By Shelley Washburn, President, GSM

By 2021, digital ad spend is anticipated to exceed $375 billion. If you’re putting a portion of your marketing budget into that pool, you need to make sure your ads reach the right people at the right time with your ad targeting and retargeting strategies.

Targeted digital ads allow you to reach customers specific to your business with content that is relevant to their wants or needs. For example, dealers can boost sales by targeting people who have expressed interest in their parts and accessories inventory. Dealers can also retarget consumers who have expressed interest in the dealership’s inventory, showing them the exact cars — or similar ones — they’re interested in.

As the modern car-buying journey becomes more convoluted, marketers must reach the right consumers effectively. More than 50 percent of prospective customers visit two or more websites before they make a purchase. Retargeting through channels such as display, Facebook, and paid search allows you to reach customers who have shown interest in your dealership and bring them back to your website. The approach has proven effective as customers who are retargeted are seven times more likely to convert.

Taking Aim

If you haven’t already, we recommend allocating a portion of your marketing budget toward specific audience targeting methods that are available within digital marketing. Below are five common methods:

1. Behavioral: Target consumers based on their browsing activity and shopping behaviors. With this method, you should ask questions regarding the websites they’ve visited and recent purchases they’ve made.
2. Demographic: Pinpoint people based on factors such as age, gender, income, location, etc.
3. In-Market: Use machine learning to determine whether consumers are “in-market” or ready for purchase by analyzing online behavior such as clicks on related ads, content viewed on websites, and searches.
4. First-Party: Target existing customers in your DMS by using data collected directly from them. This approach allows you to build out custom audience segments that you can also use to create future audiences that resemble your current customers.
5. Interest-Based: Reach specific audiences based on interests that users have shared on social media sites (e.g., likes, follows, and brand interactions).

With any of these targeting methods, you must track key metrics to ensure you reach your intended audience. Look for conversions that come from your retargeting efforts. The people you retarget have already expressed interest in your offerings by visiting your website, so they should generate the highest volume of conversions at the lowest cost per conversion. What’s more, retargeting is shown to increase conversion rates by up to 150%.

You should also measure your cost per click (CPC) and cost per thousand impressions (CPM). These metrics can reveal how efficient your ad spend is per click or impression. The most important thing to remember is to update your marketing strategy to reach consumers whose online activity makes them most likely to purchase or use your services.

Hitting the Mark

The right targeting and retargeting strategy will help you reach consumers with more relevant content, thereby increasing your dealership’s visibility. Instead of increasing your spend to reach more people, you can reduce your costs by reaching the right audience members at the right time — when they are ready to convert.

If you want to elevate your dealership’s marketing game by increasing your digital ad targeting and retargeting, follow these four steps:

• Evaluate the customer experience. According to a study by consulting firm Walker, customer experience will be the main brand differentiatorby the end of 2020. Think about the online experience with your dealership. Are you driving customers to relevant landing pages? Do they see all the offers your dealership provides? Is there anything you can add to your dealership website that can shorten or simplify the customer journey? Consider adding options such as pricing and appraising tools, a payment calculator, an online service scheduler, a new vehicle configurator, an online application, and more. Even condensing your website’s menu options can make the process quicker and easier for consumers trying to find the information they need.The first step of any targeting strategy is to know what your customers see. Once you understand that, you can determine what you might need to adjust to better target existing and prospective customers.

• Leverage first-party data. Retargeting is all about getting in front of existing customers — or those who have visited your site at least once. That’s why first-party data is so important. You can take what you already know about those customers and use that information to retarget them with the same or similar content they viewed on your site.

  Customer Match on Google Ads allows you to easily target your existing customers by entering their email addresses. It can also target based on a customer’s stage in the buying journey.

• Generate a keyword strategy. Keyword search retargeting is another excellent way to reach your customers. When a customer searches for a specific, relevant keyword that you’ve identified, the search engine will display one of your ads. Keyword Planner, Google’s free keyword research tool, provides keyword ideas, terms, and traffic, but it doesn’t show you the keywords your competitors use. That’s where a third-party tool can come in handy.

• Study your competitors. To help you to understand how your competitors are garnering online traffic, you can use third-party tools like:
  • SpyFu to download your competitor’s most profitable keywords, as well as their ads for both paid and organic search
  • Hootsuite to monitor your competitors’ social media posts
  • Hashtagify to find the top trending hashtags on Twitter that are related to your tweet’s topic

With the ability to see your competitors’ keywords, social media posts, and ads across the web, you can better adjust your keyword strategy, ad copy, post topics, and ad creative to retarget customers — and win them back.

Blindly sending out ads and hoping that your customers will see them is no longer sufficient. Strategic targeting and retargeting are necessary to reach the most relevant customers. These steps will help you to create a more effective digital ad strategy that keeps your dealership top of mind throughout the customer journey.