The Project
How do you make a brand stand out from the crowd in the competitive car hire search market at the same time as inspiring customers who are taking a trip of a lifetime?
We worked with Hertz to create a US road trip planning tool that allowed target audiences in Europe to build their trip with ease but also gain inspiration and ideas from the people who know these routes better than anyone else.
In doing so, not only would we enhance the Hertz brand experience and customer service, we’d also secure valuable search visibility and number one rankings for important keywords within the customer journey.
Our Solution
Having worked with Hertz for a number of years we understood the size of opportunity for the US road trip market and we knew what made their audience tick.
Two distinctive types of US road trip sites were popular – blog feature articles which gave a vivid take of another person’s road trip and highly technical planners which allowed users to plan their trips with military precision. We cut straight down the middle to service the best of both worlds – providing a vivid inspiration for a US road trip, but allowing the user to personalise their trip, without the need for a complicated mapping tool.
Our Hertz Road Trip Planner tool would suggest exciting road trip itineraries based on the area that the user wanted to visit, their interests and who they’d be travelling with. But where we really made a difference was by picking the brains of the people in those key Hertz pick-up locations – the people who meet the road trippers every day – for their top tips. We weren’t looking for those everyday ‘tick-box’ attractions, we wanted to go off the beaten track and allow our customers to make their own unique memories by exploring America’s hidden gems.
The campaign was shared on owned and paid channels and we worked with our partner PR agencies to outreach to relevant sites and powerful influencers across parenting and culture, to food and travel.
Visit the website Go to the hertz road trip planner websiteWhat we achieved
Within three months of launch, Hertz was driving additional traffic across its European sites for important keywords in the US fly-drive market, positioning the brand at the start of the customer journey.
To date, the site ranks in 16 top-three positions, out-performing the official website for the US tourism body VisitUSA.com in many cases, and holds a further 39 top ten rankings.
148%
increasein traffic from organic search
173%
increasein sales from organic search
$300
higheraverage order value
