EXECUTION: Uncovering Big Data's Missing Piece

by David Metter

The greatest marketing trends of all time began as insignificant ideas that eventually gained enough momentum to reach a critical tipping point – the point in which uncharted tools and technologies once overlooked by the masses are adopted by the mainstream. When ideas reach their tipping point, an infectious, unstoppable domino effect goes into play. The undiscovered becomes discovered, the unfamiliar becomes familiar, and the unknown becomes universal truth.

Just as the adoption of CRMs exploded in the early 2000’s and mobile marketing reached its tipping point circa 2014-2015, I believe big data has reached its culmination in 2017. I know this because I’ve seen the distinct black and white clarity today’s automotive data has finally been able to give to car dealers. 

For the past several years, dealers have lacked significant visibility into their market regarding:

• Where and how they’re losing sales
• Who they’re losing sales to (whether the customer is purchasing the same make or another brand entirely)
• If sales are lost due to internal or external factors
• True successes, failures, and trends tied to each salesperson, lead or traffic source, inventory, day of the month, zip code, etc.
• Close and defection rates for all your leads and lead providers
• Validation that you are stocking the right inventory and marketing it in the most efficient manner

… the list goes on.

What we know now is that all of the items listed above are finally within reach. It’s also important to note that the problem has never been the data. It’s that dealers have only been able to view sales trends within their own CRM and DMS. How can you possibly improve your sales effectiveness if you’re only comparing it to yourself? The inability to see the sales and defection trends of top competing dealers and brands in your market has been a HUGE roadblock for dealers... until now that is.

Today’s big data landscape has evolved to become 100% executable. We can quickly gain insights from data using a scientific approach that exposes lost sales by source at an aggregate level. By knowing your lost sales opportunities, who you lost them to, and where you lost them, a strategic path towards increasing sales and reducing defection rates naturally comes into view – despite what your market conditions may look like.

We can even take it a step further and look at success and defection trends tied to an individual person within your sales staff. For example, if someone has a high close rate AND a high defection rate, you can break down where these lost opportunities are coming from. You can see that person is being assigned way too many leads and then you can make smarter decisions in terms of how you divide up your employees’ responsibilities. 

When you can see where you’re losing sales across the board, you can then align your conversion goals, the operational training of your staff, and the way you drive traffic and leads into your dealership – so you can have the highest quality lineup of opportunities to close.

The advent of integrating automotive data to make more profitable operational decisions is similar in many ways to when CRM and DMS technologies were first implemented. Using these tools gave you a way to organize and streamline your process to help you sell more cars. The ability to execute smarter sales strategies using data analysis is no longer alchemy. It’s the current reality of this instant gratification world we live in, and it’s the weapon dealers need to be unstoppable.

The Automotive Marketing Home Run

By David Metter

The four bases that make up a baseball diamond can be directly related to the car shopper’s journey. We all know the path begins online. The final destination, or home base, is the dealership. The goal is to surpass all your bases and arrive back at home, or rather, get buyers into your store. You can’t get a home run without rounding the other three bases - that would be cheating. Similarly, in the car business, there are three obstacles you have to conquer first and foremost, before returning home for the win.

First Base: Meet Expectations

The expectations of today’s digitally equipped consumers have skyrocketed. Souring shopper standards have caused additional complexities within the marketing landscape. There are more media outlets than ever before. New developments in mobile and wearable devices are generating more buzz than an overcrowded group text. Our access to data is exploding. Social media advertising opportunities are #Trending. But with all this technological innovation has come consequences. These advancements mean one thing for dealers and marketers: more competition. The following are guidelines to rise above and defeat the competition.

In a recent study, eMarketer reported 97% of US corporate executives say their customers expected an efficient, fast, cost-effective, and personalized level of experience. The two most critical components in automotive marketing today are speed and personalization. Cost aside, if you don’t offer a seamless, personal experience that spans from your digital advertising all the way to your showroom, having the lowest price in town isn’t going to matter - because buyers won’t make it to your dealership if you lack the first two pieces of the equation.

