Automotive Advertising Mistakes

One of the great advertising mistakes I see happen is continuing with the old school mentality of advertising.   Back in the day of traditional advertising the ability to measure the effectiveness of an advertising campaign was fairly difficult and for the most part dealerships and advertising in general simply ignored that part.

In todays hyper connected digital world, the ability to track your advertising effectiveness is available to anyone who wants to implement it.  There is a myriad of options available to anyone advertising to start tracking how effective it actually is at driving people to your dealership.

This isn’t just for online advertising either this can include traditional advertising as well, such as print ads, radio spots, tv spots, you name it we can track it in todays world.

The ability to track means measuring the ROI on your advertising.   Is that expensive radio ad really performing like you think it is?   The “hey how did you find us” question is not a measuring tool.  How you ‘feel’ about it is not an accurate measurement.

If I gave you two options to advertise and told you one will knock it out of the park and the other will tank (same price), which one would you pick?   Would you split the money across both hoping or take the sure win?

I think anyone would take the sure winner, but how do you know a sure winner?   Because you have to track and measure and adjust.   By doing so, you start to learn exactly what works using numbers and you can adjust and increase your spending accordingly.

Tracking Tips

• Every phone number can be tracked, when doing different ads (radio, tv, print, website, etc) be sure you’re using a trackable phone number that is only associated with that particular ad.  These numbers will automatically forward to your real number and now you can determine which ad generated the most leads.  Now you can determine your cost per lead and if you’re measuring your closing on those leads, you now have a total ROI calculation.
• Website addresses that are advertised can also include trackable information.  Anytime you show your website url, think of it like a phone number and make a different one for your different ads (you may need some help with this).   You can measure again the amount of people who remember/saw your url and see how effective that ad is.
• Online advertising has what they call conversion tracking.  Be sure you’re incorporating this into your online paid advertising!   Find out which key phrases you’re paying for that are driving the most amount of leads.  Don’t pay for tire kickers!
• Call tracking can be done down to the key phrase used to find your website.   When working on an SEO campaign, you want to focus on keywords that aren’t driving the most traffic, but are driving the most leads (phone, form submission etc).  This requires some more advanced stuff but it can be done.  This allows you to target the most relevant people with precision by know exactly which ones are turning into valuable  leads.

There isn’t a single thing that doesn’t get tracked on the sales floor, it’s been that way for years to improve sales performance and set goals.  Why work so hard at measuring your sales process inside the showroom and blindly spend on all the advertising and marketing when you could be tracking and measuring and adjusting that too!

If you need help with understanding your options and how they can benefit your dealerships advertising budget, contact moveyourmetal.com and we’ll gladly show you some options based on what you’d like to do and what we can also recommend you do.