Pub. 3 2013 Issue 4

10 AUTOMOBILE DEALER NEWS ILLINOIS www.illinoisdealers.com Allocating Your Dealership’s Marketing Budget The Fog Begins to Clear T here is one thing the economic downturn was able to firmly es- tablish - email, search engine opti- mization, social media and online marketing alone were never going to fill your service drive or showroomwith customers. As sales and service revenues tanked, managers skewed quickly to these new emerging media because they were considered to be a more cost effective way to advertise. But along with that change inmarketing strategy came a sharp decline in both Sales and Service Department customer traffic. Five or six years ago the potential of this new media, especially email and online marketing, was wide open. A dealership was going to be able to touch a customer almost instantaneously with a targeted message at the exact moment that customer needed a vehicle service or even a whole new vehicle. It was going to be great; a new age in automotive marketing. The problemwith this newmode of adver- tising was that it never had the ability to engage but only the smallest fraction of the potential pool of customers in your PMA and more importantly, they all require a potential customer to perform an action, to actually do something. It does not matter if a customer must open an email (open rates for automotive related emails run at about 18%), find your website, go to your Facebook page (you’ve got 2,367 “Likes” – which trans- lates incidentally into zero revenue), scan a QR Code, opt-in for text messaging or enter a PURL address. If a potential cus- tomer has to take any action at all to point them in the direction of your dealership, the odds are heavily in favor of no action ever being taken. It’s not to say that any of these media are bad business practices as long as you can source the business gen- erated from them and they provide an ac- ceptable ROI, but they will never fill your service drive or showroom with custom- ers. They just do not have the horsepower to do so. The automotive industry is fortu- nate in the fact that most consumers own vehicles, need them repaired on occasion and will eventually purchase new ones. The trick is locating the maximumamount of “qualified” customers in your PMA and reliably placing your message directly into their hands without your customer doing a darn thing – except maybe opening their mail box and reaching for the mail. Yes direct mail is the red-headed stepchild of advertising, but it’s probably the best suited and most powerful of the advertising tools available for automotive marketing. The fact that we know where a potential customer lives, what kind of vehicle they own, how old it is and whether they purchased it and have it serviced at your facility is some pretty useful informa- tion. The ability to reliably place in the hands of a potential customer, in a non- invasive manner, advertising that shows your facility, introduces your staff, pro- vides competitive pricing, displays your location and hours and allows for ample branding opportunities is an extremely powerful tool. Unlike any of the other media, includ- ing radio, TV and newsprint, a direct mail BY DALE BECKER , PRESIDENT OF WESTATES AUTOMOTIVE PROMOTIONS