Be Proactive and Let Your Marketing Take Care of Itself

Spinning your wheels and spending marketing dollars on messages that fall on deaf ears is costly and exhausting. But you must implement marketing efforts to attract and maintain a customer base.

Your dealership can implement proactive marketing to counterbalance the time and money wasted on an ineffective marketing strategy. Proactive marketing utilizes real-time, agile marketing processes that are data-driven and can be adapted while the campaign is running.

Proactive marketing, or predictive marketing, is an ongoing evaluation that determines insights about underlying consumer needs and potential action behaviors. It allows dealers to gain knowledge of what their consumer base might require next through data analytics and provide them with a new, used-to-used vehicle offer or service mailer before they even know they need them. Getting to the core of why consumers are leaning in a specific direction and where a trend will head shortly allows you to plan effective campaigns with a purpose.

With good data, dealers can be agile and adaptable to the ever-changing needs of what their customers are seeking in real time. Proactive marketing illuminates what’s happening in the landscape and what path to take to reach an audience effectively. A marketing strategy can then be determined with supporting content that offers solutions that solve customers’ problems.

Traditional marketing campaigns have often been used as a reaction to what the competition is doing or an immediate need your dealership has. They are planned with the dealership in mind, not the customer. Reaction campaigns can not only waste time and money but can be frustrating when you see where things went wrong post-campaign and wish you could go back in time to revise your strategy before it was too late.

Of course, you can gain beneficial information from analyzing the performance of campaigns once complete, but proactive marketing platforms allow you to analyze data on the spot, optimize your campaign strategy, and pivot where necessary to reach your customers better.

A successful campaign depends on great data, which can require a lot of effort when you don’t have the right tools or platform. With an advanced platform like AutoAlert’s Engagement Studio, most of the action and data-driven processes are taken care of for you. It just comes down to utilizing the information you have at your fingertips.

You can start your marketing journey by focusing on a few aspects of your content strategy.

Not all content will resonate with your audience. Your decisions on templates will depend on what your data analytics shows are spurring customer action.

We all know that providing the right message at the right time to the right customer is key, and with an easy-to-use platform backed by robust data, your team’s tasks can be practically automatic. For example, if your customer has always purchased used vehicles, they might resonate with a used-to-used message compared to a factory order template.

A sign of reactive marketing is when you shift your marketing plan in response to an external trigger. Instead, plan to collect and analyze your data consistently. Watch for trends.

AutoAlert’s Audience Builder allows you to build monthly audiences and adjust your marketing delivery options based on your dealership’s and customers’ service or sales needs.

The good news about data is that it can be used for more than one purpose. You can upsell and cross-sell current customers that have previously purchased from your dealership or even conquest service-not-sold customers into a new deal. Collecting and centralizing data into a single platform provides insight into customer buying patterns. This data lets you anticipate other vehicles or services your customers might need and when they need them.

Your customers want you to know them, and the best way to show you are paying attention is through adaptive marketing and engagement. Your customers will respond positively to messages that speak to what is relevant to their current lifecycle position and negatively to messages that seem forced and off the mark.

With a complete view of your customers’ wants and task automation on your dealership’s next steps, AutoAlert’s proactive marketing has never been easier.

Get more bang for your marketing buck backed by the best data in the biz – AutoAlert’s Engagement Studio hands you the tools to reach your customers proactively.

“We focus on engaged customers – the ones with the lowest-hanging fruit. Who’s been on the website lately? Who’s opened the offer that we sent out? We use those offers and marketing emails to trigger activity on the customer’s behalf without the salesperson putting in more effort.”

Charlie Dubord, CMO for the Ray Brandt Auto Group