In recent years, the following factors are affecting the oil change and car maintenance sector:
Jiffy Lube® Ontario represents 59 Jiffy Lube® stores across the Province of Ontario, Canada. For years, they have done exceedingly well by running coupon-based (e.g., $8 off your Pennzoil oil change) promotions through traditional media such as radio, newspaper, direct mail and TV. As the years passed, Jiffy Lube® Ontario’s marketing department watched the return on investment (ROI) with these traditional forms of media campaigns decrease.
In 2015, and the years to follow, the company boldly committed 50% of their marketing budget to be spent on digital media, a segment that probably contained less than 15% of their budgets historically.
With little background in digital marketing, the company had turned to tbk Creative to assist them in spending this money digitally. There was a lot of flexibility in what tbk Creative could suggest but any recommendations needed to be based on strong rationale and needed to go towards the goal of increasing car counts and revenues across the province.
Both Jiffy Lube® Ontario and tbk Creative knew a website by itself wouldn’t be the ticket to showing an increase in car counts and revenues. The two groups would need to come together to intelligently comb through the options, map out a plan that was logic-based for every proposed tactic, be willing to drop items that may be attractive but not be in alignment with the company’s core marketing goals, and push the envelop in some areas where their competitors were more passive or absent, so that they could stand up and reach out to new customers that may know of the Jiffy Lube® brand but had never visited one of their bays. In that spirit, five campaigns were considered that would galvanize the marketplace.
A quotation from Jiffy Lube® Ontario’s (JL Management), Director of Marketing, Rick Morton:
To understand the momentum and achievements of 2016 in their fullness, we’ve included a brief review of what was accomplished in 2015:
1. State-of-the-art website was built:
2. An integrated digital marketing strategy that included:
A strong foundation was built for the brand in 2015 considering, before that year, the company did very little digital marketing.
The focal point of 2016 was about iteratively making changes to a strong base and progressing Jiffy Lube® Ontario further into succeeding in the digital sphere:
Improve Google Search Ranking – When consumers grabbed their mobile device to “Google” a local oil change location, Jiffy Lube® had to show up in the Maps. A strong emphasis needed to be put on increasing rankings for non-branded key terms in the 59 geographic markets in which the stores operated in the province.
Increase Website Traffic – We knew there would be a correlation between an increase in qualified website traffic and an increase in car counts (revenue) for the brand. tbk Creative needed to formulate tactics that would increase website users.
Enhance User Experience – Consumers landing on the website from any device needed to have a seamless, omni-channel experience; one that embodied quality, professionalism, and the ability to find exactly what they were looking for with the least amount of effort possible.
Generate More Coupon Downloads – A big way to introduce new customers to Jiffy Lube® Ontario is through advertising coupons. The brand used to offer coupons mostly through direct mail and newspapers, but tbk Creative knew that if we could re-create this age-old tactic digitally, we could decrease the cost of acquisition.
Increase Car Counts – All told, Jiffy Lube® Ontario needed to see car counts go up across the province. This would be the confluence of the four goals above occurring on time and on budget.
Unique Homepage Content – When tbk Creative began working with Jiffy Lube® Ontario, the market was a fragmented with individual stores, the corporate US division, and two key franchisor corporations in Ontario having their own websites. Several years ago, Google was pushing towards ranking better, more authoritative websites versus hyper-local keyword domains. This influenced our decision to get all 59 stores under one domain: jiffylubeontario.com.
Aside from the authority to a search engine of all 59 stores acting in unison, it created effective cohesion in marketing as each store was now provided a professional, dedicated microsite area in the main domain in which they could keep up-to-date themselves with store information (e.g., hours), community news, and promotions.
The downside to this move is it created a lot of duplicate content; a vital SEO-centric project was commissioned in 2016 to role out unique content across all 59 store pages.
tbk Creative and Jiffy Lube® Ontario settled on a goal of 500-1000 unique words per store. To help facilitate this task, tbk Creative prepared a questionnaire and shared it with store managers and owners that touched on things like: why they love working for Jiffy Lube® (branded content), why they love their city, and what they do for the community to increase SEO rankings in the communities they serve.
