By Dane Saville, Co-Founder, Brand and PR Manager, Reunion Marketing

COVID-19 has forced changes upon consumers, advertisers, and automotive retail. There is not one facet of American life — of global life — that has not been affected. People have been quarantined for what feels like an eternity, and though states are beginning to open back up, there will be two sets of people: 1) those who are eager to get out and return to “normal”; and 2) those who are hesitant to go out into the world for fear of infection as we still have no vaccine.

With consumer demand compressed and gross margin profits as tightened as ever, you must leverage cost-efficient marketing channels and best practices to work within those channels. There is, however, one universal truth to marketing: relevance is king.

Relevance (n) — the quality or state of being closely connected or appropriate

That’s what consumers seek. Connection. Whether they’re seeking a new car, a used car, an oil change, or headlight replacements, they want to see results that are appropriate to — that are connected to — their intent.

So, how do you know their intent?

You don’t need a marketing agency to understand consumer intent. I say that as a representative of a digital marketing agency. You have a free tool at your disposal to get those insights. It’s Google Analytics. You can do a lot more than just see search queries to see what people want, but we don’t need to dive into that right now.

Yes, you can see what people are searching for and how they’re searching for it. Now, here is where you need an internal team or marketing agency. You take that information to build content on your website – content that is relevant and compelling.

Relevance + Message = Success

You can’t simply just “write” a webpage. Human beings are not algorithms, so you want to write to them and not the search engines. That requires a level of copywriting skills. You need the ability to distill the information in a way that compels people.

Did you know that there have been studies that demonstrate a 90% increase in clicks by putting “My” or “Me” into calls-to-action instead of “You” or “Your”? There is a psychology to personalizing a consumer’s journey. You’re making it more relevant to them because those first-person pronouns empower them. They are making the choice; it’s not you giving them the choice.

And good copywriting comes from — just like any other marketing tactic, strategy, or campaign — analyzing the data and testing new approaches.

So, we already addressed content marketing. You leverage Google Analytics to create content around consumer intent, and each page is optimized with best practices for technical SEO (meta titles, meta description, URL structure, etc.). Your SEO isn’t the only strategy delivering on consumer intent.

Every dollar you invest in paid search can have its potency maximized by focusing on relevance.

• Relevant ad text
• Relevant landing page
• Relevant keyword to the search query

Those are three of five factors that influence your ad’s Quality Score.

Ad Position = Quality Score x Bid Price

When you increase your Quality Score, you’re able to bid less on every keyword to maintain a top position. In addition to this, by being relevant, there’s a greater likelihood that you’ll increase your Click Share (the anticipated share of clicks you earn for local, in-market searches) because consumers are more likely to click on ads that relate to their intent.

Side Note: One of the ways to help ensure relevance is by employing an internal team or partnering with a marketing agency that can launch your campaigns with Responsive Search Ads, which uses Google’s AI to use copywriting options you provide to put together an ad most relevant to each search query.

When you have a granular account structure that accounts for the varied types of searches and intents coupled with good copywriting within the Response Search Ad framework, you have a remarkable opportunity to maximize your return on investment.

Are we done? Not quite yet.

SEO and SEM are both in-market platforms. They connect relevant content to people who have employed signals that demonstrate they’re ready to buy — they’re raising their hands and waving them at you (metaphorically, of course!). So, what about those not in-market? After all, about 99.5% of people aren’t in the market for a vehicle on any given month.

You have several programmatic channels. One of the most effective of those is Facebook. Not only does it have tremendous reach through its members, but its ads are also syndicated on Instagram and its network.

The unfortunate reality is that most agencies that provide social media advertising run approximately three to six ads that have generic copywriting and a single static image. Yes, there will be clicks. Are those clicks, however, leading to actual engagement, or are they just clicks — just a vanity metric that’s been pushed into your face?

To be relevant on a platform like Facebook and to avoid the pitfalls of ad fatigue, you must offer your local, in-market consumers a variety of ads with tailored copywriting that connects them with actual inventory and services available at your dealership. Contingent on what brand(s) your dealership represents, you can have up to 50 ad combinations for variable and fixed operations.

A truck buyer is different than a sedan buyer, and they are both different than an SUV buyer. When you drill down even more, let’s be honest, a Colorado buyer likely has different needs, interests, or budget than a Silverado buyer.

Or let’s say you’re a Buick GMC dealer, you can run ads about the Enclave, Encore, Envision, Acadia, Terrain, Yukon, as well as SUVs in general. Each can have a unique headline, ad copy, and inventory fed through. You can tailor them by thinking about what value propositions (technology, safety equipment, space, etc.) that drive the interest and decision-making for the vehicles.

This customization reduces the ad fatigue that we (as advertisers) often subject consumers to. It also makes the content more relevant because it’s more tailored to them as individuals.

To put it back into the automotive retail perspective, you wouldn’t run a single SUV ad for your paid search campaigns, so why would you allow a single SUV ad for your paid social media? You will give audiences a greater variety of ads that have the potential to resonate with them, creating a higher likelihood that the ad will speak to them.

Results of a Social Media Campaign Powered by Audiences

An actual dealership ran a Facebook ad campaign powered by 26 different ads.

• $0.30 cost-per-click
• $8.86 cost-per-thousand-impressions
• 2.92% clickthrough rate
• 10%+ retargeting clickthrough rate

The industry average cost-per-click is $2.29 and clickthrough rate is 0.8%.

There’s more to the story. We asked if clicks are just clicks or if they are leading to engagement. Remember that social media is reaching people — although highly targeted — who have not demonstrated that they are in-market and ready to buy right now. So, how do we know that the clicks on a social media campaign aren’t just for vanity purposes and are leading to engagement?

Here is a summary of re-engagement rates — meaning people who come back to the website after their initial clicks from Facebook ads — of this robust approach (up to 50 ads / on the left) versus the standard ads (3-6 / on the right).

Each week, you see that exponentially more consumers are returning to the dealer’s site when they see ads that are more relevant to their intent, needs, or budget.

Relevance Is the Crux of Any Strategy

Relevance is vital to the success of your digital marketing campaigns, no matter what channel you’re using. As you review your digital marketing performance, take a look at the content on your website, the way your paid search account is set up, and the number of ads you’re running on Facebook.

Then ask the right questions:

• What searches are driving traffic to the site?
• Where are those searches coming from?
• Do we have custom pages that align with those searches?
• How is my paid search account structure?
• How many ad sets and ads do we have and why?
• What is our approach to Facebook?
• How many ads are we running?
• Are we A/B testing?
• Who’s doing our copywriting?

Those are just a taste of the types of questions you need to ask to hold your internal team or marketing partner accountable. And, of course, you should pose the most important question: Is the content we’re creating in digital marketing relevant to our consumers?