BMW is a leader in their category, consistently competing for the number one spot in luxury automotive in Canada. Their current ultra-luxury lineup, the X7, the 7 Series, the i8, is the strongest it’s ever been. However, the audience for that lineup is more elusive than ever, spending less time in-market than previous years with more competitor options to consider. This high-end audience is the least likely to respond to one-to-one communications, and the quickest to make a purchase decision. How can they introduce this high-value target to their new ultra-luxury lineup if they’re actively avoiding new vehicle marketing?

The objective became finding a new way to reach high net-worth individuals and to lower their cost-per-lead amongst this segment. Google and Ipsos’ automotive research revealed that the majority of car purchase journeys are prompted by a major life event, and for their luxury audience, 33% of those purchases start when they’re moving into a new home.

The luxury car buyer is a luxury home buyer. The agency was now tasked to make BMW’s ultra-luxury lineup an unexpected and welcome part of the home-buying journey. To reach the high net-worth target, they would embed themselves where they knew the target would be looking.

Every driveway, a showroom. They partnered with high-end real estate agency Heaps Estrin to embed their new high-end vehicles into Heaps Estrin’s multi-million-dollar home listings and open houses. When a home was being staged and photographed, they staged the driveway with a brand new X7 or i8. When people came to check out a listing in person, the vehicle was still on display.

When home buyers visited the online real estate listings and flipped through a house’s photo gallery, they found a BMW in every exterior shot. The agency took a well-known, standard, utilitarian part of the house buying process, the image carousel, and turned it into a new media channel, making the ultra-luxury lineup hard to miss.

They used the location of each listing as a focal point to identify and reach adjacent luxury neighbourhoods. Knowing that the areas around their homes were filled with high-value leads, they turned each home listing into a geo-targeted, neighbourhood-specific ad designed to bring attention to their newly staged driveways. Anyone who clicked on one of their ads or inquired about the vehicle at an open house was put into contact with a BMW dealer.

To ensure that they were reaching high net-worth individuals, they created a geo-fenced area around each of their multi-million-dollar listings and ran targeted media that leveraged the property. This pool of potential buyers was used as the basis for building lookalike audiences across the GTA, who they reached with targeted mobile and digital ads driving to their lead capture page on BMW.ca.

This strategy ensured they made their way into their elusive target’s consideration set by being present at the moment they knew the targets were thinking about buying. Their first touchpoints with one of the listings acted as a passive introduction to a new ultra-luxury BMW – one that didn’t require anything of them or get in their way. The smart, targeted digital advertising changed the context of that introduction and worked to remind them of the vehicle they had just seen with a prompt to action.

For the most part, this was a digitally driven campaign. The agency turned online real estate listings into online BMW ads. They used display and mobile display media to geo-target affluent neighbourhoods and to reach likely luxury buyers. But the most meaningful and innovative activation took place in each of the driveways of the homes they worked with. Driveways became showrooms for their most valuable audience.

It resulted in a significant drop in cost-per-lead. Through the online lead-generation activity and in-person driveway showrooming, they lowered their cost per-lead for this class of vehicles by 56% and added a new pool of 37,000 prospects to their marketing efforts.