To invest wisely and to observe the repercussions of their marketing offensives better, dealerships must assess the results coming from different marketing pushes, such as online advertising, traditional marketing as well as pushes coming from their employees.
Dealerships making a large investment in their marketing should divide their plan into three categories:
- Traditional Marketing, including commercials on the radio, on television, and in the newspapers.
- Online marketing, including website, social media, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and SEO.
- New and used car advertising.
Setting objectives and establishing a budget
It’s important to analyze your results, your budget as well as your marketing objectives per department many times throughout the year. There could be many objectives such as generating visibility, developing your brand identity, multiplying subscribers on Facebook or your followers on Instagram, acquiring prospects or existing clients, generating conversion rates, etc.
There are many ways to do so and a lot of questions to ask yourself. What’s the traditional platform best suited for my marketing offensives, what social media should I prioritize, Facebook and/or Google? What types of advertisement and strategy can be used with these two platforms? Should I link my clients to my website or on a specific landing page? What suppliers and strategies align with my objectives?
That being said, if neither you nor your suppliers have any data regarding your performance and marketing, budgets and strategies will be harder to set. This information will allow you to know what’s working and what’s not, as well as where you should focus your efforts.
Consider your advertising partners
For many dealerships and digital marketing agencies, the goal is to generate the most leads. A lead can either be a phone call, an online request or a walk-in, although the latter is harder to account for.
Even if the amount of generated leads is one of the best performance indicators, it’s not the only one and it does not guarantee success. An efficient CRM will allow you to analyze a lot of important metrics that point to the amount of generated leads, as well as their quality. Certain metrics are more important, you should prioritize the percentage of clients reached, the number of appointments, the number of appointments where the client showed up, as well as the number of sales and deliveries.
With this data, it’s possible to analyze and compare the performances of different ongoing marketing campaigns and sub-campaigns, from the cost per lead to appointments and sales.
Today, this data is instrumental for your supplier to distribute the campaign and sub campaigns’ budget that will generate appointments and sales.
Analyzing your data is crucial because not every lead has the same value according to its source and your supplier.
Analyzing used vehicle advertising
Within the last 10 years, the price for advertising used vehicles has significantly increased and there are a lot of reasons why: the base price increase to display a vehicle, the rise of new media platforms, newer options such as bumping up the priority on ads, and finally, the option to display the new vehicle inventory.
The platforms will provide you with interesting metrics to promote your services, such as the number of used vehicle information packages (UVIP) and the number of generated leads. It’s paramount to know more information to make informed decisions. By adding the percentage of clients reached, appointments booked, appointments where the client showed up, the sales and deliveries, you will be in a better position to invest in the platform that has the best return on investment.
Support your employees
Not everything is based on your marketing strategies and suppliers. One of the most important aspects to maximize your results and your ROI rests on your employees’ performance. As your success factors depend on the swiftness of your first contact, the quality and the number of follow-ups, as well as the employees’ performance on the phone, you should provide a tool to your advisors or BDC agents to ease their work.
Do your Directors also have access to a powerful CRM that allows them to inspect the work done? Can they evaluate the number of follow-ups, listen to and watch the conversations with potential clients and take time to train the sales team?
If your results are not what you were hoping for, there are three options to consider:
- Temporarily reduce your marketing budget.
- Offer your team training on client management.
- Outsource the management of your online requests to a BDC (business development center).
CRM, an essential tool
Today, CRM is a crucial tool to perform and make insightful decisions. It’s the transmission belt between your strategies, your suppliers, your sales teams, your results, and the ongoing improvement. It can also manage your potential and current clients, and be the tool that centralizes all of your sales processes.
It is time to ask yourself the 5 following questions:
- Is your strategy on point?
- Are you maximizing your marketing investments?
- Do you know what your advertising suppliers are doing with your money?
- Are you improving your results and do you have the proper data?
- Do you have the right CRM to support your objectives? It pays off to invest in the right place with the right tools!
