DerekCadzow.com creates imaginative, engaging websites like this car show site for select clients. This series highlights some of those sites and tells you the story behind each of them. Got a project in mind? Please let us know about it from the contact page.
Website: https://oceansideautoappraisers.com
Business: Specialty Auto Appraiser
Purpose: a unique web page to promote, instruct, and display a virtual car show
Auto Show page: https://oceansideautoappraisers.com/fathers-day-car-show/
My long-time best friend David in British Columbia, Canada, runs his own specialty auto appraisal business. Recently, we re-did his entire website and added a section for owner-for-sale specialty car listings.
As the world shut down due to Covid, he came up with a new idea.
Many of David’s clients enjoy taking their restored cars to meet friends and other car folk at the many auto shows held by local and provicial/state clubs around the country. These aren’t the famous and grandiose shows hosted in such places as London, Pebble Beach, Geneva, or Washington DC. These are the grass-roots shows put on by local people and hosted by their regional and local car clubs.
Unfortunately with the Covid-19 pandemic, there haven’t been any this year — they’ve all been cancelled. No car shows equals some very bored car guys.
But, if you know a car guy like David, you’ll also know that wouldn’t stop him…
He decided to host a virtual car show using his website at OceansideAutoAppraisers.com.
How did it work?
David used email, Mailchimp, and word-of-mouth to spread an appeal to car owners for 1-to-2 minute videos of their cars and themselves giving viewers a tour. They used a free file-transfer service called WeTransfer to send in the video files.
DerekCadzow.com created the branded video title and trailer and simply added them to the front and back of those videos that car owners edited themselves. When other car owners just sent David the raw video — we had fun editing those from scratch, adding the title and trailer, and writing the words on the video gallery page. We used Final Cut Pro for the video and audio editing and Elementor and WordPress for the website. We created David’s new YouTube account and hosted all the videos from there.
But sending everyone to multiple videos on YouTube would be a little complex AND would defeat the business purpose of getting people to go to the Oceanside Auto Appraiser website.
So we designed a page to present all the contributor’s car videos.
At first, David didn’t know how many people would participate — but, as videos continued to roll in we had to redesign the page three times to accommodate and display all the proud owners and their vintage and exotic automobiles.
David also gave a boost to some local auto-related businesses, car clubs, and specialty collectors with featured videos throughout the page.
He worked with Hagerty specialty auto insurance to stage the car show. In the spirit of the virtual event, Hagerty contributed a few of their own videos too, which were featured prominently throughout the page as the co-sponsor with Oceanside Auto Appraisers.
Results
In the end, almost 100 specialty cars can be seen on the car show page between individual contributors, collectors, clubs, and business. I think David was blown away with the reaction.
He also enjoyed a surge in visitors to his site increasing traffic by around 900 percent over the 30 days before the car show and received a number of complementary emails from enthusiastic participants and viewers.
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