By Ryan Gerardi, Founder & CEO, AutoConversion
Today’s dealership receives leads from an array of consumer touchpoints that all have the same purpose: To drive the customer into making a positive response in the sales funnel. It goes for all departments: sales, service, parts, and even collision repairs.
Dealers invest thousands of dollars monthly into campaigns for all these consumer touchpoints, but how do you gauge their success? It isn’t like you can ask every customer what path led them to choose your store as their provider.
Complicated Marketing Broken Down
What’s necessary for any retail or service-based industry like dealerships is a complete understanding of where their traffic comes from. While every marketing tool can be tracked and monitored individually – at least, at a high level – it’s extremely time-consuming.
Aggregating touchpoint data can assist dealers in understanding where their customers are coming from.
As Kelley Koliopulos, director of regional sales at CallSource, explains in this video, “[Dealers] can have a full spectrum of attribution, from the campaign to the keywords that are driving people to the store. [Shoppers] come to the website, a lot of times it looks like everything is coming from Google, but we can see those nurturing vendors that are helping them get to the website.”
And what should dealers do once their marketing techniques are broken down and the effective consumer touchpoints are identified? They’re able to adjust campaigns, media sources, copy, and engagement to further increase that success, and adjust their ad spend accordingly.
How to Identify Effective Strategies
Even with data from all marketing platforms funneled into one place, how can you tell what’s effectively driving traffic into your store? Imagine sifting through data from thousands of phone calls, emails, text messages, live chats, and beyond, trying to correlate the contact method with actual in-person traffic to your dealership. And which of those leads has received follow-up?
It’s not easy to sift through, if not near impossible.
Understanding which consumer touchpoints are most effective for your client base hinges on being able to interpret all that data into usable information. It’s a job that almost certainly requires a specialized skill set.
What Are Current Trends Telling Us?
Phone calls and emails are still primary touchpoints for consumers, but it’s far from the only effective strategies. Text messaging is on the rise. A dealer that has a text-enabled number on their website can see an increase of 20 percent in inbound leads.
Text messaging is a growing touchpoint today, but that may change in the future. It boils down to understanding the audience and growing your campaigns with them.
What the data tells dealers is this: you must have the ability to adapt and change with your customers’ needs.
About the Author
Ryan Gerardi is an automotive media and marketing professional devoted to being part of the great convergence in mobility tech and connectivity, exploring people, ideas, and technologies that influence how we are connected and the way we get around.
