5 Steps to Efficient Dealership Marketing: Insights

We have already covered two key steps to make your dealership marketing more efficient: Understand Your Customers and Understand Your Business Goals. Step three in making your dealership marketing more efficient focuses on applying what you know from step one (understand your customers) to your business goals from step two, so you can build a smarter marketing strategy defining how you will reach that goal.

Insights on automotive purchases in your market are the key link to bringing it all together. In fact, your customer insights are not complete without market share intelligence.

You know you need to apply data from available customer insights so you can create a dealership marketing strategy defining who you want to reach. And you need to figure out how you will convince them to take a specific action. But how do you get to that marketing strategy in the first place?

Understanding your customer base, and especially differences between subgroups, is helpful to developing a smarter marketing strategy fueled by insights. However, on top of that you need to layer a full view of what’s going on in the market, and understand the customer journey.

Where are you losing market share where you should be winning?
Where are you winning where there may be more untapped opportunity?
Where do your biggest opportunities overlap with increased consumer demand?

All of these insights and intelligence on consumers and the market provide the link to put into action focused marketing and advertising tactics to reach your target audience. And that’s what your dealership marketing strategy is all about – reaching the right audience with the right message. Simple, right?

Automotive insights are like the conduit, so you can channel the understanding you have of your customers and your dealership into a concrete plan to grow your dealership. When you take the time to understand the full picture of what’s going on in your market, you can find those silver linings of opportunity, even when competition is fierce. Those opportunities are the path to drive more sales to your dealership so you can reach those business goals.

Bonus? Focusing in on the right opportunities drives efficient dealership marketing.

Right, but who has time for that? And how do you get to pulling insights across all of those data points?

Many agencies and marketing solutions providers can help with third-party data to better understand customers by make and model of vehicle they own, as well as target in-market auto shoppers. And some marketing partners also provide market share data. A few can provide data across all of those sources, plus do the analysis for you. And that, my friend, is a big time saver.

For example, say you discover your target audience indexes higher than average for dining out, visiting certain social media platforms or news sites, or attending local high school sports events; all of these insights give you something to work with related to audience targeting, and how to best reach your audience. There is an enormous amount of anonymized audience targeting available, based on self-selected interests and sites visited.

Now, imagine applying that level of sophisticated audience targeting against the best opportunities informed by market share trends. You know where you aren’t selling as much of a specific model as you could, you know who is most likely to be interested in that model, and you know how and where to reach them.

When you can apply insights across both customers and the market, you can focus on the best opportunities. Instead of feeling like it’s necessary to go super broad in order to make an impact with your advertising, you can actually be more effective by going super targeted with multiple micro-campaigns. We’re talking a seriously smart approach to more effective dealership marketing.

Pinpoint where you have the highest chance of selling more vehicles or generating service business, then target the best audience likely to match that specific opportunity. All of this informed by insights on your customers and your market situation, using the best advertising or marketing tactics to reach the right audience.

Boom! A recipe for dealership marketing success! And more focused marketing means simplified marketing, so you can focus on running your dealership.

We love to talk automotive insights, and we are big believers in data helping to make automotive marketing more efficient and more effective. It’s like magic that works.

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