WeBuyCars Flip It campaign gets the laughs - and results

Supplied. The WeBuyCars campaign with comedian Schalk Bezuidenhout has enjoyed huge reaction

When WeBuyCars recently revised its marketing plan, part of that exercise was to evaluate the queries it commonly receives from its customers on social media.

“By understanding these, it led us to the conclusion that we need to communicate information about WeBuyCars to our customers in a way that is fun, entertaining and broadly accessible,” says Rikus Blomerus, general manager - marketing at WeBuyCars.

WeBuyCars had two main objectives:

• South Africans enjoy laughing together and tend to share a unique sense of humour so it wanted to reach its customers through this shared sense of humour.
  
• Create entertaining content that is relevant to WeBuyCars.

Recognisable links

“When Schalk Bezuidenhout shared a video online, stating that his show will be bigger than a WeBuyCars branch, we found it funny and wanted to meet with him to discuss a possible collaboration,” says Blomerus.

There were instantly recognisable links between Schalk and WeBuyCars.

“Like our customer base, Bezuidenhout has an extremely diverse audience. South Africans love and adore him - he is one of South Africa’s most popular and enjoyed comedians and those factors decided to go ahead with Schalk so easy,” says Blomerus.

The collaboration has grown beyond initial expectations. “Originally we planned on producing the Flip It series, but then Bezuidenhout then came up with the petrol video concept and we loved it,” he adds.

Two million views

The numbers speak for themselves. Apart from the more than two million views on YouTube alone, in the same timeframe, Facebook statistics show that the video reached 227,974 people, with 2,488 reactions, shares and comments.

Adding to this, Bezuidenhout shared the video on his pages, receiving 185,000 views and 11,384 reactions, shares and comments on Facebook, and there were 80,000 combined views on WeBuyCars and Bezuidenhout’s Instagram pages.

Anecdotally, people are talking about the videos, and they have gone viral on WhatsApp.

WeBuyCars is planning to release an initial run of 12 videos. Bezuidenhout, along with Bouwer Bosch and Bennie Fourie from Freckle Productions, has finalised and produced the videos.

“These videos bring some unexpected levity and a laugh to the business of buying or selling a car," says Blomerus.

Anyone can share Schalk’s madcap humour by subscribing to WeBuyCars’ YouTube channel.

“There are more videos featuring Schalk in the pipeline, and when you think it can’t get any funnier, Schalk proves you wrong,” Blomerus concludes.