Car subscription start-up, Drive Fuze, selected Common Ground to help them increase brand awareness and generate sign-ups through strategic SEO and PPC, with a view of becoming the market leader.

Car subscriptions provide a flexible alternative to car ownership, in direct competition with the more common approach of PCP/PCH, and are becoming increasingly popular.

Due to this rapidly growing and highly competitive market, Drive Fuze wanted to seize the opportunity to disrupt the sector and become the go-to for car subscriptions from the outset,

The campaign was aimed at people actively looking for a car subscription (or information about getting one), as well as those who were in the market for a traditional lease but could be tempted by a car subscription instead, amongst other factors.

This gave us approximately 17.8 million users when targeting via Meta. When compared to the organic search volume of 39,000 per month for the “Car Subscription” topic, the need to create demand as well as capture it was clear.

To do this, we adopted a multipronged approach of both PPC and SEO.

Our PPC strategy involved making use of Meta and Performance Max to capitalise on our strong target audience numbers by educating them on what a car subscription service is. We also expanded this to target a custom user group who were looking for a new car.

Driving sign-ups from the beginning of the campaign was of huge importance. We used Google Search Ads to target users searching for broad terms, brand-focused terms, and subscription alternatives.

As well as this, a combination of new data and client feedback allowed us to optimise our campaigns and distribute the budget accordingly, improving cost per sign-up as well as the quality of the lead.

To support our PPC strategy, our SEO strategy focused on creating content that covered queries around the topic “Car Subscription”.

We built landing pages based on key terms such as car makes, models, and emissions types, as well as subscription lengths, to encourage sign-ups as early as possible.

A change in approach then saw us focus on more general, educational car subscription-related content and adjust where the budget was prioritised, while a link acquisition strategy was also brought in to provide a strong, future-proof backlink profile.

As with any new entrant, rapidly increasing Drive Fuze’s brand visibility within a competitive market of established companies presented a challenge.

This, coupled with a brand new website that provided little to no data, meant that we had to start from scratch in terms of data and authority.

Further to this, the development budget at Drive Fuze was reasonably limited, with digital marketing one of many focus areas. This led to challenges in key deliverables (such as recommendations for on-page optimisation, site structure, and page speed) being carried out.

Our close relationship with Drive Fuze’s leadership team would prove crucial in overcoming this aspect of our challenge.

Given the tough competitive landscape, achieving eye-opening results in this market would be challenging for even the most established brands and more so for a newcomer such as Drive Fuze.

But, the campaign was a roaring success.

Our carefully planned paid and organic search strategies saw Drive Fuze achieve an excellent 4:1 ROI for the campaign, establishing their brand and gaining them many new sign-ups in the process.

The number of sign-ups generated exceeded our forecasted target by over 17%, while the average PPC CPA was 25% lower, with our focus on educating our target users about an emerging solution proving key to this.

We turned challenges beyond our control into an advantage, with the switch of budget allocation focusing our efforts on targeting both raising awareness and driving leads in unison.

Brand visibility in the SERPs increased by 300% and position 1 for our target head term, “Car Subscription” was achieved within 6 months. Visibility was also increased across a wider set of targeted terms during the campaign, with at least 9 others featuring Drive Fuze in the top 10 results.

The campaign’s success also resulted in Common Ground and Drive Fuze winning the award for Best Use of Search – Automotive (Small) at the UK Search Awards 2023.