THE last few years have been a challenging period for the automotive industry. Recession and industry consolidation have seen dealers having to work their marketing budgets harder than ever before to drive footfall into their dealerships. This means allocating marketing spend has become a headache for some.
The automotive marketplace continues to evolve with dealers having many more ways to communicate with potential customers.
Keeping track of inquiries can prove difficult for some dealers. Effective measurement of marketing activity is a must to calculate whether a return on investment has been achieved or not.
If a dealer doesn’t know what is working, then they can’t make sure they do more of it. Identifying a cost-per-sale value is vitally important for dealers to ensure that they can accurately identify which marketing activity is working, but also to compare and analyse like-for- like promotional undertakings.
The used car sector is highly competitive with ever-increasing numbers of physical and online marketing channels bidding for a dealer’s budgets.
However, it also makes it increasingly important to be able to track and analyse responses to different to different sales channels – to understand where there is overlap and where different channels offer unique approaches to market. It can be all too easy to throw money at every channel out there and then struggle to identify which actually delivered the sale.
The success of a dealership will rest on how many cars it is able to sell and what profit it can make by doing so. By getting every channel working effectively, a dealer can deliver genuine business results.
But, it is only by tracking responses that a dealer can evaluate the effectiveness of the overall sales and marketing strategy.
Motors.co.uk has a tool to allow dealers to monitor their marketing spend in real time and assess the return on their investment.
‘The Eye’, which was launched in 2012 and is available to all Motors.co.uk customers, integrates within the existing Motors.co.uk product portfolio to provide live statistics showing exactly how well any vehicle advertised within the Motors.co.uk network is performing.
The software allows a dealer to monitor web analytics, vehicle views and which models are generating sales leads for the dealership – vital for tracking customer journeys and determining sales and marketing strategy going forward.
This is also important for matching the sales data to search traffic and identifying the significant number of people who don’t call a dealer before arriving on the doorstep.
In addition, each dealer advertising on the Motors.co.uk network is given their own dedicated phone number, providing visibility of the calls generated in return for their marketing spend.
‘The Eye’ also provides the user with the ability to listen to, download, monitor and track calls to this dedicated number, allowing for the evaluation of the performance of the sales team in converting leads.