Service Module – To better showcase Jiffy Lube® Ontario’s products and services (which vary based on location), we introduced a service module which promoted the franchisee’s unique service offering and allowed the user to stay on their local Jiffy Lube®’s microsite vs. being redirected to the corporate site to find this information. By doing it this way, we kept users one step closer to the information they needed to get to the store.
However, this presented a unique problem for a franchise business model. We aimed to satisfy the user by presenting them with service content right within their local Jiffy Lube® website, but we couldn’t use the same content for a specific service across all locations as this would be picked up as duplicate content by Google and other search engines.
The solution?
Through sharing the internal link equity with the corporate site, the franchisees of Jiffy Lube® Ontario are now able to advertise their unique service offering as it is fed from the corporate site onto their local pages, creating a seamless experience for the user.
Custom Promotions Manager – Customers will get a sense of the quality of service in the quality of the creative they see onsite. tbk Creative had to find a way to showcase the high-end custom creative we were preparing for Jiffy Lube® Ontario (corporate), and maintain its quality and visual appeal, across all modern browsers, screen sizes and devices. Thus a piece of critical website real estate, which we’ll refer to as Promo Box A, was built to give franchisees the ability to promote corporate coupon offers and events.
A feature in demand.
Promo Box A is strategically linked to the corporate landing page, which is loaded with keywords and SEO signals to promote the health of ongoing Google AdWords campaigns. This created a centralized place to showcase Jiffy Lube® Ontario’s corporate promotions (which tend to change seasonally and are also seen on billboards, on TV, on social media and across the web) creating a truly consistent brand experience for the user, built with the technology to send users exactly where they need to go for the information, or the coupon, they need to make a purchase.
Examples of custom creative in Promo Box A above.
As always, Jiffy Lube® Ontario wanted to give their franchisees the ability to market to their local audience which is why we gave them permission to override a corporate offer in Promo Box A, or make use of Promo Box B & C, have if they feel their local offer trumps what corporate is pushing out.
Above is an example of a Jiffy Lube® franchisee utilizing Promo Box A for its own location-specific promotion. The corporate promotion has been pushed down do Promo Box C.
In an already saturated marketplace, we needed to find a way to have the brand stand out amongst the noise, build Jiffy Lube® Ontario’s lead / customer database further, and develop a better relationship with the marketplace. To accomplish these goals, we turned to running four online sweepstakes throughout the year.
In simple terms, each sweepstake would have an attractive offer for users, and users could enter for a chance to win the given prize. We then supplemented the campaign with a marketing and communications plan that would consistent of advertising across its main website and store pages, digital advertising, and in-store.
These campaigns were launched strategically throughout the year during the typically low-revenue months.
To help create attractive prizes for its audience, Jiffy Lube® Ontario reached out to pre-existing partners such as Air Miles®, Shell, and Pennzoil. Some of the prizes that were acquired included:
Each landing page may look simple, but through running many online sweepstakes tbk Creative over the years, this page is strategically designed to maximize its leads.
Here’s some of the elements going on:
As a side story: Through live campaign experience, the elements above matter. In 2014, tbk Creative ran a similar sweepstakes for a client in a different industry. Its campaign started out poorly at only a 2.5% conversion rate on the sweepstakes landing page. We then launched a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) project and made a total of five changes to the page. After implementing, the landing page’s conversion rate increased to 13.5% representing an increase of 440%.
To provide an example of how one campaign performed in more detail, see below:
Digital advertising is a big part of the Jiffy Lube® marketing mix. Across its geographic markets, we could run hyper-local ads and monitor the number of coupon downloads occurring per marketing channel. tbk Creative then created a process with the client where they fed back to us the number of coupons being redeemed each month at their locations. With this data, through iteration, we could do a number of things including: spending more of the client’s budget on the highest yielding ads or ad channels, decrease spend or cancel underperforming ads, and probably most importantly, through tracing redemptions (purchases in-store) back to online efforts, assess the usefulness of the advertising and determine the cost per acquisition for the client.
