A panel of experienced industry marketers at the Australian Automotive Dealer Association Conference have agreed that generating too many dealership sales leads through the digital omnichannel is counterproductive and inefficient and that marketing campaigns need to be targeted at a specific audience and easily measured.
Autotrader, CarsGuide and Gumtree Cars chief marketing officer Manisha Seewal convened the panel discussion on what marketing strategies automotive industry leaders will prioritise in 2022.
The other panellists were Maserati Australia and New Zealand national marketing Tim Stanton, Universal Internet Services owner David Hanlin, and Alto Group marketing and digital transformation group manager Michael Olek.
Throwing tradition out the window
Olek says Alto is the countries third largest privately owned dealer group and now takes an unconventional approach to marketing, rather than relying upon the previous promotion strategies such as offering customers a preloaded $10,000 Visa gift card.
He says the group sells 15,000 new cars annually and services more than 65,000 vehicles annually and it does not use traditional call to action marketing approaches.
Instead Alto Group has focussed on Google My Business pages making sure its pages are on point and it promptly answers all Google reviews both positive and negative. Olek says the OEMs are very supportive of this effort and often assist with audits.
At the Group level, Olek says Alto uses very specific campaign communications targeted to specific customers. He says blasting out mass communications is pointless as the opt out rate from recipients is “massive.”
“We send out birthday messages to our customers and we have a 90% open rate and no opt outs whatsoever,”Olek says. “We also send greetings on the anniversary of a vehicle purchase up to three years after the transaction and then we turn it off. And all of this is done through automation,” he says.
Olek says that generating too many leads through the digital omnichannel is not good for a dealership as the conversion rate drops and leads to a bad customer experience, he believes less is more.
“Dealers are always chasing more but it’s not the best mentality,” he says. “Measurement is the most important thing.”
Olek says Alto Group’s operation is completely digitised and it visualises all data from DealerSocket and Pentana Solutions through Microsoft Power BI. He says all sales people and management have to input their data into DealerSocket for daily tracking and reporting, which keeps everyone in the business accountable.
“Microsoft Power BI is a game changer and is something all dealerships should consider investing into,” He says.
Relaunching a luxury brand
Maserati Australia and New Zealand marketing manager Tim Stanton says when he came on board more than two years ago, he inherited a product portfolio where the youngest vehicle was more than five years old, and he had 18 months to look for new opportunities to market the brand before the next new vehicle was due to arrive.
“Future customers were not yet on our radar, and we needed to shape the business for growth,” Stanton says.
Stanton engaged a Data Scientist to create a complex yet simple to use dashboard that allowed the Maserati brand team to dive into the data of how it spent each marketing dollar. Another benefit of working within a small team of seven people means there is a daily 15 minute WIP meeting where information is shared for the benefit of all.
He says the luxury brand now has a digital strategy which integrates with its events and public relations strategy.
“We are an events focussed brand, while people may not yet be converted we can invite them to events around watches, wine, food, and theatre which are part of the luxury narrative,” Stanton says.
“We were relaunching a luxury brand and we needed to change the previous narrative, we also needed to understand the local publishers offering to increase inquiry levels on our product and react more quickly to market.
“We needed to tell stories about our brand through publications which our potential customers are interested in. Owned, earned and paid media all work together in the ecosystem. Digital needs PR and Events, they cannot exist without each other.
“If you lose two weeks of brand advertising, it will take you two months to recover the momentum previously created, if the leads aren’t there then you start to panic,” he says.
Stanton says in a post COVID digital world, the one on one, face to face relationship is coming back strongly, and is still needed and is very much part of the customer experience for luxury brands such as Maserati.
