Connected marketing: What is connected marketing and why does it matter for your dealership?

Car dealerships receive sales and service leads through many channels. While your dealership’s experience may vary, many dealerships spend their monthly advertising dollars on radio, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, and social media marketing, just to name a few. When marketers talk about connected marketing, they mean ensuring that related channels like search engine marketing and search engine optimization are connected.  

Let’s go into more detail about what that means! 

The First Step: Design Your Conversion Funnel 

Regardless of which advertising methods you use, most of the conversions you can actively measure easily are through your website. Ensure that you are using Google Analytics 4 or other website conversion tracking software for all of your traffic and that you have conversion goals set up to reflect what you’d like to see in your CRM software. You’ll mostly want to track phone calls, form lead submissions, and other phone interactions, with some stores also using vehicle detail page views. 

Having your website properly set up to record your conversion funnel is an essential first step to making connected marketing truly work. 

Aligning Strategies 

When your website is all setup and tested for proper, working conversions, you’ll want to ensure that all your strategies are aligned.  

What does this mean? 

You’ll want to have the same content on your Google Ads that you offer on your Facebook and any other social media network you advertise on. This means publishing the same offers with the same graphics and the same if not similar, wording. A potential customer who sees your ads across Google and Facebook should see a similar message and not one that is too broad, generic, or contradictory. 

Following Customers With Connected Marketing 

One aspect of connected marketing that can follow your customer throughout their purchase funnel is remarketing. Remarket to your customers who found your website, regardless of their source, with ads on Facebook and Instagram, as well as Google’s Display Network, of course. The intention is to provide consistent advertising to customers who are potentially in marketing on the platforms they know and trust. 

Experiences Across Platforms 

Service and sales customers at your dealership may use multiple devices and browsers to look for the services you offer. Since many customers will explore your site using a laptop or desktop computer and then switch to a phone, you should ensure that your website is properly set up with a good mobile platform. 

We strongly suggest you try your mobile website and ensure that users easily access all functions, from the finance calculator to filters for searching for vehicles. Making it easy and fast is very important! I’ll be honest: if you don’t like the mobile experience on your website, try a different vendor. The mobile experience drives most of your traffic! 

A Little Bonus: Connect With Your CRM 

A form of connected marketing can also tell you what is happening once the customer gets into your CRM. Some CRM companies allow you to view what the customer has done on your website after making a lead. This shows overall behavior and might show some intent to your sales staff.  

Conclusion 

Connected marketing brings together the many platforms and methods your customers use every day to search, keep in touch with friends and family, and organize their lives. You’ll want to take full advantage of every way these platforms connect in order to continue reaching customers.