With automotive marketing digital optimization, it can be easy to get lost in both the minutiae and the possibilities. You can test and adjust…pretty much everything.
Here are 5 key things to keep in mind as you approach digital optimization for your dealership marketing and advertising campaigns.
1. Understand Your Dealership Business Goals
Your automotive marketing or advertising campaign could have great overall metrics, but if it’s not getting you closer to reaching your ultimate business goal, what’s the point?
If you keep your business goal in sight, effective digital optimization can help you monitor and turn around any dealership advertising campaigns not performing as well as you might expect. And it can help you replicate success to improve your overall marketing and advertising performance over time.
Automotive marketing is both an art and a science. There’s real science behind the audience targeting and marketing campaign tracking and reporting. But how you optimize your campaign is based on the art of knowing which levers to adjust in order to reach a specific business goal.
That, my friends, is why we start with your dealership specific goals to define your marketing strategy. Understanding your business goals is key to a marketing strategy aligned to grow your business. And a clear marketing strategy can provide a framework for campaign optimization.
2. Build a Clear Automotive Marketing Strategy & Revisit It
It’s also important to keep in mind your planned marketing strategy before you dive into digital optimization on a given campaign. It’s not random!
Knowing your marketing strategy and business goals will help you target the right metrics to follow. By monitoring these key performance indicators you will have specific items to measure which will define your digital optimization success.
If a specific dealership digital marketing campaign is not working to get you closer to your goal, and you’ve already adjusted tactics, creative, targeting, etc., it may be time to revisit the overall strategy. Ask yourself if the approach you are trying is really the best way to impact your specific business goal.
Taking a fresh look at your marketing strategy is not failure – it’s part and parcel to your ongoing digital optimization.
3. If You’re Not Testing, You’re Guessing
Avoid advertising campaign stagnation and status quo by being open to testing as part of your ongoing digital campaign optimization. Taking the extra time to test creative or audience targeting segments can generate more revenue in the long-run by increasing conversions.
Plus, by paying careful attention to which platforms are performing best, you can actually make your marketing more efficient by opening up opportunities to reallocate budget spend.
Effective digital optimization involves testing across a number of possible areas, which can be distracting. Hence starting with business goals and a clear marketing strategy. You have a specific goal and outcome for your dealership advertising campaign.
Optimizing for clicks may sound good, unless your goal is linked to outcomes on end lead generation. Take the time to think about what outcomes show success or movement towards your end goal. Those are the areas you need to work on testing in order to optimize.
4. Choose a Focus Area for Testing
Even when you know what outcomes you are looking to impact, there are seriously a ton of things you can test with digital optimization.
Try not to test everything at once, so you can truly understand what is causing improvements. For example, first look at audience targeting and then test ad creatives later. Once you have an idea of the best match there, you can move on to optimizing by ad platform.
Within each test, make sure you are providing a long enough time to gather enough data to gauge impact. For email marketing, you can split off smaller test groups within one send and receive directional information on a subject line split very quickly. For search marketing, however you will likely need between 30 and 90 days of data to provide enough information for useful comparison.
5. Continuous Optimization is Key to Long-Term Success
Be open to additional tweaking for improved results. And know that digital campaign optimization takes time. You’re not going to get there overnight.
Again, it’s an art and a science, so the exact order you test your advertising campaign components in may depend on your KPI focus, and the way you approach optimization over time may shift based on changing business goals for your dealership or auto group.
Digital Optimization is a journey, and you definitely won’t get there all at once. But it’s worth it so you can apply learnings towards more efficient and more effective dealership marketing.
Contact us today to find out how we can help you improve your dealership marketing efficiency.
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