analytics and search engine ranking reports are two of the ways that PerformanceCars regularly tracks leads and website performance. It is able to measure which websites and keywords are producing leads. Contact forms help to measure conversion rates, and there is a dedicated phone number for inquiries coming from the website.

"The website is one of the first things that we've had that is measurable. It has opened up a whole new world of possibilities. Previously, you put an ad in the paper, and you wouldn't really know what kind of an impact it made," says Morissette.

One of the challenges is to rate the level of success of the website, since PerformanceCars has few previous website metrics with which to compare current results. However, Morissette is pleased with the outcome so far, with a more relevant site, reduced costs, and a steady stream of website leads. After an encouraging start to the new online strategy, future goals include: the development of an automotive club; improving the site's appeal to women buyers; and optimizing the structure of the site to reduce the number of required clicks for visitors.

Visit the PerformanceCars website at http://www.performancecars.ca.