Launching a foreign brand in an ultra-competitive market: the full-funnel digital strategy for Sunny Cars France

Red Online Marketing became a strategic partner from July 2024, with a remit covering all digital acquisition channels:

• SEO: audit, content production, link building
• SEA: Google Ads and Microsoft Ads campaigns
• Meta Ads: full-funnel strategy (awareness, consideration, conversion)
• Affiliate Marketing: launch and management of the TradeTracker programme (started in 2025)

The approach was designed to address both identified challenges directly: building organic visibility and brand awareness over the long term, whilst running performance-driven paid campaigns to generate bookings from the outset. Red Online Marketing, with over 20 years of experience in tourism marketing and an office based in Lille, brought the dual dimension that was essential: sector knowledge and local grounding in the target market.

SEO work began in July 2024. The strategy was structured around three simultaneous pillars: domain authority (link building), content (destination pages and blog), and technical optimisation (site structure, Schema.org markup, mobile performance).

A comprehensive SEO audit was carried out, covering keyword opportunities, competitive analysis, content, technical aspects and domain authority. This served as the roadmap for all subsequent actions.

The blog was launched in Q3 2025, targeting informational top-of-funnel queries (“highway code”, destination guides, road trips) to broaden keyword coverage beyond transactional pages.

Alongside the editorial work, a link-building strategy was implemented from 2025 onwards, with the aim of progressively strengthening sunnycars.fr’s domain authority by acquiring inbound links from quality editorial sources within the travel and tourism space.

The Google Ads strategy is built on a full-funnel architecture: Search campaigns (brand and non-brand by destination), Performance Max, and Demand Gen (SEE, THINK, DO) to cover the entire customer journey. A target CPA is set with the client.

Microsoft Ads (Bing) is managed as a complementary channel, targeting a different audience profile: typically older, with higher purchase intent.

The Meta Ads strategy follows the SEE > THINK > DO framework:

• SEE: awareness phase, cold audiences
• THINK: consideration phase, qualified traffic, Advantage+
• DO: dynamic retargeting by destination, targeting website visitors

The DO phase was active from November 2024. The SEE and THINK phases were launched in June 2025. Video formats (UGC in particular) and destination visuals (islands, road trips) are the strongest-performing creative drivers.

Dedicated ad copy and visuals were developed for each target audience segment: families, couples without children, and seniors.

AI-generated videos were also produced and have consistently delivered strong performance results (watch an example on YouTube).

The affiliate programme was launched on the TradeTracker platform in late 2025. The strategy deliberately excludes cashback and promotional code sites, in favour of high-quality editorial partners: travel blogs, specialist comparison sites and content creators.

Since the launch of the partnership, key performance indicators have progressed across all channels. At a global level on the French market, 2025 marks a significant first milestone:

• +37% revenue generated vs 2024
• +45% bookings recorded vs 2024
• +49% sessions on sunnycars.fr vs 2024

Brand awareness, measured by the average search volume for “Sunny Cars” on Google France, clearly reflects the brand’s growth trajectory and the impact of our digital strategy.

Source: Google Trends

SEO & link building

The starting position was characteristic of a brand with limited maturity in a foreign market: DR 34–36 (Ahrefs), limited keyword coverage, thin destination pages, and a domain authority significantly behind direct competitors. The link-building strategy, launched in 2025, has delivered consistent, measurable progress:

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+10 DR points and +255 referring domains in under two years. On organic rankings, Italy entered the top 10, a significant number of keywords moved into page 2 positions (11–20), and organic traffic recorded +49% growth in 2025 (GA4).

The rise in brand awareness is also visible on Google Trends: searches for “Sunny Cars” in France grew from an index of 3 in 2023 to an index of 20 in 2025, a sevenfold increase in two years.

SEA: Google Ads

The Google Ads trajectory over three years illustrates the combined effect of scaling investment and continuous campaign optimisation, with a near-stable CPA despite the progressive integration of awareness-oriented campaigns (Demand Gen, YouTube) that are naturally less focused on direct conversion:

That represents +351% in budget and +352% in bookings since the start of the partnership. On Microsoft Ads (Bing), the channel is performing well ahead of its target CPA, with a conversion rate of 2.67% YTD 2026.

Affiliate marketing

Launched in late 2025 on TradeTracker, the affiliate programme generated a ROAS of 868% across the first seven months of 2026.

Growth has been consistent since May 2026. The programme is built on a deliberately selective, quality-first approach: cashback and promotional code sites have been excluded in favour of travel editorial partners. The next priority is to diversify the publisher portfolio.