When a pitch is thrown to home plate, the batter has less than a tenth of a second to make a decision on whether or not to take a swing. When it comes to your website and mobile site, the same holds true. The modern-day consumer is flat out impatient. Google says 70% of smartphone users will leave a site that has a lagging load time and 67% will switch websites if it takes too many steps to get the relevant information they’re looking for. Dealers have a total of two seconds to ensure their mobile site experience prevails – slightly more time than a player at bat, but a very small window nonetheless.

According to AutoConversion, personalization of messaging is something we can and should be measuring. “Consumers now expect and respond better to messaging that is better customized to them personally, thus customization has become a key measurable characteristic with marketing attribution, an idea unimagined only a few years ago.”

Second Base: Establish Trust

I don’t care how you do it. Or at what inning in the game you earn their trust. But trust is paramount when it comes to selling cars. Choosing which vehicle to purchase and where to buy it is a large, emotionally dense decision. Whether it’s trust in a brand, a dealership, or a salesperson, it is ultimately that sense of security that makes people feel like they’re being provided with a personal, reliable experience. That feeling of comfort will translate across channels into vehicles sold.

Salespeople are already at a disadvantage when it comes to trust. A new survey from HubSpot says, “Only a mere 3% of people consider salespeople to be trustworthy.” Dealers need to be cognizant of this when staffing sales and BDC staff. Your team’s ability to communicate with honesty and transparency should be equally as important as their experience and knowledge of your inventory.

The same rules apply in marketing. Your brand, your digital campaigns, your “why buy” messaging, and your reputation management, all must collectively paint a picture of trust. A dependable brand provides helpful tips and easy access to information. Dealers can establish integrity by sharing useful advice or articles throughout their digital endeavors, not necessarily related to their given product. 

Third Base: Achieve Conversion

We know vehicle details page (VDP) visits are important. There is no denying the correlation between VDP views and units sold. But what is even more important is the experience your VDP offers once the customer gets there. Your landing pages need to do three things: be easy to navigate, load fast, and above all, convert. Ask yourself, how do your VDPs incentivize customers to take that next step toward home base (your showroom)? KissMetrics says a one second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.

And finally…

Home Plate: Your Dealership

The culmination of the home run occurs when all these factors are simultaneously in play. The trajectory includes every digital touch point (base) that ultimately drove a buyer into your showroom. Just as players must work together as a team, these micro-moments must all work in harmony in order to meet expectations, establish trust, and offer a fast and personal experience.  

Auto Attribution: Are We Stuck in the Minor Leagues?

By David Metter

There are a lot of rookie players in the game when it comes to accurate attribution reporting (measuring your digital sales return on investment). More often than not, the task of obtaining valuable sales attribution metrics is put on the bench due to their roaring complexity. The problem is not the data. The data is there; we just need the right players in the game to tell us what to do with it and how it connects. Obscure conundrums of the digital world can be “attributed” to the ongoing development of new media channels and information available. This new-age, omni-channel playing field has resulted in an upheaval of brand interaction opportunities – leaving the one source that led to a sale increasingly difficult to pinpoint. Keyword being difficult, not impossible.

The concept of attribution itself is relatively simple. According to DrivingSales, “Attribution allows you to understand which elements of your marketing mix were involved in the purchase decision process, and ideally, which were the most effective.” The problem lies in securing truthful statistics. What use is big data when you can’t put it into perspective and draw logical conclusions? If we knew which touch point led to a sale, wouldn’t we have a much better gage on how and where to spend our ad dollars?

In Google’s recent article, they highlight one consumer’s 900+ digital interactions that took place preceding her final vehicle purchase.

·      The Good News: That’s 900 opportunities for dealers and manufacturers to engage customers with relevant, impactful information. Or in Google’s words, 900 chances to “be there and be useful.”

