The Key To Understanding Data And The Best Advertising Channels To Maximise Your Marketing

Running a successful automotive business is hard work. There is very little time to learn about how you can maximise your profits through understanding the hoards of data and where to best focus your marketing budget.

We’ve compiled a list of some helpful tips so that you can navigate the relentlessly changing marketing side of the automotive industry. We’ve split these tips up into two blogs so make sure you stay tuned for part two!

1.) Change Your Sales Focused Mindset

Your social media marketing doesn’t always have to focus on your latest offers and be solely focused on selling a car. Mix in different messages to break up the heavy sales posts. This will help you build a relationship with customers, and interact with them. You can post about local events, automotive news, customer stories, get your staff involved, and maybe even create quizzes or games for your followers to play.

When sending out emails to your customers, don’t just send to all of them at once. If you’re sending servicing offers out to someone who just had a service, they’re likely to be annoyed about missing out on the discounted rate. Similarly, if you send out an email about the new £30,000 Range Rover you just brought into stock to a customer you know is driving a Toyota AYGO, this will make them more likely to flag your emails as spam or unsubscribe. Segment your data and send messages to each pot with information relevant to them at a time that is relevant to them.

2.) You’ve Done The Hard Part

Your marketing work has paid off. You’ve just had an enquiry come through at 6pm, the Dealership has just closed up and nobody is going to see the enquiry until 8am the next day. By that time the customer has made 10 more enquiries and been tempted by a better deal, they’ve seen elsewhere. It’s a fact that consumers do most of their car shopping when your dealership is closed. It’s a good idea to set-up an automatic response to this send an email out to the enquirer and the more engaging you can make the automatic email, the more chance they’ll reply again, and feel a sense of attachment and commitment to your dealership.

Stats show that email leads convert to a sale within 4.5 days following a personalised email response and strong call to action. This is versus 11.5 days, (if at all) if the enquiry is left unanswered for 40 minutes or more.

Utilising a service such as the award-winning ClickEngage has helped many dealers capture enquires out of hours, with notifications of any leads, from any platform, being sent straight to one easy to manage system. The 24/7 service even allows customers to reserve a vehicle and leave a deposit. So rather than coming into a dead lead the next day, you could find yourself coming into a vehicle reservation. You can find out more about ClickEngage here.

3.) Team Talk

Working in marketing can sometimes leave you detached from the customers you’re actually trying to communicate with. Maybe someone likes a Facebook post or leaves a good review on Google but as a marketer, we have no idea who they really are. The fantastic news is your colleagues have all the answers you need. They can add context to data. Sales staff, service advisors, telesales, hosts, etc. They all speak to customers every single day. Find out what customers are interested in, what they’re not happy about, what would make things easier for them…

You might also find out from your sales team that one particular customer has been buying cars from your dealership for over 12 years. They’ve just bought their fourth car – that is the perfect example of a customer story that you can use on social media to break up those sales messages. The benefit is you’re still promoting your business. If a customer keeps coming back for 12 years and buys four cars, they’re clearly happy with the level of service and act as a glowing review of positivity to any potential customers seeing the post online.

We hope you found those tips helpful – join us for three more next week!

To find out more about how Click can help you with your marketing, get in touch by calling 01782 478220, emailing marketing@clickdealer.co.uk or by requesting a call back below.