Case Study: How Savaari car rentals leveraged Mom Influencers to drive brand awareness | #casestudy

For their Diwali campaign, Savaari took an initiative to ensure mothers don’t miss out on meeting their own family and spend time with their parents and siblings through their #HomecomingWithSavaari campaign, taking a hyper-local marketing route with Mom influencers.

With a view to ensuring safe travels, especially for new and expectant mothers, Savaari Car Rentals rolled out an offering in the form of a special discount on its car rental services throughout the month of November. The case study delves deeper into the execution and results of the campaign.

Industry Introduction

The most conservative estimates put the Indian Car Rental Market at $15B annually. Though billions of dollars have been spent by two on-demand players (Uber and Ola) in the market during the past 7 years, it is quite surprising that 85% of the market still remains unorganized.

The older Car Rental companies, which are primarily focused on corporate customers, provide quality services but run complete manual operations, owing to which their pricing is significantly expensive. The on-demand players on the other hand are not genetically designed to offer customization and manual support to customers. This is where Savaari Car Rentals comes in.

Introduction to Savaari Car Rentals

Savaari was started in 2006 to fill the gap that existed in the Indian online Car Rental market. It is an online chauffeur driven car rental company in India spanning 2000+ cities and still growing. Savaari operates both in the B2C as well as the B2B verticals.

Campaign Summary

On the occasion of Diwali 2020, team Savaari attempted to solve a mobility-related issue dealt with mostly by pregnant women and new mothers. Out of the many problems the pandemic has posed, providing a safe commute for these women has been a major cause of their social isolation. The problem ran so deep that this vulnerable segment hasn’t met their own kith and kin for over 8 months.

Therefore, during this festive season, Savaari ensured these mothers don’t miss out on meeting their own family. They could get home safe and just in time for an intimate family celebration. The campaign was named #CelebrateTogethernesswithSavaari.

Problem Statement/Objective

Due to the health risks involved in traveling with a young child during the pandemic, new and expecting mothers have been reluctant to avail all modes of public transport to travel to a different city. Since railway stations and bus stands are breeding grounds for the deadly virus, commuting to smaller cities that require a train or bus journey for the last-mile connectivity has been particularly aggravating.

Savaari expanded its one-way car rental services to 5 lakh routes in the midst of the lockdown to facilitate essential travel and easy commute to over 2000 cities in India. The women went on to share their grievances about the limited safe and affordable commute options to their hometowns (tier-II or III cities) and their inability to meet old parents in smaller towns due to the same.

With this in the backdrop, the goal of the campaign was to leverage key social influencers belonging to its’s focus audience segment to explore, experience, and evangelize Savaari’s Car Rentals services.

Creative Idea

The intent of this campaign was to spread the word amongst this section of women that in case they require a reliable, safe, convenient, and affordable commute to visit their hometown along with their toddlers, Savaari Car Rentals is their go-to solution.

In order to maximise the reach in this demographic, it collaborated with 8 credible mommy influencers on Instagram. The idea was to give them a hands-on experience of Savaari’s hassle-free and safety-focused service, so they could evangelize the key use-cases to their social circles in a manner that would connect best with their audience and deliver the message effectively.

Challenges

Starting September, the operations and customer support teams at Savaari received inquiries from young mothers from different parts of the country looking for safe transportation back home. The service executed over 90% of these trips. However, when it came to shortlisting mothers on social media, it wasn’t as easy finding influencers who fit in well with it’s use-case, simultaneously having a huge, credible social stature so as to ensure the message was spread to a large audience. Moreover, Savaari also wanted to highlight the fact that it’s one-way services weren’t limited to metro cities. Hunting for influencers in smaller cities was another challenge.

After over 3 weeks, the service was able to finalise 8 diverse influencer moms with reach varying from 7000 to 17,000, who were based out of smaller towns such as Faridabad and Ranchi as well as from tier-I cities as Bangalore and Delhi.

Also Read: Case Study: How Suta built a gender-inclusive Instagram campaign for Navratri

Execution

The campaign was introduced to Savaari’s audience through it’s Facebook and Instagram handles.

The teams reached out to its target audience of pregnant women and young mothers by leveraging the follower base of 8 mommy influencers. The various pain points of these women – safety concerns whilst traveling with the toddler, convenience of doorstep to doorstep service, access to a smaller town where flights don’t operate, affordable one-way fares on routes which are not serviceable by other cabs/car rental companies were addressed and demonstrated well by Savaari and its chauffeurs.

As a part of the campaign, the 8 mommy influencers shared their experience of using Savaari by the means of one static post and one video post on their respective handles.

The campaign was strictly Instagram focused. Women aged 25 to 35 (our TA in this campaign) are regular Instagram users and fellow mommy bloggers and influencers for their daily dose of parenting tips and hacks.

Results

Over the three weeks of the campaign, the following are the key quantitative metrics from the campaign

• Reach – 100,000 unique impressions.
• Engagement – 300 Comments | 3000 Likes | 150 Bookmarks/Shares.
• Advocacy – 10% improvement in customer ratings on Google Reviews, Play Store and Tripadvisor.

CMO Quotes

“Savaari’s approach to Influencer marketing has always been in identifying real consumer needs and incorporating solutions to this need through organic trials of our car rental services by a niche target audience. This formula has given a high resonance between the service and the marketing message, and the organic trials by influencers have led to high advocacy and trust amongst key target group networks. Furthermore, this focused approach has always given us a cost-effective and high ROI outcome that comfortably outperforms other Top of the Funnel channels. The Diwali Homecoming campaign is one such successful campaign from our roster,” said Anand Dorairaj (VP, Head of Marketing & Growth).

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