Auto Dealership Marketing Ideas for a Data-Driven Audience

Dealers are learning now more than ever just how important automotive segmenting, targeting, and positioning can be for success in the automotive sales business.

The auto industry is constantly changing, as dealers across the nation continue to face inventory shortages, diminished customer loyalty, and increased competition. Incorporation of predictive analytics into automotive marketing makes all the difference when attempting to reach prospects in hopes of acquiring them as a customer in the future.

It is important for dealerships of all sizes to identify data-driven audiences across their loyalty, service, and conquest portfolios. These target audiences should ideally be ones that are:

• Preparing to return-to-market
• Well-qualified
• Most likely to respond 

Predictive analytics empower dealers to easily plan and prioritize advanced marketing campaigns that engage and convert their best prospects with personalized messaging and offers. By taking a data-driven approach to targeting and engaging audiences, dealers can provide tailored resources and messaging that make each consumer’s journey “down the funnel” more seamless and efficient.

In this blog post, we will cover:

·  Reasons why dealers should prioritize advanced marketing

·  Characteristics of data-driven audiences and how they act

·  Ways in which dealership marketing technology can support this strategy

Why Should Dealers Prioritize Marketing?

Even while customer demand is still hot, marketing should always be a top priority for dealerships. Staying in consistent communication with your audience is key to both conquesting new customers and proactively protecting loyalty buyers from the marketing attempts of competitors, especially as buyers are likely now more than ever to switch dealers or brands. 

A strong, data-driven marketing plan is key to staying competitive, creating and maintaining market demand, and maintaining your dealership’s reputation within its community. Thanks to rapid digitalization, supporting a data driven dealership marketing plan isn’t as costly or difficult as it was in the past. With several new releases on the horizon in 2023, it’s important for dealers to prepare and prioritize their marketing efforts now to engage customers before they return to market.

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3 Reasons Not to Pump the Brakes on Dealership Marketing

To improve their efforts, dealers need to formally assess what high-performing marketing looks like at their dealership. Remember: Tailoring your approach to each buyer is key. According to a Meta survey, 81% of U.S. car buyers say they would like to receive personalized messaging on mobile from their preferred auto brand.

The more your team understands the wants, needs, and behavior of your audience, the better they can be at predicting what each customer is most likely to do next. This will also help to determine the specific messaging they’re likely to respond to.

Additionally, the entire dealership should understand their role in the process to support your marketing efforts, from the general manager to the service advisors (and even the porters). By unifying customer insights dealership-wide to connect the dots between departments and unify a team’s approach, dealers can leverage predictive analytics to effectively and efficiently engage audiences across platforms.

What Are Data-Driven Audiences?

The backbone of most data-driven marketing campaigns is first-party data. First-party data is the information you collect on your customers, ranging from their purchase and maintenance history to their clicks and actions on your website. This is the data that lives in your dealership’s CRM, DMS, and other sales platforms.

In today’s hyper-competitive and rapidly changing market, dealers can’t afford to rely solely on first-party data in a silo, such as using standalone equity mining platforms. It is vital to accurately identify customers earlier in their buying journey and avoid nurturing a lead who only seems like a prime prospect on the surface. To do this, dealers need to look deeper at the factors driving a prospect’s purchasing decisions via intelligent, predictive insights.

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3 Step Guide to Dealership Conquest Marketing

Layering in third-party insights from reputable data providers, such as S&P Global or CARFAX, allows dealers to enrich their available audience data with additional details (household demographics, financial information, etc.). This tactic helps dealerships paint a clearer picture of their available opportunities. Building and targeting data-driven audiences empowers dealers to better understand and engage their existing customer bases and, with the right dealership marketing technology, deploy efficient conquest marketing campaigns.

At the dealership level, predictive analytics help identify and understand dealer prospects before they ever reach out, giving dealers the chance to proactively market to the customer in a highly personalized manner. Taking this sort of proactive marketing approach, dealers can set the stage for an excellent buying experience from that very first customer touchpoint.

How Can Dealership Marketing Technology Support Dealer Success?

To remain successful throughout the year, dealers need to ensure they’re consistently engaging the right customers with the right messaging. As the customer journey gets longer and the competition gets fiercer, dealers need to take a data-driven approach to maximize their marketing ROI. Dealership marketing technology enables dealers to leverage customer data to predict and automatically advertise to the buyers most likely to convert. 

Finally, advanced marketing tools afford your team the opportunity to expand your overall reach and frequency of marketing messages, translating to an advertisement toward additional customers as part of dealers’ top of the funnel marketing activities.

By using predictive analytics to target and engage customers with a multi-channel approach, dealers can reach customers where they are in their buying journey, wherever that may be. For example, fueled by highly accurate data, Mastermind’s predictive campaigns focus on messaging that works with more than 103,000 different campaign variations. Each campaign builds off the other to convert high-potential buyers faster, in the optimal digital or physical format. This helps dealers who market with Mastermind see a 15X ROI and the lowest cost-per-sale in the industry.

CONCLUSION:

As the automotive industry continues to grow, it is important to monitor marketing tactics on a consistent basis. This is vital to maintaining success, specifically when evaluating audience-targeting processes.

When it comes to managing both initial and ongoing communication with dealership audiences:

●  Staying in consistent communication with your dealership’s customers is key to maintaining a competitive edge.

●  Taking a data-driven approach to identifying and engaging audiences is key to conquesting customers and building dealership loyalty.

● Technology like Mastermind empowers dealers to automatically engage audiences across platforms with personalized messaging designed to convert.

Interested in learning how Mastermind empowers dealers to generate revenue opportunities from every corner of your dealership for all types of buyers? Contact us for a demo.