Digital marketing has become a major component of automotive retail, serving to drive leads, strengthen branding, and broaden the scope of dealers’ markets. However, with the arrival of CDPs, AI, and other technological innovations, many dealers are struggling to leverage their digital assets to the fullest, risking their efficiency and competitiveness.
On this episode of Inside Automotive, host Jim Fitzpatrick is joined by Colin Carrasquillo, digital marketing director at Nielsen Automotive Group. Carrasquillo has played a critical role in helping the Nielsen group navigate the latest trends and innovations transforming the way dealerships use the internet to grow their business. Now, he shares his tips for maximizing the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy and getting the most out of your data.
Key Takeaways
1. Carrasquillo emphasizes the importance of regularly reviewing and assessing digital marketing strategies to ensure they are performing as intended. This includes verifying that the customer journey on a dealership’s website aligns with expected outcomes. “Inspect what you expect,” he explains.
2. Carrasquillo urges dealers to not lose sight of the basic principles of e-commerce amidst the rapid adoption of new technologies. The need for constant vigilance and adjustment in digital marketing cannot be understated.
3. Simplifying the dealership’s website and digital interfaces to ensure ease of use for all customers, regardless of their technical knowledge, is essential for running successful digital marketing campaigns. By streamlining navigation and reducing complexity, dealerships can improve customer experience and conversion rates.
4. Dealers must use clean and accurate first-party data to develop leads. Carrasquillo suggests working with vendor partners for data cleansing and emphasizes the roles strategic segmentation and activation of data play in targeting customers effectively.
5. Carrasquillo recommends sharing customer data among the various dealerships within a group to maximize digital marketing opportunities and retain potential customers within the company’s ecosystem. Through this method, dealers can also increase conversion rates by remarketing to customers who declined to purchase at another store within their network.
"Everything that we're doing in the automotive space is really becoming, if not has already become, inherently digitally driven, right? Digital ecosystems are dominating everything that the dealerships are doing on an operational daily basis if you will. So, ultimately, inspect what you expect...If you're expecting that this is how a consumer will do X, Y, and Z, you need to inspect that that is, in fact, happening." — Colin Carrasquillo
