CASE STUDY

AVIA Petrol Stations Hit Higher Sales Targets by Switching to PinMeTo

Overview

AVIA is an international Swiss umbrella brand uniting 90 medium-sized member companies with over 3100 petrol stations, operating in 15 European countries, and serving millions of customers. By making service, customer proximity, and quality their core values, the company developed a unique international distribution and service system, allowing all their branches to be independent and implement local customer-driven strategies for each region.

The company diversified itself by maintaining contact with its customers, providing personalized service, and staying flexible to adjust its range of products and services to real needs.

The Challenge

Boost sales by improving their online presence, find a better location management tool than the one they were using

All the efforts from AVIA's side to be the best in the field showed good results, but good was not enough. Each business has its own nuances, and in the case of petrol stations, it’s the fact that motorists are not brand loyal.

What does this mean for a petrol company? It means one-time buyers, big marketing budgets, and unique customer behavior that requires a tailored approach.

You are not going to drive to your favorite petrol station when you see your gas tank running low. You will either choose the closest station or search for one online.

So, a decision was made to invest in online visibility on all digital maps and platforms. Every time AVIA was not visible in searches for petrol stations, they were losing foot traffic to their competitors. They went for a software similar to PinMeTo, but the results were underwhelming.

The solution

Automate local SEO & reputation management processes, offer a better location management system to boost the sales

With the goal to increase their market share by improving their online presence, local rankings, and brand reputation, they made the decision to implement PinMeTo into their marketing processes.

Having expertise in the petrol industry and experience improving petrol companies’ organic results, PinMeTo was able to make sure AVIA got all the tools and fast onboarding they needed to improve their results as soon as possible.

Our first goal was to provide a seamless and fast onboarding while making sure we’ve:

Collected all the necessary data
Connected all the networks
Trained AVIA team members by showing how to make the best out of the tool
Claim and create locations on the networks
Solve potential complications and more.

AVIA chose to start with two of our main services: Listings and Reviews. By connecting their data to these tools, they were able to:

Take control of their locations’ data
Keep the locations up to date on all maps services
Save time on optimizing around 3075 locations
Ensure searchers see only correct information about each location
Get detailed insights about the locations from one dashboard
Improve local SEO results by acting on Reviews
Increase sales and trust by responding to customer reviews.

The outcome

Numbers doubled and tripled in different AVIA markets resulting in more sales

Currently, PinMeTo hosts all of AVIA’s location data, and the insights from all 15 countries and 3075 petrol stations keep improving, which helps us believe in our solution even more and strengthens the trust between our companies.

We’ve received a customized offer, suitable for the organizational structure of AVIA, and the customer support was very helpful and friendly. As a result, we've got higher click rates and visibility on Google.

Samuel Hartmann, Brand & Project Manager Europe, AVIA

Let’s go over some numbers and compare two similar periods to see the year-over-year progressions and the impact of using PinMeTo.

We’ve compared the results from 4 main markets between January and February in 2021 and 2022.

To understand why these results are important we need to remember the specifics of the industry: map searches and appearing in search results are the main organic paths from search to sales for petrol stations.

AVIA skyrocketed its online visibility within one year which, in turn, led to an exponential increase in sales.

Some outstanding changes were registered in the number of Actions Taken on Google. Direction clicks are an important indicator of the actual interest in visiting the petrol station. For instance, the Spanish market showed a substantial change in Direction clicks going from 52,7K to 94,4K which is almost an 80% increase in one year. And if we look at the results in Switzerland, we can see around a 50% increase in Actions Taken jumping from 21,4K to 31,9K.

AVIA has a substantial presence in the petrol market, especially in its native Switzerland. The company keeps increasing its market share and growing in many countries in Europe. PinMeTo local SEO solution has been an integral enabler of that growth.

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