·      The Bad News: The more digital interactions that make up a single consumer’s online profile, the more difficult it becomes to identify which interaction was the tipping point that led to the purchase.

Experian’s Global Marketer Report highlights the current depth of the issue. “The biggest hurdles and key priorities for marketers this year are dependent on having accurate, enriched data, linked together in a central location for a complete customer view.” In 2016, 81% of marketers are still struggling to attain this information. “Proper revenue attribution is crucial to determining each channel or touch point’s role in the customer journey.” But the reality is too many marketers have very little, if any understanding of which investments are paying off.

So let’s get to the point. The answer to the title of this blog is an obvious YES. Overall as an industry, we are stuck in the minor leagues when it comes to correctly measuring ROI. It’s a huge problem for marketers. But I assure you there is hope. If we only had the reporting to know which interaction point transformed a browser into a buyer, we could make much smarter, more efficient decisions with our money.  

So, what are we going to do about it? First, manufacturers and dealers need to hold themselves accountable for seizing the limitless opportunities to connect. Second, ask yourself if you’re holding your vendors accountable for providing you with the attribution metrics that led to a sale? And I don’t mean how many clicks, impressions or unique site visitors your vendors have sent your way. That’s all great to know. But the major league players know that those executions drove traffic into your showroom and they know how many sales they got you.

CDK’s eBook, Automotive Moneyball says it best. “Leads, clicks, visits and VDP views all have value—as do inventory searches and hours & directions lookups. They just can’t tell the whole story when viewed in isolation. No single number can. They’re simply incomplete—pint-sized, partial pictures of the shoppers they represent.”

The major league players have the good stuff: clear, proven, and complete attribution models. However, it is up to you to key up your bases with ONLY major league vendors.

As the former CMO of one of the largest dealer groups in the country, I know from experience how difficult this can be. I also know that dealers are not getting the most out of their vendors for a variety of reasons - one being lack of time, another being the fear they may try and upsell you during a meeting...I get it. But the truth is, vendors are the experts (think of a player using better equipment) and their expertise is up for the taking - just make sure your scouts know how to draft the players with major league talent.  

4 Absolutes of an Automotive Game Changer

By David Metter

I have great news. You don’t have to be a genius to change the game, and you don’t have to be a World Series winning champion either. But you do have to be willing to disrupt and question the current rules, players, and equipment used in the game. You also have to be capable of placing YOUR right players in your lineup. If you possess the mentality that there is always a better, more efficient method of accomplishing a goal, or executing a play, then you have it in your DNA to be a game changer. Most of the time, it’s simply about combining the highest-ranked players with a little common sense.

The following absolutes are not only a set of guidelines to winning a baseball game, but they also dictate the attributes of a game-winning team across all leagues of automotive marketing.

1.    Have the Proper Equipment. It’s impossible to get a home run without a bat, and it’s pretty difficult to catch a fly ball without a glove that properly fits. It doesn’t mean the talent isn’t there, it just means it’s not being correctly applied. If dealers are the players of the automotive business, then vendors are their equipment. Vendors facilitate home runs and grand slam opportunities in the same fashion that bats, helmets, cleats, and protective gear assist players in capitalizing on their true strengths. It is the equipment, or rather the vendors, that provide the freedom for players to do what they do best – play the game. Or in our case, sell cars.

In addition, just as one baseball glove does not fit all who play baseball, one all-inclusive marketing strategy does not fit all dealership business models. Now more than ever, our playing field is being infiltrated with vendors aggregating solutions into a single, “all-powerful” marketing suite that consolidates all needs into one – everything from search, to social, to email marketing and in-store conversion tools. In theory, this may sound like a good idea. However, I advise you to be cautious of anyone who claims to be a “Jack of All Trades,” as they cannot possibly be as competent in the results they deliver when compared to a company that specializes, and dominates, in one specific area.

