By Christopher Walsh, Vice President and General Manager, Naked Lime Marketing

The principles of the marketing funnel inform much of your advertising strategy on a day-to-day basis. Put simply, the funnel consists of the stages you guide potential buyers through on the path to purchase, from their first encounter with your brand to the day they walk out of your dealership owning a new vehicle.

It’s useful to think about the marketing funnel now, because the COVID-19 pandemic has completely upended our normal way of doing business. In this national crisis dealers still have to operate and find ways to connect with consumers, making social distancing and severely depressed sales activity just two more challenges to overcome.

What does that mean? With such drastic changes in consumer behavior, there are drastic changes you can make in your approach to advertising.

The COVID-19 Effect

In normal times, you can allocate marketing and advertising resources in such a way that all stages of the marketing funnel, from brand awareness to lead nurturing to the buying decision, can operate more or less simultaneously.

But there’s evidence that an adjustment is needed right now. According to Google, automotive brand searches are down between 12 and 14 percent, while location-specific searches like “dealer near me” are down 25 percent since last week. Plus, mobile searches are down overall while desktop searches are rising, presumably as more and more people find themselves stuck at home during the day.

Compare those numbers to searches for “grocery stores” (up 89 percent, per Google) or “things to do at home” (up 336 percent, per Google) and a clear pattern begins to emerge: As long as consumers don’t have an urgent need for a new vehicle, dealerships will be relegated to the background as people focus on acquiring more urgent essentials.

This COVID-19 effect is especially pronounced in the areas being hit hardest by the outbreak: New York City, Chicago, and the states of California and Washington.

Such an unfriendly environment warrants entertaining a shift in how we think about automotive advertising. Specifically, it’s a good time to consider moving your resources away from the end stages of the funnel (prospects demonstrate an intent to buy, evaluate your product, and make a purchasing decision) and toward the early stages or “upper” funnel.

Why? Because if sales activity is going to be depressed for the foreseeable future due to circumstances outside of everyone’s control, then you’d be wasting significant dollars on end-stage advertising for people who simply aren’t going to buy.

Instead, the upper-funnel stages of advertising (brand awareness, capturing consumer interest, and turning qualified leads into prospective customers) will deliver far more in the long term.

Let’s dive a little deeper and explore options for allocating your advertising dollars during this pandemic to reduce waste and maximize impact.

Adjusting Your Advertising

Now, there’s a lot that goes into advertising your dealership in the upper funnel. This is where you first catch people’s attention, differentiate yourself from the competition, and create leads that eventually become prospective buyers.

But, for simplicity’s sake, I’ve pinpointed six key areas to focus on:

• Update your Google My Business (GMB) profile and location extensions.
• Reallocate budgets to maximize ROI.
• Explore alternative customer service models.
• Evolve messaging to match customers’ needs.
• Re-engage existing customers.
• Value online metrics.

Let’s break these down. First and foremost, with the chaos that COVID-19 has injected into everyone’s daily schedules, you should update your GMB profile and location extensions within search to ensure accurate store hours and available services are up to date.

While we’re on the topic of your search campaigns, also consider reallocating campaign budgets to focus heavily on those that are relevant to current search activity, ensuring your search dollars go as far as they can (especially if you’ve had to cut overall budgets). Utilize Google’s optimization score to improve Google Ads performance and revise your current expanded text ads (ETAs) and responsive search ads (RSAs) to better align your messaging with the reality of the COVID-19 situation (e.g., new financing options that may be available, special offers, and so on).

The same principle of shifting your money to relevant campaigns applies to your display efforts as well. For those running YouTube campaigns, the level of your branding budget will inform what tools are best to implement. For example, those with adequate budgets should consider TrueView in-stream ads (the short video ads that play at the beginning of a YouTube video), while those with more limited resources could employ bumper ads targeting selective audiences to increase brand awareness with high efficiency.

Next, explore alternative customer models that provide social distancing workarounds. That includes online transactions, at-home test drives, pickup and delivery for sales and service, and email monitoring even if your dealership closes.

As I touched on when discussing search campaigns, you should also be careful to evolve your messaging to match customers’ needs and concerns during this unique and challenging time. That means avoiding calls-to-action like “hurry in today” or “ends soon” that incentivize people to ignore established best practices for staying COVID-19 free.

During this time of focusing on broad brand awareness and instilling consumer interest with an eye to the future, it’s also important to keep your existing customer base engaged. While they may not be coming in to buy a new vehicle right now, their future business is critical to your dealership’s ability to bounce back post-pandemic.

That means revisiting your remarketing lists and customers whose leases are ending soon, among others, to make sure your data is as clean, accurate, and as up to date as possible. Then, craft customized, targeted messaging that lets these customers know that you still value their business and are ready to meet their needs, crisis or no.

Finally, it may be time to shift many of your key performance indicators (KPIs) to place a higher value on online metrics, as opposed to in-store visits. While physical visits to the showroom are down right now and will be for the foreseeable future, plenty of valuable activity happens on your website that can help move potential buyers down the funnel. It’s time to adjust perceptions to account for page visits, time spent on-site, and saved or “favorited” vehicles, and make changes as needed to help with engagement.

In It for the Long Haul

What’s the one concept tying all these ideas together? Namely, that we’re all in this for the long haul, and need to react as such.

That means shifting your advertising focus to generating interest and potential leads for future business while accepting that sales activity will be depressed in the short term due to circumstances none of us could have predicted or prepared for.

Start adjusting your advertising for COVID-19 today, and you’ll set your dealership up to roar back stronger than ever.