In 2016, Jiffy Lube® Ontario’s media budget was utilized across Google AdWords Search, Google AdWords Display Network (Remarketing / InMarket / Topic Targeting / Keyword Targeting), Twitter, and the new addition of Instagram advertising which was added based on Jiffy Lube® Ontario’s desire to attract younger demographic its stores to create loyal customers in the long run.
Below are some statistics for our 5 best display, Facebook, and Instagram ad campaigns.
| Campaign | Clicks | Impressions | CTR | Avg. CPC | Spend | Conv. | Cost/ Conv. | Conv. Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Display – May 2016 | 664 | 166,133 | 0.38% | $0.76 | $481.92 | 23 | $20.95 | 3.46% |
| Display – December 2016 | 684 | 268,334 | 0.25% | $0.58 | $398.52 | 23 | $17.33 | 3.36% |
| Facebook – January 2016 | 3,909 | 1,847,491 | 0.21% | $0.78 | $3,036.06 | 483 | $6.29 | 12.36% |
| Instagram – February 2016 | 1,727 | 2,408,113 | 0.072% | $1.48 | $2,546.77 | 428 | $5.95 | 24.78% |
| Instagram – May 2016 | 969 | 1,235,939 | 0.078% | $3.51 | $3,397.71 | 199 | $17.07 | 20.54% |
Above are examples of HTML 5 animated Google Display Network ads tbk Creative produced for Jiffy Lube® Ontario.
Above are examples of high-performing Instagram and Facebook ads.
Imagine if ads a user would see online could change for users based on the weather outside? In 2016, this became real for Jiffy Lube® Ontario.
Search trend data showed that cold, snowy weather was likely to increase the interest in getting winter tires installed, and other cold weather services. Based on this understanding, tbk Creative built a weather script for the Be Wise Winterize and Tire Switch campaigns.
This script dynamically switched between two types of creative that were tailored to the weather conditions on a city-by-city basis across Ontario. When it was snowing and cold in an area, the ads presented were focused on services being immediately available at Jiffy Lube® Ontario locations. When the weather was mild or there was little snow buildup, the creative and messaging focused the user on being proactive and not getting caught unprepared.
For instance, on a day heavily snowing, we would show tire switch ads to a client (encouraging them to come in an get their winter tires on). On days where it wasn’t snowing, we’d run some of their other standard service ads such as oil change.
With over 11,000 new emails generated from online sweepstakes in the 2014/2015 season, we had a great pool of potential and current customs that we felt through targeted and attractive email marketing, could drive more sales.
In 2016, we introduced an online newsletter, distributed monthly, that focused on promoting the company’s service offering, while educating our subscribers on Jiffy Lube® Ontario’s philanthropic efforts, newly published blog articles and offers.
Throughout my years working on the Jiffy Lube account and strategizing as the Digital Manager, it has reinforced the power of data and iteration. By collecting data from each location for each individual ad platform, we gave ourselves the opportunity to analyze this performance at the most granular level. We can now allocate budgets and optimize ad platforms based on that specific location’s performance. We can report on a direct ROI for each location and, as a result, accelerate their integrated marketing strategy.
The year 2015 marked Jiffy Lube Ontario’s big dive into the digital arena. Throughout the term we consistently optimized our ad campaigns and by the end had really found our “sweet spot” – seeing all time lows for key metrics such as click through rate, conversion rate and cost per conversion. Moving into 2016, this freed up some room in the budget to run new pilot ad campaigns outside of our foundational set of digital advertising products and platforms. We figured one new platform in particular would help generate a solid amount of impressions and traffic, but we were sceptical it would be a big driver of coupon conversions. We were pleasantly surprised to see that it provided more conversions at a lower cost than one of our standard ad products. I now realize the value investing a sample selection of budget in to pilot programs as they are a great way to obtain valuable data, and the results you get may just surprise you!
