By Andy MacLeay, Director of Digital Marketing – Dealer.com
In recent years, global advertising spend has skyrocketed. In 2018 alone, companies spent $1.3 trillion, up 5.5 percent from the previous year according to PQ Media. This year, ad spend is expected to grow another 4.6 percent. Yet, in spite of this rapidly increasing trend, not all advertisers feel as though their money is being well spent.
Digital advertising, in particular, is becoming a more crowded and difficult space for businesses to connect with their consumers. People are constantly being exposed to advertising throughout the course of their everyday lives. Additionally, advertisers fret over whether their advertising budget is being spent targeting the right, in-market consumers. Digital ad-fraud – click bots which illegally boost ad traffic with fake customers – cost advertisers $8.2 billion dollars annually. Dollars that waste away on shoppers no longer in-market, or ones that never truly were, is an advertiser’s nightmare. Take these factors into account and it is easy to see why companies are concerned with where their money is spent.
These advertising issues affect all businesses, including automobile dealerships. When looking for an ideal advertising partner, dealers should seek vendors that help them engage with the maximum number of buyers, and simultaneously, improve their advertising flexibility, reach and intelligence.
Rather than focus advertising spend in a single way, dealers must find a provider whose solution is a nimble, multichannel advertising portfolio that targets the desired audience through a variety of channels. To maximize return on investment, the platform should include options such as paid search, display, retargeting, video advertising, audience targeting and analytics. When combined together, these advertising channels form a powerful tool that helps dealers target more in-market consumers, generating stronger leads and, ultimately, more sales conversions.
Paid search is one of the most popular advertising solutions. When fully integrated with vehicle inventory, paid search boosts individual vehicle content with every ad, differentiating a dealership’s offerings from the competition.
Display advertising, meanwhile, is seen by many as the most cost-efficient and effective forms of advertising. These targeted campaigns place vehicle inventory ads in front of potential buyers no matter where they travel online. Constantly seeing the right vehicle ad will drive them to your digital storefront help them better understand and connect with your unique brand messaging.
Retargeting advertisements are perhaps most important in today’s digital shopping age. As more consumers spend the majority of their car-buying process online, it’s important to be able to bring shoppers who have already visited your site back to your digital storefront. Retargeting campaigns deliver specific vehicle image ads that target shoppers that have recently left your site. These ads must consistently and accurately reflect your dealership’s pricing, vehicle deals and photos to help keep your customer connected to your store.
Another dynamic form of advertising involves video. Custom content video advertising benefits dealers in multiple ways. First, the dynamic content can help build brand awareness for a dealership, making you a more recognizable player in the crowded automotive industry. Second, these videos provide potential customers with further details on your inventory offerings. The best video advertising campaigns align with a dealer’s sales strategy and can be viewed on both mobile and desktop devices.
Audience targeting helps businesses harness the latest advancements in technology, such as machine-learning and artificial intelligence, to leverage the necessary market data that helps identify the consumers most likely to purchase a vehicle immediately.
For example, Dealer.com’s TotalConnect Advertising leverages proprietary shopping data from Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book as well as a dealership’s existing audience behavior targeting strategy. From TotalConnect, Dealer.com measured dealers receive a 47 percent increase in quality visits, a 61 percent increase in views of vehicle detail pages (VDP) and 94 percent increase in total leads.
That last number is key. Increased quality leads and interactions are what all businesses, not just automobile dealers, are looking for when they gauge where and how to spend their advertising budget. While it can be tempting to remain married to an advertising solution that has worked well in the past, it’s imperative for dealers to be willing to break from the way they’ve done things previously. Challenging the norm and investing in an advertising budget that incorporates multiple channels is the quickest way auto dealers will reach more in-market shoppers. You’ll know your efforts are working as more and more customers show up to your lot ready to buy or engaging right on your website to begin the purchase process.
The final piece to the puzzle involves choosing an advertising solution that offers performance analysis through analytics. It’s extremely valuable to review individual campaigns to determine what made them successful or what caused them to fail. An advertising partner that offers data-driven results for advertising campaigns can help take a dealer’s business, and advertising spend to another level. Utilizing the feedback you receive on campaigns enables you to double-down on the advertising channels and strategies that perform the best and avoid the ones that fail to live up to expectations. These data-based decisions will enable dealers to spend their advertising budget in the most efficient way possible, eliminating any worries of advertising dollars going to waste.
Whichever advertising avenue you elect to pursue, it should be tailored to highlight specific inventory and your fixed operations campaigns. It’s important to remember that all these different advertising channels are the means to a larger end– meeting and surpassing your business goals.
About the Author
As the Director of Digital Marketing at Dealer.com, a Cox Automotive software company, Andy MacLeay is responsible for cross-platform product strategy and the exploration of emerging technologies. Andy joined Dealer.com in 2011 and has served in a variety of advertising, technology and marketing roles including Lead Market Research Analyst and Director of Product Management for Advertising and Social Media.
