5 Steps to Efficient Dealership Marketing: Business Goals

Last time around we talked about the ways understanding your customers can drive more efficient dealership marketing. In this post we dive into the second step to make your dealership marketing more efficient. Step two involves truly understanding your key business goals, so you can build your automotive marketing strategy based on the right things to move your dealership forward. 

 

To understand where you have the best opportunities to grow your dealerships, evaluate your overall market share, including how your dealership is performing compared to the brand, your competitive market share and understand what’s happening in the most important focus area: your own backyard. Competition is getting fierce and sales forecasts from Borrell look challenging. 

 

Know that by uncovering what’s really going on behind that data, you can also uncover the best opportunities to address key business goals. Those goals may include protecting the zips closest to your dealership or focusing on inventory turn rates. 

 

Based on your dealership specific business goal, you can then identify which segment of your customers or prospects to focus on, as well as which advertising tactics can help you meet your goal. By narrowing down your focus areas, you see an automatic win in dealership marketing efficiency. 

 

You likely run across many of these data points in a given month. When you are looking to step back and figure out which business goal provides the best opportunity, we find it’s best to dig in and look at the trends across this data, plus cross-reference against geography, and market trends in vehicle segments and even models. I know, I know. Who has the time for that? 

 

If you keep on with the status quo of looking at sale and market share data with a cursory glance at best each month, you may find yourself spinning your wheels in the Year over Year/Month over Month numbers game. Let’s not fall into that habit, okay? 

 

When you pull back and take a look at the complete picture of competitive market share over time, with a bit of slicing and dicing, you can actually pinpoint where you are moving things, and where you aren’t growing but should be. So, taking the time to do the data analysis can actually simplify things by focusing in on the right opportunity. This informs your dealership marketing strategy, and helps you achieve efficiency in selecting the right advertising tactics amidst so many. 

 

For example, if your business goal is to grow volume in a specific segment, you may need to increase leads from a new customer group, rather than targeting existing customers. Or if your dealership marketing has been focused on broad reach, you might do better with multiple targeted advertising and marketing campaigns. Take the time to evaluate which advertising or marketing tactic can best reach the intended target audience, and make sure those tactics are aligned to your business goals. 

 

Claritas offers a zip code analysis tool to get you started on thinking about customer personas for people in your target zips. 

 

And if you’re an Auto Group, keep those goals dealership specific. One dealership may have an inventory turn rate that needs work, while another dealership may need to focus on a specific geography and consumer group based on market share opportunity. The point is to be specific in understanding the current situation and identifying the goal, so you can be just as specific in building a strategy and tactics towards achieving that goal. Each dealership in your auto group may have distinctly different opportunities to focus individual dealership marketing and advertising campaigns. 

 

By focusing in on a specific goal and opportunity, it makes it that much easier to focus your audience targeting and marketing campaign tactics. And by aligning your dealership marketing strategy with your dealership specific business goals – informed by market intelligence – you’ll be on the way to more effective and more efficient marketing campaigns. 

 

We live for digging deep into automotive insights and building smarter marketing campaigns for dealerships like yours.  

 

Contact us to request a Dealer Scorecard to get started. 

 

Related Content 

• 5 Steps to Efficient Dealership Marketing: Understand Your Customers 

• 5 Automotive Marketing Consumer Stats You Need to Know in 2019 

• Auto Buyer’s Journey Infographic 

 

Resources 

• EMarketer US Automotive Industry Stat Pack 2018 

• Automotive Advertising Takes a Sharp Turn, Borrell 

• My Best Segments Zip Code Look-Up Tool, Claritas