You may best know Sunoco as the official fuel of NASCAR. However, Sunoco has a substantial 130-year history and distributes fuel to approximately 10,000 convenience stores, independent dealers, commercial customers, and distributors throughout the United States. In addition to fuel distribution, Sunoco offers commercial customers refined product transportation while delivering loyalty and credit solutions experiences for consumers. In 2020, Sunoco hired Levelwing to drive digital strategy for the brand with regard to both B2C and B2B requirements of the business.
Overview
Sunoco tasked Levelwing with creating a more fundamental structure in their digital strategy, including brand strategy, media, integrated analytics, consumer credit, loyalty programs, and business listings management.
Sunoco has a complex business of fuel distribution, service station management, credit programs, and more. Our initial approach was to help create a fundamentals-based solution that would establish a structure to be used as a foundation from which to grow the business with the ultimate goal of driving increased store visits across their 5,500+ locations. This includes media designed to amplify enhanced loyalty and consumer credit programs, while also managing integrated analytics and search engine optimization efforts.
Insights
Convenience is king in fuel choice. Therefore, having the proper brand presence is the key to success.
Convenience and presence are not simply relegated to store location. They also include the presence of brand to the consumer in their lives, based on their particular needs, at any given moment in time.
- 90% of non-branded fuel searches lead directly to Google Maps—consumers are interacting with Google My Business (GMB) listings and never hitting branded sites
- Many brands fail to properly manage GMB results with all appropriate information (directions, call, location specifics) making the “presence” of the brand to the consumer need difficult or non-existent
- Optimized brand presence ensures top results, especially when consumers are searching with intent-based searches
- A holistic paid and organic search strategy ensures that paid search captures missed keywords in the short term, with the long term goal of having organic ownership through thoughtful optimization
Actions + Results
Created a unique key to be used across GMB, Website, and SAP Terminal data to ensure data integrity across all sources; identified 10 million incremental GMB actions monthly.
By building a robust fundamental structure for all location data, while engaging both paid and organic search to work in tandem, we achieved immediate results:
- Levelwing helped Sunoco optimize foundational elements of the business to drive success in digital channels
- Fully verified store locations have helped Sunoco create a unique key used across all GMB, website, and SAP Terminal data to ensure data integrity across sources
- Identified opportunity for 10MM incremental Google My Business actions per month
- Increased location traffic by 122% during the crucial 4th of July holiday travel period
