AUTOMOTIVE CASE STUDY
HOW KECG GREW EOFY SALE EVENT ATTENDANCE BY 400% FOR A MELBOURNE DEALER GROUP
A Melbourne dealership’s sale events were struggling to bring people through the door. We needed to turn a trickle of foot traffic into a crowd, and turn that crowd into sales.
Leading Australian Automotive Dealer Group
Objective – Driving Showroom Attendance for EOFY Sale Event and Increase Showroom Sales
Client & Context
A LONG-STANDING PARTNER, ONE BIG EVENT
Our client is a large automotive group based in Melbourne’s west, specialising in mid-tier cars and SUVs, and a partner of ours for over 3 years. They came to us after experiencing gaps in client relationships and speed to market with their previous agency, particularly when it came to executing time-sensitive offers and sale events.
For this campaign, the dealership planned a one-day sale event aimed at the local community, with the target audience being middle-class buyers, young people, and young families. The event included an animal farm, DJ, sausage sizzle, and spin the wheel activations, designed to create a family-friendly environment that made car buying feel approachable and accessible. The objective was to ensure the right audience was aware of the event and motivated to attend ready to buy.
The Challenge
GREAT EVENT, EMPTY SHOWROOM
In previous sale events, the dealership consistently struggled to drive attendance, averaging just 12 people through the door on the day. With limited foot traffic, test drives and sales failed to follow, leaving the dealership well short of the results the event was designed to deliver.
This created a costly imbalance. Significant investment went into organising the event itself, the activities, staffing, and on-the-day experience, but with so few attendees, that spend wasn’t converting into the test drives and sales needed to justify it
Objectives
What success needed to look like
With the event just two weeks from planning to delivery, our objectives centred on two key outcomes:
1. Build awareness of the sale event within the local community, ensuring the target audience knew about the event and the experience on offer.
2. Generate test drive bookings ahead of and during the event, converting awareness into action on the day.
Paid Meta campaigns ran for one week prior to the event, giving us a focused window to drive both reach and bookings. Beyond the immediate metrics, the dealer principal placed strong emphasis on building a sense of community around the dealership, encouraging previous customers to attend and re-engage with the team in person, strengthening relationships between customers and the dealership.
Strategy
A FACE TO THE BRAND, A REASON TO SHOW UP
Our strategy combined static and video creatives to bring the event to life ahead of the day. Static ads showcased the new model alongside the family-friendly activities on offer, while video content took audiences on a personal walkthrough of the dealership led by the dealer principal, putting a face to the brand and building trust with the local community.
We focused targeting on local audiences, layering in retargeting to people who had previously engaged with the dealership’s ads or submitted their details through past campaigns. This meant we could reach new local families while also re-engaging warmer audiences already familiar with the dealership, giving the event a stronger chance of converting interest into attendance. Two days prior to the event, we also sent an EDM to the dealership’s existing customer base, ensuring previous customers were notified directly and encouraged to attend. AMS tracked lead activity throughout and fed directly into the dealership’s CRM, giving the team full visibility into who was engaging and how that activity translated into results.
Meta, primarily Instagram and Facebook, led the channel mix, supported by Google Search, SEO, and YouTube Reels to extend reach and capture intent across multiple touchpoints in the lead up to the event.
Execution
REFINED IN DAYS, NOT WEEKS
The campaign ran with a budget of $500 spread across one week ahead of the event. Early into the campaign, we identified that creative was placing too much emphasis on the event activities rather than the vehicle itself. As the priority was driving test drive bookings, we refined the creative to bring the new model and a stronger call to action to the forefront, ensuring the messaging stayed aligned with the dealership’s primary goal.
Results
FROM 12 TO 60+, SALES TO MATCH
The refined strategy delivered a significant uplift in attendance and sales. The event drew 60+ attendees, up from a previous average of just 12, resulting in 17 sales across the single day, a result that far exceeded past performance for this style of event.
Creative reached 21,000+ impressions in the lead-up week, with the Instagram Reel content in particular generating strong engagement and response from the local audience. The event delivered on the dealership’s broader goal of community connection, with attendees given the chance to speak directly with the dealer principal and sales team, creating a lively, personable atmosphere that reflected the brand’s local presence.
Ready When You Are
WANT THIS KIND OF TURNOUT AT YOUR NEXT EVENT?
Tell us about your dealership and your next sale event. We’ll map out what a properly targeted, properly timed campaign looks like for you.