10:31 am, November 7, 2024
When you’re investing good money in your prospective buyer’s journey, you need confidence that your approach is delivering strong results and helping drive more car sales.
But if there are areas of the journey that remain opaque, such as knowing which areas of your website a prospect visited after clicking an Auto Trader listing, it’s hard to build an accurate picture of your ROI.
There are teams in the automotive industry that have this detailed insight into which channels deliver the most promising leads. They can trace the customer journey from the moment they land on the website to the second they call.
They know how to craft their marketing to attract buyers and – crucially – how to demonstrate campaign performance to their leadership.
How can they achieve this? Through a deeper understanding of every call that comes into their dealership, from its source right down to how long it took a salesperson to pick up the phone.
Let’s explore the technologies that make this possible.
You can capture more value from your calls
Understanding your best sources for generating leads often starts with tracking static numbers.
This helps you easily identify whether your investment in pricey ads such as pay-per-click (PPC), which drives 21% of dealerships’ online traffic, are worth the costs.
With the arrival of new tools and channels, such as Google Performance Max and Google Vehicle Ads, it’s increasingly valuable to know which keywords spark interest and which you should exclude to reach the right people.
Beyond static numbers, there are even more sophisticated ways to understand your prospective buyers and how they interact with you.
‘Tracking static numbers may be straightforward, but it won’t give marketers much insight beyond call volumes,’ explains Faye Thomassen, Mediahawk’s head of marketing.
‘Using dynamic call tracking, you can pinpoint every stage in the customer’s journey after they’ve clicked through to your website.’
With this approach, you can implement a dynamic pool of numbers using a platform like Mediahawk.
When a prospect arrives on your website, they’re assigned a unique phone number that only they see. When they call this number, you can log all their activities, such as browsing your vehicle catalogue or using a car configurator tool.
So, not only do you know where they came from, you know which website features inspired them to enquire.
With 54% of car buyers using dealers’ websites as their primary research source for new vehicles, and 37% for used vehicles, it’s vital you have a strong website to back up strong marketing.
The more you know about your most engaged prospects, the more you can tailor your marketing to target similar buyers. It’s what drew Russell Brown, head of marketing for premium dealer group Dick Lovett, to Mediahawk’s dynamic call tracking and sales matching.
‘We are always striving to improve our understanding of our marketing capabilities, and Mediahawk call tracking has helped with this,’ he says. ‘Over time, we’ve been able to modify our marketing strategy based on the hard data.’
Unlock next-level analysis of every call
These techniques are helping savvy automotive marketers understand the journey that leads a prospect to dial – but what about when they’re on a call with the dealership? How can you derive useful insights from the call itself without listening in on every single conversation?
That’s where Speech Analytics – and its new AI-powered feature, Speech Insights – completely elevates a marketer’s understanding of this all-important stage of the customer journey. It automatically analyses every call to identify the metrics that matter most to you, at both macro and individual levels.
Simply by asking a question, you can find out everything from whether a call went to voicemail to how many callers booked a test drive. The analysis can highlight keywords you might not have considered, help you understand the caller’s perception of your brand, and create a more complete picture of your target customer.
This information can be used to spot the most promising prospects and track trends across whole categories of customers – without needing to dedicate hours to analysing calls manually. And everything you learn from these calls can feed straight back into your ads, SEO, and marketing materials to ensure you’re achieving strong ROI across the customer journey.
Summary
With the knowledge you can glean from technologies like dynamic call tracking and AI-driven analysis, you can achieve anything: stronger marketing attribution; a greater understanding of your customer base and what makes them tick; a seamless journey that leads every prospect from their first click to your desired outcome.