IBM’s recent whitepaper recognizes the advantages that accompany integrating the unique mix of solutions that support your individual needs as opposed to a “one size fits all” marketing suite. “In 2016, look for new ways to leverage your technology mix to give you greater agility to innovate and more strongly engage your customers.”

2.    Put Your Players in the Right Positions. Know the distinct strengths of every player on your team. Just as you wouldn’t put a first baseman in to pitch to a batter, you should very carefully consider putting a vendor that began in one segment and now offers “everything” in a position to manage your full marketing needs. Automotive is not a one size fits all business. The same dealers, dealer groups, and manufacturers that have changed the game are the ones that have taken the time to sit down and evaluate new, revolutionary technologies. Why? Because their impacts can be revolutionary on your most critical KPIs.

When considering which vendors to add to your roster, remember to choose ones that complement each other. For instance, if your goal is to increase your website conversion, you first need to secure a method of getting enough traffic to your site. Likewise, when drafting a winning team, the coach is tasked with the finding the right blend of strengths and talents, and placing each player in the right position. When you think about it, that’s really the only way to win at anything – finding that ideal combination of tools that cover all your bases with the player that’s made for the job.

3.    Don’t Throw the Same Pitch Every Time. In order to win the game, there has to be an element of surprise. That’s your curveball. In marketing, there is traditional, predictable thinking, and then there is the kind of thinking that completely obliterates everything it means to be average. Game changers refuse to succumb to all that is ordinary. When you’re working within our current digital playing field, it’s important to acknowledge the dense fog of information attempting to cloud your vision at all times. But never take your eye off the ball, as this is the fundamental secret weapon needed to break through the clutter.

Thinking outside the conventional marketing platform is the clutch, or the fastball, that will ultimately defend your dealership from falling into the dreaded “average” category - which also fails to identify why people should buy from you. Average is not compelling nor is it magnetic. Average online experiences don’t drive buyers to your showroom – and more importantly, all-in-one marketing suites fail to offer memorable experiences for your customers. Who wants to be average in an industry synonymous with competition?

4.    Know the Score. How can you possibly win at anything when you don’t know the score? In order to overtake the competition, you have to know where you stand in comparison. Don’t get me wrong, you don’t have to be a statistician or analytics expert, nor do you have to know every player’s batting average, but you do need to know what you’re up against and above all, what sets you apart.

To win the game, you have to be ready and willing to change the game. True leaders combine unbelievable technology with a common sense approach. Sometimes all it takes is asking the right questions, which then evolve into ideas, and ultimately solutions that change and improve our operations. Top-of-the-line equipment will never fail to safeguard a competitive edge, but what really sets game changers apart is that they know how to appropriately allocate their assets. They choose to work with vendors that make it possible to transform a single idea into a better-suited reality.  

Do More Firefighters At A Fire Cause More Fire Damage? Rethinking Attribution

When thinking about attribution, it would make everyone’s lives much simpler if there was a straight line between marketing, conversion and a sale. As car buyers increasingly visit more touchpoints in their car shopping journey, attribution becomes more challenging. 

There was an interesting analogy in a recent article on Business 2 Community that I felt nailed the challenges we face - and errors we make - when attributing a sale to a particular source. The article shared that data has proven the more firefighter at a fire, the more damage the fire caused. It was hypothesized to reduce fire damage the answer was to send fewer firefighters to fires. Of course, we all know that would probably not solve the problem, or reduce fire damage. After a deeper analysis factoring in other variables, it was found that the presence of more firefighter at fires was not, in fact, what increased fire damage. The reason more fire damage happens is because more firefighters are present at larger fires. 

While reviewing month-end expense reports to determine whether a vendor’s service is producing sales, do you simply measure cost versus revenue? Too many dealers make this mistake. All dealers - whether they realize it or not - have multi-channel marketing strategies. Some more than others. But, the simple fact is that every dealership has varying combinations of marketing channels that include print, radio, TV, online, social media, and more. How many messages from these channels did it take to compel that lead to respond, or that customer to walk through your door? It could have been one, or it could have been many. I’m sure you do your best to source customers. However, simply attributing a sale from an online inventory service based on a call-tracking number might steer you to some erroneous conclusions. 

