How to Attract the Best Dealership Auto Leads

There’s no denying that automotive leads are the lifeblood of any dealership. But seldom, if ever, has there been a dealership that is completely satisfied with its car sales lead quality and quantity. 

Some of the most common questions we hear from dealers revolve around automotive leads and prospecting: Where do qualified leads come from today, how do you get more leads and how do you convert them into sales?

According to research from Foureyes, 39% of the average auto dealership’s leads are organic leads generated by searches or research, 28% are prospects who have come directly to the dealership, 23% are from paid advertising, 9% are from referrals and 2% are from social media channels.

But in today’s marketplace, the best automotive leads are generated by high-quality data analysis that develops actionable insights into each individual prospect, giving dealers the knowledge and tools they need to power their marketing, sales and customer experience management.

In this post, we take a data-driven look at:

• Who are your dealership leads?
• What do you know about them?
• How do you connect with them?

Who are Your Leads?

Some auto industry veterans may think of automotive leads as people who have somehow indicated to your dealership that they’re in the market for a new or used vehicle. In reality, that’s only one kind of lead.

According IHS Markit research, there are approximately 9 million in-market consumers who are ready to buy without strong loyalty to a specific brand in 2020. These nomad buyers offer dealerships a massive opportunity when it comes to identifying and engaging auto sales leads.  

To take advantage of this opportunity, dealers need to effectively view every single person of car-buying age in their marketplace as a potential dealership lead of greater or lesser quality. That obviously isn’t a prospect list you can plop down on a salesperson’s desk and tell them to start calling, but it is a starting point for modern data analytics tools like Mastermind’s MarketEyeQ. 

By analyzing a combination of public and private information about the consumers in your marketplace – including from sources such as your own DMS and CMS in addition to OEM and third-party providers – MarketEyeQ identifies the consumers who are most likely to be in the market for a vehicle purchase, presented in a 0-100 Behavior Prediction Score® that lets your sales team easily prioritize the highest quality dealership leads.

What Do You Know About Your Auto Leads?

The challenge isn’t that there isn’t enough data. If anything, it’s that the connection of so many parts of our lives to the digital world means all of us – including the people behind your dealership leads – are generating almost inconceivable amounts of data. 

The total amount of data stored worldwide is predicted to grow 16.6% in 2020 alone, reaching 16.6 zettabytes – 16.6 trillion gigabytes – of data. That’s four times the amount of combined data all humans generated in just 2013, which demonstrates how big “big data” has gotten and how it’s getting even bigger.

When it comes to auto dealerships, some of that data is relevant to automotive lead generation, but most of it is not. The increasingly important challenge is to ensure you’re using the right data to maximize sales lead quality. That’s why Mastermind’s predictive analytics tools rely on high-quality data from IHS Markit, TransUnion, CARFAX and other unrivaled sources to give our dealer partners access to insights from 200 million households, 3.2 billion ownership records and 650 million vehicle records.

How Do You Connect With Your Auto Sales Leads?

When it comes to auto dealership leads, sales and marketing are deeply intertwined. The average dealership spent $554,292 on marketing in 2019, averaging $640 in advertising spend per new vehicle sold. With the added pressure of the COVID-19 pandemic challenging dealers to “do more with less,” it’s critical dealerships be more efficient and effective in their marketing without wasting high-quality sales leads. 

But in the advertising marketplace, you’re not just competing against other dealers. Whether it’s conquest marketing, dealership loyalty retention or other forms of automotive lead generation, your messages are competing with the estimated 4,000 to 10,000 advertisements the average American sees each day. 

This isn’t merely ensuring your marketing spend is aimed at the right marketing channels. Rather, the power of predictive marketing in the automotive industry is seen in its ability to determine which channels are most likely to connect with each individual prospect at the right time – and with the right message to influence their decision process. 

The most successful predictive marketing campaigns maximize the effectiveness of your message by building off each previous campaign. In fact, by creating a personalized experience that nurtures leads through the sales funnel, Mastermind’s predictive marketing solutions help our dealer partners gain up to an incremental 15 conquest sales per month.  
 

Interested in learning how Mastermind can empower your dealership to attract and engage the best leads in your market? Contact us for a Market EyeQ demo.