5 Steps to Efficient Dealership Marketing: Audience Targeting

We have already covered three key steps to make your dealership marketing more efficient: Understand Your Customers, Understand Your Business Goals and Understand Your Insights. Step four in making your dealership marketing more efficient involves knowing how to effectively apply audience targeting techniques with specific tactics around your stated dealership marketing strategy

There’s a lot of skill involved in knowing how to best apply audience targeting tactics in an automotive marketing campaign. DIY marketing is hard, and audience targeting provides three specific challenges, even if you have marketing staff in-house. Keep these three items in mind, so you can get the most out of this option for maximizing your advertising spend.

1. Segment Your Audience for Maximum Effect

The main goal for any advertising is to engage the viewer and move them to action. With audience targeting, think carefully about the specific audience segment you are going after. This should be informed by customer insights and available market data.

Not every customer insight is actionable, and within those insights that do have associated audience targeting tactics, not every tactic will help you reach your ultimate goal. Understand your best opportunity, and which target audience is the best match for that opportunity.

Keep in mind your creative and message as you implement your advertising or marketing campaign. You want to use images and a message that will speak to that specific audience segment you are targeting and inspire potential customers to action.

You want to be the dealership in their consideration set when they have completed research and are ready to buy. Knowing what ad creative focuses, messages and even calls to action work best in successful campaigns for dealerships like yours would certainly help.

Is your brain melting yet?

2. Choose Audience Targeting Selects Carefully

While the fact that media has become super fragmented can be both frustrating and daunting, it does present interesting opportunities for more targeted and thereby more efficient advertising. Digital advertising in particularly offers a ton of options and functionality around audience targeting, pixel or UTM tracking and goal setting. Hundreds of selects, plus identifying which platforms and options will be most efficient in reaching the right people make for what could be an exhaustive process. Don’t let it.

Remember to use audience targeting selects judiciously. Check counts for your selects, and tests before you proceed with your full budget. The more selects you add the smaller your audience and potential effectiveness of your dealership marketing campaigns. You want to be targeted, but not so selective that you miss out on opportunity.

When you have tested audience targeting selects, you can get going on a full campaign with the specific selects that look like they will work best to reach the intended audience.

Don’t stop there.

3. Test Audience Targeting for Performance

You definitely want to monitor any advertising campaign for performance, but with audience targeting applied, it’s important to you keep an eye on whether the audience segment you selected is delivering. If not, don’t despair. Digital marketing and digital advertising allow for a lot of testing and optimization. The majority of car dealerships are actively using digital advertising channels so you want to be present there, and optimize for success.

In step 2 above, we touched on the idea of testing out audience select criteria before running your full budget. However, you also want to keep yourself open to changing audience criteria or even creative if the campaign is not getting the engagement or actions you need.

Campaign optimization is all about fine-tuning your campaign over time. Audience criteria can play a big role in that, whether you are adjusting the actual targeting, or adjusting the campaign creative to better engaged the audience. More on that in the next blog!

That’s a lot to work through in figuring out how to apply customer insights and audience targeting to your specific dealership strategy. All of this can be overwhelming if you’re trying to manage it on your own.

The good news? By investing in understanding and applying audience targeting techniques, your dealership marketing can be more efficient.

And you don’t have to go it alone. We can help.

Contact us to find out more about how we can help you navigate audience targeting for dealership marketing campaign success.

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