Over 200 active dealers, 164 campaigns executed, around 45 million end customers reached. Carado, the motorhome brand of the Erwin Hymer Group, has been working with socialPALS since 2021 to make authorized dealers locally visible across multiple countries – without dealers needing their own marketing departments.
Isabelle Branz, Marketing Manager at Carado, explains in this interview how Carado made the leap from a classic download portal to measurable, international dealer activation. Five authorized dealers from the Carado network also share their own perspective, describing how the system plays out in their day-to-day reality.
Isabelle Branz
Marketing Manager | Carado
Carado has been working with socialPALS since 2021. How did the collaboration come about, and what problem were you trying to solve?
The collaboration grew out of the Erwin Hymer Group. Our goal was to provide our motorhome dealers with more professional support in the areas of social media and online marketing. Anyone familiar with our industry knows: our dealers are often family-run businesses or specialized workshops. They have neither their own marketing department nor the time to deal with target audience targeting, campaign structures, or ads managers on top of their day-to-day business.
At the same time, it was important to us to make our brand professionally visible across Europe, right where purchasing decisions are made.
What did your dealer communication look like before?
Previously, we had a classic download portal for marketing materials. Dealers could download the content, but there was no further interaction. We had no idea which dealers were actually using the material, which content was performing, or what kind of reach was being generated. There was simply no transparency whatsoever. And even when dealers did download the content, they had to set everything up themselves: build the ad, define the target audience, manage the budget. For most dealers in our industry, that was too high a barrier.
“We had marketing material in our download portal, but no transparency at all as to whether anyone was actually using it.”
Isabelle Branz, Marketing Manager at Carado
What specifically changed with socialPALS?
Heute erhalten unsere Händler fertige Kampagnen auf Knopfdruck. Die Werbeanzeigen sind vorbereitet, das lokale Werbebudget ist hinterlegt, die Carado Zielgruppe rund um den Händlerstandort ist eingestellt. Der Händler muss kein Marketingexperte sein und braucht sich nicht mit Kampagnen-Setups beschäftigen. Das übernehmen wir gemeinsam mit socialPALS zentral.
Today, our dealers receive ready-made campaigns at the push of a button. The ads are prepared, the local advertising budget is set up, and the Carado target audience around the dealer’s location is configured. The dealer doesn’t need to be a marketing expert or deal with campaign setups. We handle that centrally together with socialPALS.
On the other side, we now have transparency: we can see exactly which dealers are active, which campaigns are performing, and what reach is being achieved. This data foundation simply didn’t exist for us before – and it’s now also helping us continuously improve our campaigns.
Which campaign format works particularly well for you?
Our Partner Days campaigns are a good example. With these, we support dealers at local events and open days – right at the moments when motorhome buyers are seeking personal contact with a dealer. The dealer receives up to €500 in local advertising budget, a ready-made campaign promoting the event within their catchment area, and in some cases we also provide a feature vehicle on-site as an additional draw.
What’s great about this format is that it translates our central brand communication into real footfall at the point of sale. And we measure that too – through reach, engagement, and event visitors.
“With up to €500 in local advertising budget per dealer, we bring motorhome buyers from the catchment area directly to the dealership.”
Isabelle Branz, Marketing Manager at Carado
Carado uses socialPALS across multiple countries. How does the international collaboration work?
We create the campaigns centrally, and then the individual countries duplicate them, translate them, and adapt them locally. Some markets adopt campaigns almost identically, others customize more heavily. Both are possible, and that’s exactly what makes the system so useful.
In practice, this means: within a few hours, we can roll out campaigns across multiple markets in parallel. The countries don’t have to start from scratch every time, they benefit from each other, and the brand image remains consistent throughout. For a brand like Carado, which is active across several European motorhome markets, that’s an enormous efficiency lever.
How important is local advertising in your industry specifically?
Very important. A motorhome is a high-involvement, high-value purchase. Most customers research intensively, compare over several months, and ultimately visit a dealer in their region that they know or trust. If our dealers aren’t locally visible during that research phase, they drop out of the consideration set entirely.
Local advertising reaches precisely the target audiences around each dealer’s location. And the key point is: our dealers can execute professional local online marketing with minimal effort on their part. That simply wasn’t possible before in this form.
How would you describe working with the socialPALS team?
Collaborative and personal. You can tell that it’s not just a platform being provided – it feels like working together toward solutions. We have a dedicated contact person, and our dealers have contact people who can help them in multiple languages when questions come up during onboarding or with a campaign.
That’s particularly important in our industry: if a dealer with five employees wants a campaign live on a Friday afternoon and something goes wrong, they can’t end up in a call center queue. Personal support makes a real difference there.
“It’s not just a platform – it’s a team that works together with us and our dealers.”
Isabelle Branz, Marketing Manager at Carado
What sets socialPALS apart from other solutions on the market, in your view?
The combination of technology and personal support. The platform itself is straightforward to use, which is crucial given our dealer structure. But at the same time, there’s always a contact person available – both for us as a brand and for our dealers. Having both together is rare.
Many tools can do one or the other – either self-service or consultancy. socialPALS combines both, and in practice that’s the difference between a system gathering dust in a portal and a system actively used by 209 dealers.
What are you most looking forward to in the ongoing collaboration?
The continued development of the platform and new possibilities in dealer activation. Topics like internationalization, local advertising, and data-driven optimization are becoming increasingly important for us. We want to use the insights from our campaigns even more to develop our content and formats further.
What would you pass on to other brands with a brick-and-mortar dealer network?
Dealer marketing has to be simple. The simpler the process is for the dealer, the higher the adoption rate. That sounds obvious, but it’s where many programs fail. And the second point: personal support is not optional. Dealers need a contact person and a solution they can actually use in everyday life – not one they have to manage.
“Dealer marketing has to be simple. The simpler the process, the higher the adoption and the greater the local brand impact.”
Isabelle Branz, Marketing Manager at Carado
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