Improved sentiment and nearly tripled orders

Auto-Teile-Unger, Germany's largest chain of workshops, has combined automotive repair and retail under one roof since its founding in 1985. With over 500 branches nationwide, ATU offers high-quality automotive services and products at attractive prices, positioning itself as a reliable partner for both private and business customers.

Despite being the leading automotive workshop chain in Germany, ATU faced declining brand awareness among younger target groups. Additionally, many potential customers were not sufficiently aware of the wide range of services and products on offer. The goal is to sharpen and strengthen the brand profile while specifically increasing the number of online appointment bookings and online shop revenue.

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In close collaboration with ATU, we developed a detailed social media strategy incorporating both organic and paid channels to expand their presence on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Our responsibilities include the entire organic channel and content strategy, content creation, as well as reactive and proactive community management and social listening to serve as a feedback loop. In paid social, we manage the promotion of the online shop and offline business, as well as campaign testing and performance measurement.

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Organic: 

Together with ATU, we opted for an entertaining, occasionally provocative, and self-deprecating strategy. We create relatable content that addresses everyday situations involving cars and workshops without directly pushing the ATU brand. The brand, products, or services are not the primary focus, ensuring users never feel like they are being subjected to a push marketing strategy.

A key aspect of our strategy is active social listening and community management. Through continuous, proactive community management, we maintain a presence on the accounts of other companies and users, commenting on their videos. Reactively, we monitor our own comment sections and use these insights to adapt the content on our own channels. One example is our response to the critical use of the brand name ATU, which is often jokingly twisted into "Amateure treiben Unfug" (Amateurs causing mischief).

Based on this feedback, we developed a humorous content series in which we address common negative comments, such as "You can't even perform an oil change," and debunk them in a lighthearted way. "Amateure treiben Unfug" has since become a fixed part of our social media identity and even our bio description.

At the same time, we handle our own mistakes and weaknesses with self-irony and communicate with the community on equal footing, as demonstrated by our hostage-taking video. This shows that ATU is not trying to maintain a rigid brand image and that we speak the language of Gen Z. This creative approach is very well received by the community and helps bridge the gap to our target audience.

The success of this concept is undeniable: three of our Reels reached over 6 million views and went viral, and we were able to organically drive many others to over 100,000 views. The "Love Score"—the percentage of comments that have received at least one like—is also over 80%.

In the future, we will also introduce a "brand persona"—an apprentice who takes control of the social media channels. This portrayal as a supposed friend and ally of the community is intended to create an authentic and accessible atmosphere that perfectly reflects social nativeness.

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Paid:‍

Parallel to our organic content strategy, we intensified ATU's paid social campaigns to boost the visibility of both the online shop and the stationary retail and branch network. A primary focus is on promoting online appointment bookings. We first established a solid foundation for performance measurement by implementing a tracking setup.

The campaign structure includes a generic traffic campaign, a conversion campaign to support sales in the online shop and via click-and-collect, and a lead campaign specifically for appointment bookings. These campaigns included both generic content that can run "always-on" as well as seasonal or monthly offers that provided additional incentives.

A central component is leveraging synergies between paid and organic content. We coordinate our shoots so that material is generated for both organic posts and paid ads. This approach ensures that the content is both authentic and highly relevant to our target audience, which significantly increases conversion rates.

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The courage to embrace provocative storytelling clearly pays off. However, this requires the brand to trust both the team and the content ideas, as well as short feedback loops. It is a natural reaction for many brands to be skeptical at first about appearing provocative in public. Yet, this very type of "vulnerability" and the way criticism is handled proves to be particularly effective in significantly increasing follower counts and reach (especially on Instagram) and in markedly improving overall sentiment. Of course, this strategy is not suitable for every brand, but ATU proves that being bold can be worth it. A careful test-and-learn approach helps to evaluate the opportunities.

Taking a holistic view of organic and paid content from a single source also proves to be particularly effective. This integrated approach prevents content from being published on channels that does not align with the agreed-upon strategy. Controlling the entire content production process makes it possible to ensure a consistent brand image and avoid wastage caused by uncoordinated individual actions.