Why is Automotive Marketing So Difficult?

One of the biggest challenges many of our dealers face is how to get their automotive marketing working for them. It’s a juggling act from top to bottom – between having a great website, making sure walk-ins are greeted and cared for properly by sales staff and ensuring your brand messaging is consistent, there are a million ways to do things. None of them are exactly right, but some of your automotive marketing methods CAN alienate customers and cause problems for your dealership – in which case, they’re wrong.

If there’s anything challenging about marketing your dealership, it’s having control of everything. With so many moving parts, it’s tough to know what works best, what’s a waste of money and how best to address areas of marketing where the ROI just isn’t worth the spend.

So how do you do it? You make everything a metric.

That means absolutely everything. Whether it’s a scorecard that allows you to rate your employees internally on factors that matter to you. Whether it’s discerning what your vendors are bringing in vs. what they’re billing you (and trust us, this should always be something you do internally – don’t just take their word for it.) Whether it’s really using discretion to determine whether or not bottom line sales goals are being met.

Using metrics to discern whether your automotive marketing is working isn’t a “well, maybe we’ll do this”. Start looking at it as a must. And if you currently investigate your metrics month over month to see if your marketing is working, consider drilling down a little deeper. Is the reporting you get from your CRM accurate? Is there anyone on the dealership side evaluating vendor reporting to ensure the numbers are accurate? Are sales reps actually being incentivized and rewarded based on the numbers they bring in – not their popularity in the department?

When you make everything a number, you begin to look at how departments and dealerships are run from the bottom up. This gives you the ability to change what’s not working from both a 50 foot and the 5000 foot view.

Need help with the view? Let us know. We’ll dialogue together on what’s working for your dealership and what can be changed using different baseline metrics.