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Office Hours, May Recap: Marketing Your Dealership to Modern Car Buyers

Here are the top five tips for using mixed-media marketing to reach more customers and grow your business by Bob Lanham.

Office Hours by Flex - Your Dealership to Modern Car Buyers with Bob Lanham

Welcome to FlexDealer’s May Office Hours recap! Each month, we’re inviting our clients to meet with our team and a featured guest speaker to take part in meaningful conversations about moving the car business forward.

On this month’s call, we were joined by Bob Lanham, Head of Automotive at Facebook. Most experts on a specific platform can speak to everything related to that platform, but Bob has a unique knack for dissecting the purchase path that modern car shoppers follow, relating to actions taken both on and off Facebook.

 

Enlist the creative power of the FlexDealer team to help your dealership scale!

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Tips and Takeaways from May’s Office Hours

During May’s call, our discussion revolved around an important question: how can dealerships best meet customers where they are today, and potentially where they’re going? Let’s take a look at Bob’s top 5 tips and takeaways for how to best market your dealership to modern car shoppers!

1. Focus your efforts on behaviour. Relying on the same marketing methods, or using one method to target a large group of potential customers, may not be the best way to serve your dealership. Some people don’t want to interact with lead forms anymore, or they prefer to interact via chat instead of phone calls, or they still read the paper and aren’t using Instagram, or any number of things. Use your data to profile customer behaviours, and then target those behaviours in your marketing.

2. Consider a mixed-media marketing approach. It’s not that radio or print or TV is necessarily “dead”, but that your target audiences are simply more likely to respond to mixed-media advertising. The success of any form of advertising is based more on the delivery than anything else. Be clear in what you’re trying to say, and broadcast it across various channels - and don’t forget to analyze the results and optimize your efforts!

 

"Tackle your marketing from an omnichannel approach, and consider all platforms together. You should be measuring results and optimizing your approach throughout the process in order to make progress.

 

3. You know your market best. It’s easy to get laser-focused on using certain marketing techniques when we see titans and thought leaders engaging with these approaches. If it works for them, it should work for me, right? Not necessarily! What the data shows for one area of the country might not be true for yours. Nobody knows your market better than you and your store-level team. Targeting your specific demographic is one of the best ways to market your dealership towards current car buyers.

4. Audit, audit, audit. It can be really easy to throw money at your advertising budget and just assume it’s working. But it’s important to understand exactly what you’re buying and exactly what you’re getting out of it, particularly with package deals that group a range of services into one lump cost. What if 50% of the components in that package aren’t working for you? Audit, audit, audit. Otherwise, you can be spending far more money than you realize and seeing a minimal return from it.

5. Investing in your business is about more than money. Investing in your business is a bit like one big experiment. You create a hypothesis, test it, and analyze the data. Folks in this business tend to be uncomfortable with saying “that didn’t work.” But that needs to change. Successfully reaching modern shoppers via a mixed-media model takes time, flexibility, and a willingness to invest in testing and experimentation. Stay the course and you’ll drive results.

 

"We know that testing is uncomfortable. But we need to treat it as an investment into perpetual growth and keep it centred around our main purpose."

 

Access the Full Office Hours Video, and Join us Next Month

We hope that our clients were able to extract some helpful “golden nuggets” from May’s Office Hours with Bob Lanham. We certainly did, and we are already excited about our next session! If you’re a FlexDealer client and missed this month’s call, be sure to check your inbox for access to the full Office Hours video. Have an idea for next month’s topic? Don’t hesitate to drop us a line! We want to hear about what’s important to you and your business, and constantly evolve the Office Hours experience to meet the needs of our clients.

Interested in taking part in future Flex Office Hours sessions? Contact us here at FlexDealer to learn more about our creative marketing services, and all that we can offer your business!

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FlexDealer Team      

FlexDealer Team      

FlexDealer is a leading provider of innovative dealership inventory and marketing solutions. Our goal is to help dealerships thrive and grow in a rapidly changing industry.

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