To keep your dealership at the center of your customers’ minds when it’s time for them to purchase their next vehicle, a solid automotive marketing campaign is key. The first and most important step of this process is knowing how and where to begin.
That’s why the marketing experts at Aspen Automotive have put together this step-by-step guide on how to design an automotive marketing campaign. By following these tips, you’ll find yourself with an effective direct mail strategy that’ll turn strangers into leads and leads into lifelong customers.
Step 1: Who Is Your Audience?
To construct a wide-reaching and successful automotive marketing campaign, you first want to ask a few basic questions: Who’s my ideal customer? What demographics does my ideal customer fit into? What are their needs? When did this customer purchase their last vehicle and what type of car was it?
By posing these questions to your audience, you’ll get a better understanding of the automotive marketing strategies that are most likely to result in engagement with your dealership.
In addition to those questions, you and your team should gather more data on the demographics into which your consumers fall. Some of the key categories in which you want to place your customers are:
- Age
- Gender
- Household Size
- Income
- Occupation and more
Once you’ve had a chance to gain some insights into your audience’s wants and needs, you’ll be able to craft an automotive direct mail plan that speaks to each individual within your targeted demographic.
Step 2: Define Your Dealership’s Goal
Of course, you can’t make a solid automotive marketing campaign without clearly defining what you’re looking to achieve.
Now that you’ve managed to gather solid data about your audience, you can use that information to take your automotive businesses’ marketing strategies in a new direction—getting rid of old tactics that didn’t work and establishing new practices that set your dealership apart from your competitors.
So, what is your team hoping to achieve? Do you want to increase the number of new customers that walk through your showroom doors? Are you looking to rekindle your relationships with previous consumers who purchased vehicles from you? Is there a yearly revenue goal you want to surpass?
No matter what your marketing objective may be, determining what it is can go a long way in aligning every aspect of your direct mail strategy with your goals.
Step 3: Choose Your Marketing Platform
When it comes to establishing your dealership as a thought leader in the automotive industry, direct mail marketing offers a host of advantages.
Not only does this automotive marketing technique allow you to target a specific mailing list of the customers you want to reach, but it also provides you with a way to further personalize the message on your direct mailer, thereby making the content of your message more enticing to your readers.
On top of that, direct mail is highly measurable, which means that your team can easily assess how your automotive direct mail campaign performed.
For instance, including a coupon code on your mailer makes it simple for your dealership to track the number of coupon codes used to the number of direct mailers you sent. That way, you’ll have a better idea of what worked in your auto marketing campaign and what you should change in the future.
Step 4: Incorporate Marketing Technology
To make the most of your automotive marketing campaign, you want to incorporate technologies that make the process of audience engagement as simple as possible.
Platforms like Personalized URLs (PURLs), IVR Touch-Tone Response, and Micro-Sites help your leads and your customer service reps connect in a way that’s convenient and informative.
By adding these innovative, user-friendly technologies to your auto marketing strategy, you’ll not only increase the satisfaction of your customers, but you’ll also get a sound understanding of the effectiveness of your campaign based on your audience’s feedback.
Design Your Automotive Marketing Campaign Today!
At Aspen Automotive, we’ve used our time-tested approach, creative geniuses, and data-driven marketing technologies to help dealerships across the country build a solid automotive marketing campaign.
So, if it’s time for you to revamp your connection to your audience so that you can maintain revenue increases year after year, look no further than our squad of direct mail marketing professionals.
To get started, all you have to do is reach out to our team by shooting us an email or giving us a call today!
