Solving a Dealer’s Marketing Pain Points
As marketing technology continues to evolve, dealers have more choices than ever when it comes to their marketing solutions. However, marketing for dealerships is very time consuming. When dealers launch marketing campaigns, they must jump through many hoops as they work with their agency or in-house marketing team to launch a single campaign. By the time that campaign is live, the immediate market need may have passed and their customer may have already transacted elsewhere.
Dealers need a better way to own their marketing, deploy campaigns, and reach their best customers easily and efficiently. If they were working with a digital agency, they could have more time on their hands.
Marketing automation is the future of digital marketing for dealerships.
THE FUTURE OF AUTOMOTIVE MARKETING
Marketing automation is the future of marketing for dealerships. Self-serve, Omnichannel marketing automation platforms allow a dealer to be autonomous and have successful marketing without the legwork of working with an agency. Marketing automation enables the dealer to reach the right audiences at the right time.
As consumer behavior evolves with technology, dealers require an easy and effective way to own their marketing and deploy campaigns that reach audiences most likely to respond and take action. Omnichannel marketing automation platforms empower dealers to reach the right customers at the right time with the right message. Omnichannel marketing automation solves pain points in marketing by enabling dealers to craft customer marketing journeys that address their specific lifecycle needs with communications delivered in a variety of methods including email, direct mail, calls, digital display, and social media.
HOW DO OMNICHANNEL MARKETING AUTOMATION PLATFORMS WORK?
By using on demand omnichannel Marketing Automation platforms, dealers can launch campaigns in Facebook, Display, Direct Mail, and email efficiently, with the right messaging, to the right customer. Direct Mail campaigns will be in the mail as soon as the next business day, while email and digital campaigns are ready right away. Reporting from these campaigns is then immediately pushed back into an automation platform so the dealer can track their own success.
Autonomous marketing platforms can integrate with multiple sources of data for the dealer to choose marketing audiences from such as DMS, CRM, OEM Portals, Inventory Feeds, and any other third-party data to reach the customer who fits the dealer’s needs.
CUTTING EDGE TECHNOLOGY
In addition, there is little to no marketing knowledge required to operate these autonomous marketing platforms due to propensity models, which have model data that guides them if they do not know what to choose. For example, a dealer can select: “I want to schedule more service appointments” and the model can choose the correct audience and messaging to deploy a campaign with that goal.
Marketing automation technology continues to keep up with the changing nature of digital marketing. Last year, it was announced that cookies will no longer be used in display marketing in order to track customers who visit your websites. By leveraging a dealership’s first party audiences, they will not have to worry about losing out on customers who are in marketing to transact with their store. Marketing automation can do it for the dealerships, to drive successful marketing campaigns effortlessly. These marketing automation platforms solve a dealer’s pain points in marketing. For a single campaign, some examples are effectively eliminating timely marketing planning calls, client success calls, and final client review calls. Dealers can finally own their marketing and reach the right customers by leveraging marketing automation platforms.
The best part about omnichannel marketing automation is that there is no one size fits all solution. Dealers now have the ability to craft custom marketing journeys that address their specific lifecycle needs with communications delivered across all channels. Marketing automation platforms can guide the dealership through effective journey creation that are keyed to customer and vehicle lifecycles to achieve new sales or service goals. By integrating their own first party data and other data sources, the dealership will have plenty of audiences available to inform these lifecycle campaigns. In addition, based on the dealership’s sales or service goals, marketing automation can help the dealer decide the optimal touchpoints in the customer and vehicle lifecycle, and what channels such as email, calls, and digital can best reach and motivate customers. Unifying a dealer’s messaging across multiple channels will amplify
their marketing impact and help the dealer build a better presence in their community with their customers.
BETTER MARKETING SOLUTIONS, BETTER CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT
Dealers do not need extensive marketing knowledge to reach their best customers at the right time. Technology can do that for them quickly and efficiently. Customers can engage with dealerships easier since messaging can be delivered at the right time. Time consuming marketing planning and lengthy calls are a thing of the past. Marketing Automation is the best way for a dealer to take control of their voice and how they want to reach their customers. Finally, dealers can attract and retain customers with dealer-crafted marketing journeys, intelligently tailored to address the specific needs of individual customers. Marketing Automation delivers dealers a better way to own their marketing and deploy efficient and effective campaigns.
Madison Crader has a diverse background in automotive marketing, focusing on seamless integration between Tier 1 and Tier 3 marketing strategies. Madison has experienced marketing from various perspectives from working with the OEMs and dealerships directly, to now serving the automotive industry from the technology and vendor relations side of the business. Currently she serves as the Lead Marketing Business Partner at Solera, where she strives to elevate consumer experiences and enhance dealership value at every stage of the vehicle lifecycle.
By Madison Crader