A new year means new opportunity to grow your business. That means you can’t keep operating under the same mindset when it comes to setting goals, planning advertising, and evaluating metrics if you want to be successful in growing your dealership and continuing to move metal and servicing vehicles. It’s vital to your business to be open to change, to be ready to react to consumers, and to execute advertising to reach customers throughout their car buying and car servicing life cycles. With that in mind, I’ve come up with 5 questions to ask yourself regarding your advertising strategy to grow your business in 2017.
Am I focusing on the right metrics to judge success?
We’ve already discussed the role that traditional metrics like email and phone call leads play in measuring the success of your advertising strategy on our blog, you can read that here. But in today’s mobile-first world, traditional metrics don’t carry the same weight as they used to when evaluating your advertising strategy. Indeed, they are helpful, but when you advertise online versus traditional media like TV and radio, the same metrics to measure success do not translate like they used to. Sure, you can measure how many eyeballs saw your TV commercial, but when consumers choose to engage with you online, that is more powerful as it shows their interest in you.
Your task, look at your 2016 performance to determine where you were most successful and where you think you can improve. How were consumers choosing to interacting with your brand online? With Cars.com for instance, were more customers engaging with you while on the lot versus sending emails and did this result in more sales? If so, what are you going to do about it? How does that compare to the success of your TV campaigns or radio buys? Ask yourself, do your engagement metrics online translate to the success of your other traditional media buys? Your advertising plans need to cross all platforms to be sure, and when you sit down to measure the success of your plan, it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach when looking at metrics.
Am I placing my ad dollars in the right media so I can quickly react to my customers?
You probably have a process in place already to review your ad spend weekly, monthly, or quarterly. That’s great. But, have you thought about that how, now, your dealership and virtual lot are always online and available to customers to find. When you sit down to review data and metrics, are your customers sending you signals via this data? For instance, are customers always calling asking for more photos on your listings or are your engagement metrics showing movement on specific makes and models over others when on the lot? If so, how are you highlighting this inventory?
Your task, when reviewing your ad plan, ad spend, and performance, can you make the necessary changes quickly based on the signals your customers are sending you to optimize your ad spend? If customers are asking for more photos, can you quickly send them those photos or send them a video of the car in question encouraging them to visit your lot? There’s no limit to what you can do and how you react to show your customers you’re listening – just do it quickly.
Does my advertising strategy speak to customers throughout their car shopping journey?
Every consumer that comes across your dealership and brand is in a different stage of the car shopping process. Have you optimized your online presence to speak to customers in every stage of that journey? We’ve discussed this in similar terms for consumers who walk on the lot, and the same is true for those customers who are online researching. By creating content on vehicles and making it available via your own website, the likes of Cars.com, or on social media, you’re influencing consumers to engage with you more throughout their journey because you’re helpful throughout their process. This is true for the consumer who’s just starting their research into makes and models all the way to the consumer showing up on the lot comparing specs on vehicles who’s ready to purchase.
Your task, create a holistic plan that provides information for every stage in the car shopper’s journey. If you create content or ads that speak to these different stages and make it available at the right moment at the right time, you can influence customers from a short term mindset to a long term customer. Show consumers the breadth of what you offer them throughout the car ownership lifecycle.
Am I allowing customers the opportunity to engage with me when and how they want?
If you haven’t faced it yet, consumers want to engage with you on their terms. Given the integration of media across platforms thanks to the Internet, your online presence needs to be seamless to properly speak to your customers. Your photo and video capability – vehicle photos and information to your commercials – need to be consistently available and up to date regardless of the platform or screen size a consumer chooses to use to engage with you.
Your task, when creating video or photo content, be sure to allow for everything you create to be consumed across platforms and devices. So, make your TV commercials available on your website in a mobile friendly form. Create a process to respond to email leads with more engaging photo or video content to influence consumers when you reply. There’s no end to what you can do or the access consumers have to engage with you, or your competitors if you haven’t thought through all the ways consumers can engage.
Am I optimizing my dealership for the mobile world?
We’ve already said that you need to be mobile to engage with consumers and allow them to choose when and how to engage with you. But, if your dealership’s content isn’t optimized for mobile screens – phones and tablets – you’re missing out on key opportunities to influence consumers to choose your dealership. There’s more to this than just optimizing your advertising content. When you think about how you engage with online advertising content, you don’t always appreciate the popups or lengths of ads you have to sit through when your ultimate destination is to shop or research a product. Be sure to know your audience and give them customized options – maybe the option of choosing an ad to watch or asking them to follow your social media after completing an ad – giving consumers options can encourage them to explore your dealership and vehicles more fully.
Your task, review your current advertising content and ensure that it is optimized for the mobile world not just in viewability, but in allowing consumers to choose how they consume your content. Be sure to train your sales teams on mobile and its usefulness for a unified voice in dealing with customers via mobile.
Understanding that a one-size-fits all approach to your advertising spend doesn’t cut it anymore when it comes to allocating dollars to traditional media, social media, and third party partners like Cars.com is vital to being successful in 2017. Now is the perfect time to align and integrate your internal processes at the dealership to maximize your mobile presence, recognize that consumers expect to engage with your dealership and brand on their terms, and to create content that is informative and engaging that can be viewed across platforms. You have plenty of partners in the automotive space that help you speak to consumers and help you influence them to purchase regardless of where they are in the car shopping journey.
