Context
AutoAmerica sources cars at US auctions and delivers them to buyers in Ukraine: free vehicle selection, structural and legal checks, a full landed-cost calculation, a specialist in the States who photographs any car on request, and sixteen years of auction licences behind it. Marketing was a set of activities that didn’t talk to each other, with no audit, no funnel, and no agreement on what any of it was supposed to change.
Diagnosis
The client research settled it. 54% of customers had arrived through a recommendation or a review from someone they knew. 34% found the company online. So more than half the business ran on other people’s word.
The depth interviews returned an NPS of 70, which explains why that worked: existing clients were doing the selling.
It also exposed the bottleneck. There were almost no published reviews. In a category where a stranger wires five figures abroad for a car they’ve never seen, the buyer’s real question is "who else did this and did it work out?" The company had sixteen years of answers and no way for anyone to hear them. Half the market was being served by word of mouth and the other 34% arriving online found nothing.
The licences had the same problem. They were mentioned, never shown.
Decisions
- Made review collection the first priority, starting with clients from the past eighteen months in Kyiv and Odesa where the cars were physically reachable
- Made video the default format and set a standing rule: request a review at the close of every deal, and publish all of them, including the negative ones
- Put the auction licences on the site instead of referring to them
- Segmented buyers five ways and wrote messaging for each personality type rather than one pitch for everyone
Results
The engagement delivered a 125-page digital marketing strategy: a full audit, depth-interview findings, five buyer segments, competitor SMM analysis across four rivals, a four-week content plan template, and channel-level goals for Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Telegram.
The most uncomfortable section was the last. It quoted the company’s own replies to customers back at them and rewrote each one: a dismissive phrase aimed at a commenter, a price question answered with "leave your phone number" and no indication of where, a misspelled customer name sitting beside the correct name Facebook had already supplied. Every one of those had a paying customer reading along.