In all probability, that lead, conversion or walk-in customer was influenced in some way by one or more of your marketing channels.  The customer may not remember which touchpoints they visited that lead them into your dealership. However, even asking them will typically give you more insight as to what was their primary influence. 

I’d bet that your customer’s journey looked something like this: They passed your billboard every day on their way to work. While scrolling through Facebook, they saw your targeted ads. Perhaps a neighbor brought home a new car, and they saw your license plate frame or sticker on the back. Watching TV late at night, they viewed one of your TV ads.  They conducted some online research about a specific vehicle and viewed one of your listings. They visited your website and browsed your inventory, then left to read some online reviews about your dealership. Maybe they even posted on Facebook; asking friends, family and associates for advice on the vehicle they’ve chosen and any opinions about your dealership. They decided to give you a shot and made plans to come to your store that weekend. And then they show up. Where do you attribute the sale? Which marketing channel gets credit?

The reality is that all of your marketing channels are working together to drive business to your dealership. So, consider digging a little deeper when analyzing attribution and judging any particular service’s performance.  Save yourself from making a mistake that could do more harm than good and drive in more sales and profitability into the bargain.

What Are You Doing To Reach Your Mobile Customers?

There’s no doubt that people are in love with their to their phones.  As a result, memes and jokes constantly circulate the Internet about how some people no longer participate in “normal” activities because they simply can’t put down their phones. People aren’t reading newspapers anymore - at least not in print - and they’re fast-forwarding through commercials. So where are they? You guessed it. On their phones. 

In a recent article on eMarketer.com, a respected publication that covers the global digital ecosystem: digital marketing, media and commerce, it was reported that 2015 is “a benchmark year for ad spending in the US, as mobile surpasses desktop spending for the first time.”  

In fact, eMarketer estimates that mobile will account for almost 52 percent of all digital spending by the end of the year. It attributes the shift to consumer demand and estimates that adults spend almost 3 hours per day on “nonvoice activities” on mobile devices – 1.5 hours of which is on mobile phones. 

There’s a very simple - and good - reason companies are shifting ad budgets towards mobile marketing. That’s where consumers are. Not too long ago, when someone decided to go car shopping, the first thing they did was pick up the Friday newspaper to view the section with all of the dealership advertising. Now, they hop online and look through OEM, dealership and third party sites to obtain that information on demand. In fact, the more tech-savvy consumers conduct their research from their mobile device while they’re shopping – right in the store or dealership. 

With this ever increasing trend in the use of mobile, I would advise dealers to investigate successful methods to capture the attention of these mobile shoppers. Technology is quickly developing including the strategic use of display ads, geo-targeting and push notifications. If you can reach out to a nearby customer actively shopping in your area and immediately inform them of sales, offers or specials -- without any effort on the part of that consumer -- you certainly could then have an edge over any competitors. 
The technology exists today that allows dealers to do this relatively inexpensively, such as through the use of iBeacons, a class of Bluetooth low energy (LE) devices that broadcast their identifier to nearby portable electronic devices. This can be used to determine the device's physical location, track customers, or trigger a location-based action on the device such as a check-in on social media or a push notification. Facebook, for example, offers free beacons to auto dealerships that can be used to push messages to customers at the dealership through the use of Bluetooth and geo-location technology.

As consumers continue their migration away from desktops and rely more on mobile devices, marketing will continue its shift in that direction as well. Just as it is extremely important that your website is compatible with mobile devices, the same now applies to your marketing.  

The Most Important Attribution KPIs For Auto Dealers

With every year that passes, we’ve seen consumers increase their research and online activity exponentially and it has become increasingly difficult to discover true attribution when analyzing exactly what drove a specific customer into a dealership.

