Car Toys
The Drive You Deserve
Cars and trucks have always been about individual expression: everyone has a different idea of the perfect drive. Car Toys, with 48 locations and 1,000 employees, understands the myriad ways a vehicle can be adapted to better suit each driver's desires. They know how to make a car be more than a car, so when you sit down, turn on the stereo, and wrap your hands around the steering wheel, you're met with that indescribable sensation: it just feels right.
Services
Research & Strategy
Brand Voice
Campaign Development
Digital Strategy & Planning
Digital Media Planning
Content Creation
The Challenge
Car Toys is the largest independent specialty car audio retailer in the country, known for its wide product selection and unbeatable installation expertise. In addition to taking over their sizable monthly ad production, we were tasked with evolving the brand to meet a new generation of customers and vehicles, including promoting Car Toys’ leadership in “Factory Sound Upgrades” — complete audio upgrade packages that integrate seamlessly with a vehicle’s stock head unit.
We started with a new campaign built around the tagline “the drive you deserve.”The tagline speaks to both the literal (Car Toys improves people's drives by making their cars safer and more fun) as well as the emotional (the superior drive of Car Toys installers and staff to serve their customers).
Strategy
While Car Toys has a solid e-commerce presence, its dozens of physical locations are the bread and butter of its retail operation. We felt that the brand’s digital presence could do more to both capture online shoppers and guide them to brick-and-mortar stores. To reach, serve, and track customers better, we initiated a monthly digital advertising push, created helpful new owned media content, and implemented event tagging in Google Analytics 4.
Deployment
We produced a new landing page around “the drive you deserve,” highlighting Car Toys’ history, expertise, and services in a way its traditional promotion-heavy advertising didn’t address. We also wrote a set of new evergreen blog posts to showcase Car Toys’ experts, provide advice to customers, and build SEO authority.
To address the Factory Sound Upgrade challenge, we crafted another bespoke landing page. Most new vehicles come with head units that aren’t designed to be replaced, leading to confusion around whether an audio upgrade is possible at all. The lander visually guided customers through the world of audio options available to them, spelling out speakers, amps, subs, DSPs, and wiring harnesses in plain English.
Finally, we ramped-up the Car Toys’ digital advertising presence with a high-tech, targeted approach. This included audience prospecting campaigns across paid search (Google), Meta (Facebook and Instagram), and programmatic. Additionally, we used behavioral targeting, retargeting, and geo-targeting to reach consumers with a Car Toys store in their area. We then monitored traffic reports across stores to know where to send extra support or if we should increase spending in any given geographic area to help boost foot traffic to those stores.