As 2024 winds down, your dealership’s marketing plan for 2025 needs to be nearing the point of deep discussion for final decisions regarding where every dollar is best utilized for growth and profitability.
Preparing for a Shifting Automotive Landscape
While November 5th election results are still being tabulated for the legislative majority, the number of serious questions facing the automotive industry, from the economy to EV, makes strategic planning even more critical. What do you need to have ready to respond when the answers come? What do your customers expect to see from you in 2025? Even more importantly, where are they looking for you?
In this year’s Capital One Car Buying Outlook, input from more than 600 U.S. car dealers and nearly 2,000 U.S. adults who had purchased a vehicle from a dealership in the last 6 months delivers an overview of what is taking place on a national scope. What I saw as the critical data point for why you must develop a specific marketing plan:
- 72% of buyers spent more than a month ‘actively’ shopping before purchase
Leveraging Digital Tools to Enhance the Car-Buying Experience
This comes as no surprise, both dealers and buyers agreed that effective online digital tools resulted in a more efficient buying process. So how do you know as a dealer what are the ‘effective’ platforms in your digital toolbox?
Here’s a partial list to get your conversation started when discussing a full-funnel digital approach from the top of the funnel, down:
- OTT (ESPN, Hulu, etc.)
- Google Video campaigns (YouTube video ads)
- Amazon OTT (More targeted of shoppers based on their Amazon account)
- Google Demand Gen campaigns for exclusive targeting of your ‘lookalike’ audiences
- Facebook Automotive Inventory Ads retarget shoppers with the exact units viewed on site, and then show similar units the dealer has that are comparable.
- Google Search campaigns
- Google Performance Max + Vehicle Ads campaigns (uses Google’s machine learning to track down and identify shoppers that are most likely to convert based on their online activity, allowing you to tell Google the value of each conversion type.)
Also, consider allocating dollars from both sales and service perspectives for regular customer e-mail contact, as well as Direct Mail (make sure you have all sales reports from 2024 DM to measure effectiveness); dollars for managing Dealer Reviews; dollars for media; dollars for…Plan ahead, Now!