Creative, Strategy and Ratios:The Holy Trinity?

Whether you’re selling Porsches or air-conditioning services, you need optimal creative and make sure everyone is aware of your online metrics

No matter which types of products or services you’re offering online, you need to be aware that everyone within your organization has a stake, as well as something to contribute. So when you’re launching an online campaign, make sure to tap into all of your resources. This will help you focus your efforts to create a successful and fruitful promotion.

Working on the Porsche account years ago was a dream come true. So when I launched the Cayenne in Latin America I was thrilled…and scared. Scared because no one knew what the Cayenne really was.

Is it a “chick” car? Most of the ones in Latam were bought by men for their wives. Is it a “sports” car? The Cayenne GT-S, with around 525 HP, will almost match a GT3rs in 0-60 (4.5 v 3.8 seconds). Is it a “luxury” car? After all, it is a $100,000 Porsche. So what’s a Cayenne?

In real life, there’s only two ways to find out, none of them palatable to a business owner: do research (which can get slow and expensive) or guess. What we did has practical, real-world answers for small business owners.

We ran a teaser campaign featuring the three different elements we knew from talking to Porsche owners were important to them: power, luxury and size. We created a dozen or so banners, ran them in sites that we knew Porsche owners frequented, analyzed which one gathered the most clicks, generated the most visits to the site and, in two weeks, we had our answer. (Power, by the way.)

These are some of the screen grabs:

Please click to enlarge

We tried several creative executions:

• • Black cars

• • Red cars

• • Cars with a Porsche brand header

• • Cars without a Porsche brand header

Our results were simple: The black Cayenne, with the Porsche header and highlighting power, won handily.

Presto, we had the answer: That’s what potential Porsche buyers were looking for. The campaign was very successful and we met 75% of our unit goals by July 31, 50% of the year.