Growth in the connected car era: Enhancing Nextbase's global presence

Nextbase came to Evolved thanks to our breadth of experience in the automotive sector. The client is a leading brand for dash cams in the UK, performing well for related keywords and asked us to help them replicate this in the U.S. market. 

They were looking for the right agency to drive profitable growth. As part of that, we provided digital PR services to target their U.S. market, build visibility for the brand and strengthen their backlink profile, which was not as strong as many key competitors. 

After being given the brief, our Digital PR, Creative Content and Design teams created HERO campaigns to address the needs of the Nextbase.com backlink profile. Nextbase not only had challenges with a small number of domains with a U.S. readership, but they were also battling with cultural differences as dash cams are (for now) much less used in the states. Our key objective was to increase the visibility of the Nextbase brand by building links from quality domains in the U.S.

We aimed to build the Nextbase brand in the U.S. and so, our focus was to create a campaign that could be outreached across every state and published in their respective publications, as well as gain additional international links. Enter, our Crash Map interactive campaign. 

The Crash Map

After conducting an audit of Nextbase’s backlink profile, it was clear that their key priority was to build on the number of quality referring domains they have directed to their .com website. To achieve this goal, we knew our campaign idea needed to: 

• Have mass appeal across several regionals in the United States 
• Appeal to both consumer and automotive publications for maximum reach
• Demonstrate the need for a dash cam 

To create The Crash Map, we analysed every crash from the last recorded year in the U.S., across all 50 states, demonstrating the grim reality of the most dangerous states to drive in. Created as an interactive interface, users can see how many fatal crashes occur per second in each state as well as discover the worst counties and cities within each state for crashes. 

We were then able to share the most dangerous places to drive, as well as the number of crashes per month, week, hour and even minutes in each state. This enabled us to reach out to publications within each state, maximising coverage for Nextbase in the U.S. 

To truly represent the sheer number of data points and to encourage publications to link to Nextbase and further increase their reach of customers, we created an interactive map that would allow every person to click into a state and find all of the information related to car crashes. 

This campaign is hyper-relevant to Nextbase and even shows what can happen if you don’t have a dash cam, promoting their key products and demonstrating E-E-A-T, positioning their brand within the right conversation.

Our strong mix of relevance, unique data, visuals and interactively led to over 800 links across target U.S. publications – and still counting! These links contributed to a 1,479% increase in search visibility between February 2023 – December 2023. 

Our heavy focus on dash cam’s also contributed to the increase in Nextbase’s average keyword ranking by six places. 

Some of the stand out publications which we gained links on for the client were hyper-targeted and relevant, including: Business Insider, Street Insider, Benzinga, Auto Body News, The Globe and Mail, Morning Start, Auto Guide, Fox News, Yahoo!, MSN, and Men’s Journal.

Key results

• 4 billion monthly views – On global publications featuring The Crash Map.  
• 33% Increase in Q4 YoY organic revenue 
• 23 Average position improvement for tracked keywords
• Page 2 For ‘dash cam’ up from Page 7