Digital marketing is a beast of its own and with the wrong advice or implementation, a lot can go wrong!
But, as a dealer, it’s frustrating to not know if something isn’t right with your digital marketing and, if there is something wrong, it can take a long time to identify the issue and resolve it.
The most common mistake agencies make across the board with digital marketing is the failure to research your market before spending your money.
So, conducting a thorough offline and online analysis of your market in order to maximize your advertising dollars and minimize wasted ad spend is a critical first step! This isn’t easy, but it is something that can and should be done by someone who knows what they’re doing.
This analysis will help you understand where your buyers are and what they are buying. Are they buying from competitors? What are the top zips you are losing market share in? What are the top makes/models or vehicle types that buyers in your market are interested in?
You’ll discover who your competitors are offline – and if they’re the same competitors that you have online!
This information will allow you to build out a laser-focused strategy and protect your budget from unnecessary spending – and it’s your first step to solving the following digital marketing oversights…
1. Differentiate Between Radius & Zip Code Targeting
One example of what you can do with the data you pull from an online and offline analysis is zip code targeting. This gives you a lot of information about which physical locations your potential buyers are located in and which of your competitors they are most likely to turn to.
Online, you can even identify keywords they’re bidding on, their ad copy, and even develop a better understanding of their market share.
Putting all that together allows you to have a much sounder strategy before moving forward – and before spending a single dollar online.
We prefer zip code targeting over radius targeting for a few reasons:
- Radius targeting may be hitting areas outside your target market
- Not all zips are created equal
- You can actually make bid adjustments for the ones that have a higher propensity of buyers (or decrease bids accordingly)
- You can get more control at the zip code level
- By targeting at the zip code level, you can shift more focus towards zips that you really want to dominate, or ones that you’re losing market share in
- Only target the highest propensity of buyers
- If you know that the west side of town has a higher propensity to buy from you then you can target that exact area down to the zip code. Why bother targeting zips in the east end of town if no one is buying out there?
- It’s easy to determine top zip codes
- You can determine the top 5, 10, 20 (or more) zip codes and adjust strategy accordingly by analyzing online and offline data.
By narrowing your list down and only targeting zip codes with the highest number of probable buyers, you will save money. You won’t be wasting it on zip codes with buyers who will never come to your dealership.
2. Focus on Branded Keywords
If you’re not bidding on your own brand, then you’ve already made a mistake.
I recommend branded keywords because this will allow you to defend your ground – if consumers search for your brand, you’ll be at the top of the list. It’s extremely cost-effective, you’ll have high-quality scores, and high click-through rates.
You’ll also take up more real estate on that search engine results page (SERP) – the most valuable real estate online. You’ll have your ad showing, as well as your Google My Business Listing, and organic results listing as well.
You’ll be able to deflect competitors who are conquesting your brand. If they’re bidding on your brand, you will outrank them and push them to the bottom of the page or off the first page completely.
Ultimately, it’s just worth the investment. You’re going to be able to increase your search engine market share, defend your own brand, and drive more traffic in a very cost-effective way. You can usually accomplish this for only a few hundred bucks a month – and the investment is worth every penny.
3. Pay Attention to Negative Keywords
What’s your approach to negative keywords?
If you’re not familiar with this term, it’s simply the term used to describe negating a term from an ad-search query. This means certain words will be removed from a search query to make it more relevant for you as a user. But, you need to make sure you’re constantly refining your negative keyword list.
By doing this, you’ll eliminate clicks from shoppers who are not relevant to what you’re selling – which will, in turn, increase your click-through rates, bolster your quality scores, increase your conversion rates (as a result of that), and your cost per click will go down. Plus, you’ll minimize irrelevant website traffic that’s landing on your website and bouncing and skewing all your results.
Ultimately, you’re going to be able to maximize those ad dollars and get the most relevant traffic possible to your website. You won’t be wasting money on people that aren’t likely to convert into buyers or those who are looking for something completely irrelevant to what you have to offer.
4. Utilize Ad Extensions
Another common mistake is not using ad extensions appropriately – or not using them at all.
I recommend you use as many as you can. Mostly because they have no additional cost whatsoever. They’re add-ons to your paid search ads and your display ads that will increase visibility and increase the size of your ads, which will increase your real estate on a search engine results page.
This boost in real estate could push your competitors down further or even off the page completely!
The ad extensions allow you to highlight unique details of your dealership which will separate you from the competition, and more… like adding a phone number and address so shoppers know exactly where you are and how to get in touch with you and linking relevant pages within your website that might catch a shopper’s eye more than the main body of the ad (like used cars or service pages).
5. Don’t Forget About Remarketing & Customer Match
This is critical to online success.
These are customers who have either interacted with your website in the past, or customers who are extracted from your DMS (through Customer Match).
Customer Match allows dealers to upload first and last names, email addresses, cities, states, and more into Google and Facebook. This allows you to target those audiences very specifically.
Additionally, you can utilize VIN-specific retargeting to reach shoppers with the exact vehicles they’ve previously viewed on your website – across Facebook and the display network.
How are you using your DMS online? This is important to ask so you can understand what your strategy is online. Whether you’re excluding those customers to focus on conquest or using this technology to reactivate customers in your DMS, it’s important that you adjust your strategy to these identified and unidentified audiences.
Ultimately, you can make this all work together to maximize your reach online – and save advertising dollars while you do it.
6. Try Using Display Advertising
This is a channel where ad dollars are not spent efficiently.
I recommend that you audit your display websites frequently. You want to increase brand awareness, but you also need to maximize your ad dollars by making sure you’re serving to the right audiences.
Here, you just want to make sure you’re excluding irrelevant websites and clicks. Much like negative keywords, you want to ensure that you’re only serving ads to audiences who are most likely to purchase from you in the future, or at the minimum, consumers that are in the car buying process.
If you serve on mobile apps, then you get maximum coverage. But, there’s a risk involved with mobile that is less of an issue elsewhere. This is due to irrelevant clicks – or people clicking ads unintentionally and immediately “bouncing” from your site. This wastes ad dollars that you could use more effectively elsewhere.
So, with mobile apps, you can either exclude them completely or, if you’re going to include them, you need to refine your list and understand what apps you’re going to be serving on. Narrow and refine your targeting often!
On the display network or Facebook, you want to utilize remarketing and utilize customer match audiences and really target and refine or even exclude your audiences as much as you can.
So, to wrap up, there’s just a few things I want to stress as you seek to avoid these expensive digital marketing oversights…
- Understand your market offline and online, know who your competitors are, and what you need to do in order to stand out.
- Defend your brand by bidding on branded keywords to make sure you’re defending the valuable real estate that you have online.
- Avoid irrelevant keywords! Understand that they don’t drive the right traffic to your site and aren’t worth spending valuable ad dollars on.
- Avoid irrelevant audiences by excluding them from your advertising – why waste money on locations and audiences that aren’t going to convert for you?
- Maximize your DMS and remarketing lists by using them online. Whether you want to go after service customers or exclude your DMS audience completely and go after new customers, maximizing these lists will have the biggest ROI for you online.
- Take advantage of ad extensions. These don’t cost you a thing but add extremely positive benefits to your display and paid search ads.
- Reduce wasted display advertising by constantly refining placements.
These are some of the most common and easy-to-solve oversights I’ve seen and if you’re able to fix them, you’ll be ahead of the game!