Marketing today mandates an omni-channel approach. No longer can you simply rely on a website and traditional media. An effective marketing strategy should include such tools as a comprehensive SEO and social media strategy, pay per click ad campaign, presences on third party listing sites, display ads and email marketing, to name just a few.

Because consumers are visiting so many sites in their car-buying journey, I think it would be fair to say that attributing a customer’s visit or transaction to a single source would be misleading. A customer could easily bounce from a manufacturer’s page, to vehicle review sites, to a third party listing site, then go to a dealer’s website, and then perhaps leave there to read reviews on yet another site. Therefore, attributing a conversion to a single page, source or form could lead to erroneous information and budgetary decisions based on that incorrect data – this could then lead to campaigns that are not as effective as they should be.

Some of the most common automotive KPIs currently used include Click Thru Rates; Conversion Percent, Site Visits; VDP views; Dealership address and directions; pricing; and engagement rates on any social media pages. I realize that some dealers may not have the time or resources to track the customer’s entire journey. If this is the case, at least pay attention to the two KPIs that give you real and actionable data:

1.    Lead to Show Ratio

2. Show to Close Ratio

While these KPIs won’t map out the customer’s journey, what they will do is help you to determine what marketing efforts are producing a return on your investment – and which are not.

A typical beginning of the month has management analyzing marketing sources and measuring their effectiveness by close ratio – i.e.:  We spent this much money and sold this many cars for this much profit. While this typical action may help determine if your marketing is producing revenue, it won’t help to determine whether it could be producing MORE revenue.

If you received 100 leads from prospects touched by all of your marketing and sold 10 cars, you would find that you have a 10 percent closing ratio. Whether this number is good depends on the market density.

But what does it really tell you? And what happens when you add your show ratio into that equation? By taking that same number of leads and discovering how many of those leads actually came in, you can determine whether your marketing is effective – i.e.: did it do its most fundamental job – did it drive traffic into your store?

You can then use that number to discover the show to close ratio. The first answer (lead-to-show) shows marketing effectiveness. While the second illustrates organizational effectiveness. You may be getting a high volume of customers into your dealership but fail to close them once they are there. OR, there could be a process issue in how leads are being handled.

Take the time to add these KPIs when calculating your lead providers and you’ll be better able to judge their performance and make better budgetary decisions. 

Download Our New Marketing Attribution eBook

For most dealers, the goal of an Internet marketing strategy is simple: more leads and more sales.

For such a simple goal, the creation of an effective strategy is anything but. Internet marketing requires the use of multiple channels to raise awareness and drive people to your dealership’s website; including SEO/SEM, display ads, email marketing, third-party sites and more.

More than 90 percent of customers begin their shopping process on the Internet. The ability to track IP address activity, interpret behavioral data and draw meaningful conclusions from that data is transforming the marketing landscape. Attribution is the digital roadmap that helps dealerships successfully navigate this new environment.

Today’s customer journey from awareness to sale happens across numerous touch points. A consumer may conduct research on one web site, then move from a search engine to a blog to a review site, then click on an ad, all over the course of weeks or months. Your dealership brand may appear to a customer multiple times along their shopping journey, so how do you know what specific marketing effort leads to the sale?

In our new eBook, we reveal the latest best practices, strategies and tools being used by dealerships to not only track your specific marketing effort but also improve the performance of of each channel.

Download our new eBook
Marketing Attribution: The Auto Dealer’s Digital Roadmap from Awareness to Sale

Our suite of products – Web2Show, Lead2Show and our new Mobile2Show provides one of the most powerful attribution models available. It gives our dealers incredible insights to consumer behavior so they know which marketing channels, campaigns and efforts are influencing customers at critical junctures during their decision-making process.

Marketing Attribution: The Auto Dealer’s Digital Roadmap from Awareness to Sale shares how dealers are using innovative applications of AutoHook’s incentive marketing tools and direct attribution models to increase leads, sales and marketing investment ROI.

Download your free copy today