Waze routes more service work to Kia store

Editor's note: Kia of Bedford began working with PureCars in November 2016. A previous version of this article had the wrong date.

All dealerships have ways of attracting customers for vehicle maintenance and service.

Kia of Bedford’s new way is Waze.

The suburban Cleveland store, which began advertising on navigation app Waze in January, credits the platform’s targeted marketing for increasing the dealership’s service and repair leads by 57 percent through the first half of the year.

“Waze has been instrumental in picking up business that would have elsewise just driven by,” said David Gruhin, director of operations at Kia of Bedford. “I want to be able to put our ads where people are looking, especially in a vehicle.”

The dealership’s advertisements on Waze range from offering service discounts to promoting the waiting area with free food and Starbucks coffee. They are location-based ads based on proximity to the dealership, which helps in lowering costs and increasing relevance, Gruhin said.

Since using the app, the store has cut $30,000 from its monthly marketing and advertising spend — its $175,000 per month average is now down to $145,000. At the same time, the store has doubled service revenue and increased sales to more than 400 new and used vehicles per month. When Gruhin started at Kia of Bedford in September 2016 as a director of digital marketing, the dealership was selling roughly 300 vehicles a month.

“Waze has not only helped us increase service business … it has increased our opportunity to sell somebody a new or pre-owned vehicle as well,” said Gruhin, adding that the store has moved up the national dealership rankings for the Korean brand. “It’s about optimizing where our budget dollars are going.”

Gruhin, 37, attributes “a lot” of the store’s recent success to dealership vendor PureCars, a digital marketing agency that the dealership had been working with since November 2016. PureCars, he said, played a major role in the store’s efforts with Waze.

The dealership now gets 25 calls a month from the Waze ads, while spending less than $2,000 a month on that platform.

“It’s about working smarter, not harder,” Gruhin said. “We easily believe we can sell 500 cars a month.”

Gruhin, a software developer and digital marketer by trade, had never worked in automotive retail before and was surprised by the resistance he received from his peers at the dealership about digital marketing and advertising on platforms such as Waze.

“I was met with a lot of pushback,” he said. “They’d say, ‘You don’t know anything about cars. … It was a long fight. They couldn’t get out of that automotive mindset to listen to the computer guy.”

Although he didn’t know much about automotive, Gruhin knew computers, digital marketing and advertising.

So when the store had some months with less-than-stellar profits last year, the owner gave him a chance to try “something different.”

Gruhin cut most of the store’s traditional advertising, including all TV commercials, to focus on the targeted, geographic-specific digital ads through Waze, Google analytics and other platforms.

“We were spending ungodly amounts of money on traditional advertising,” he said. “We don’t have to do that anymore.”