Building the social presence behind an independent Cardiff dealership

Birchwood Motors is an independent used car dealership in Cardiff. A real team, real cars, and a reputation built on being straight with people.

Morgan runs it. Alex runs the sales floor. Sam looks after first-time buyers. Oscar keeps the cars on the road. It’s the kind of dealership people recommend to their mates, because the person who sold you the car is the same person who picks up the phone six months later.

On the surface, nothing about Birchwood looked like it needed help being trusted.

But used car dealerships have a social media problem that trust doesn’t fix. Every dealership feed looks the same. A car on the forecourt, a price, a phone number. Scroll past one and you’ve scrolled past all of them. The content was accurate and the cars were good, and none of that mattered, because nobody stops for a stock photo of a Golf.

The dealership had personality. The feed had none.

The people who make Birchwood worth buying from were invisible online. A team that’s funny in person was posting like a classified ad. And in a market where buyers are nervous, comparing five dealerships at once, and expecting to be mugged off, the feed gave them nothing to feel.

To grow, Birchwood didn’t need to list more cars. It needed people to recognise the team before they ever set foot on the forecourt.

We stopped posting cars and started posting the dealership.

The insight was simple: the cars aren’t the content. The team is.

A used car is a used car. What makes someone drive across Cardiff to buy from Birchwood rather than the place round the corner is the feeling they’ll be looked after. That feeling comes from people, and people were the one thing the feed wasn’t showing. Morgan, Alex, Sam and Oscar are the reason the dealership works. They had to become the reason the content works.

“Car dealerships are terrified of being funny because they think it makes them look unprofessional. It’s the opposite. If the technician can take the mick out of the sales manager on camera, you trust them both more. That’s a team that isn’t hiding anything.”Finn Hyett, founder of Proteus Digital

“People don’t trust a car dealership. They trust Oscar. So we put Oscar on camera.”

The second insight was about tone. British car culture already has a language for this, and it’s Top Gear. Dry, self-deprecating, affectionate about cars and merciless about each other. It’s a tone the audience already knows and loves, and almost no dealership uses it. So Birchwood did.

The third was about what to ask for. Early on, the content leaned towards positioning: making the dealership look premium and trustworthy. That built the right perception, but perception alone doesn’t sell cars. So the mix shifted towards balanced growth, with more content built to drive enquiries, test drives and reasons to visit now.

Making Birchwood the dealership people watch even when they’re not buying a car.

Our strategy was to make Birchwood the dealership people watch even when they’re not buying a car.

The team became the talent. Every month, Proteus filmed on the forecourt with Morgan, Alex, Sam and Oscar. Sales manager versus technician. The first-time buyer expert explaining what dealers don’t tell you. The owner being outnumbered by his own staff. Scripted enough to land, loose enough to feel real.

Campaigns were built to convert. The July summer holiday competition, where one in ten cars sold won a family holiday to Spain, gave the content a clear reason to ask for the sale. Every post that month pointed at the forecourt, with the team selling the offer in their own voices rather than through a graphic.

The resource allocation moved with the business. The first months were weighted towards perception, building the dealership’s image. Once that was established, the split shifted to balanced growth: more attention and activation content, so the audience that now recognised the team had a reason to come in. September was the result: the dealership’s best month on record.

“The best thing Birchwood had was four people who are genuinely good on camera and didn’t know it. We didn’t need to invent anything. We just needed to film the dealership the way it actually is, give it a tone the audience already loved, and then make sure every laugh had a reason to visit attached to it.”Finn Hyett, founder of Proteus Digital