Working with over 11,000 dealers, Auto Trader, the UK’s most popular motoring website, wanted to more effectively communicate with its large B2B audience, to gain valuable feedback and customer insights.

The challenge

Auto Trader had long been communicating with its dealer customers via email, direct mail and phone, but wanted to build a platform to better communicate with these customers digitally during their online engagement with products and services within the dealer portal. In order to create achieve this the business chose to create its own B2B social media platform: the Dealer Community.

The solution – the (private) social network

It was decided that the social network would launch in beta form to gauge dealer appetite and engagement of the community site. A select number of dealers were asked to join this trial phase. Dealer Community was officially launched in March 2011, following completion of a successful beta phase in February and now, under a year later, boasts over 6320 members.