Practice the Art and Science of Marketing Orchestration

This is the second part of our series regarding how to make various marketing communication channels operate in a coordinated fashion to forge a seamless ‘one-sight-one-sound’ campaign.

Think about dealership assets—your customers

Opportunities exist every day of the week for you to make a vehicle sale or make a vehicle safer for people, whether to your current customers, or your competition’s. There are ways of  gaining market share in times like these and the strongest way to protect your bottom line is to secure your customer base first through regular communications and providing helpful shopping information and convenient access to making service appointments. The old sales adage holds true: The hardest thing you’ll do is to sell a person the first time. Properly nurtured, customer relationships continue and lifetime value blossoms.

In today's difficult economic times, your customers want advice and insight on what your dealership can offer. What they don't want is a hard sell. Now more than ever is the time to analyze and change your marketing communication to give them what they want. Since dealerships are authorized sales agents of manufactured products, your dealership brand and personality are what makes one dealership preferred over another - selling the same makes of vehicles.

To get and keep customers' attention, dealership management, service technicians and sales teams need to echo the same brand personality. Every single marketing effort should reflect your brand personality and be in concert with who you are. Keep your name and informational content before your sales and service customers and when they have a need to fulfill, you will be at the top of the list.

Studies show that today’s savvy automotive customers want:

• Information provided in a fair and open manner.
• A sense of community.
• You to be a trusted partner-- not just a ‘solution provider.’
• Your dealership to be there when needed, easy to find and easy to work with.

Key components of your brand are the individual past experiences customers have had in-dealership, while doing business with you. Are you friendly, accessible, helpful, approachable and trustworthy? Being available to assist shoppers as they seek to fill a need and communicating in a conversational and clear manner is one way of staying in the forefront of a customer’s mind. One way of doing this that is an inexpensive way of providing information and saying every month, ‘Hey we’re here and ready to help you’ is with a monthly digital email or postcard. These messages should be ones that are rooted in automotive-related information and special prices that make the customers feel special. Consider offering service tips along with service coupons, advice on how to get better gas mileage and, of course, information on new models and the latest incentives and specials at your dealership. That’s how to go on the offense and secure the attention of your customers. Being attentive and being available gets you half the way to writing the order.

The next installment in this series will explore the message channels themselves and their individual and collective strengths and weaknesses.