Keys to a Successful Marketing Audit
In today's evolving digital age, marketing continues to be an essential aspect of every business and continues to be a source of conversation in the automotive industry. Digital marketing campaigns offer a wide range of benefits to automotive dealers, from reaching a larger audience to tracking the effectiveness of specific marketing efforts. However, to maximize these benefits, it’s critical for dealers to continually audit their digital marketing results.
Marketing auditing is a crucial and vital practice that allows business leaders to evaluate the success of their marketing campaigns. It helps identify areas of strengths and weaknesses and provides insights on how to improve performance. Yet often, results are taken at face value or there is an uncomfortableness on the part of leadership to dig deeper. In this article, we will discuss why auditing your marketing results is key to improving performance.
Identifies Ineffective Marketing Channels
Marketing channels are the means through which dealerships reach their target audience. These channels can be online, such as social media, email marketing, and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, or offline, such as CTV, OTT, direct mail, radio, billboards, and print ads. Auditing your marketing results allows you to determine which marketing channels are not performing well.
By identifying these ineffective channels, you can have more effective conversations with your agency partners on how to pivot the message to improve performance. Or stop investing in them and redirect resources to more effective marketing channels. This not only helps improve performance but also saves you money.
Reveals Customer Insights
Marketing auditing helps businesses gain insights into their customers' behavior and preferences. This insight allows dealerships to create more targeted marketing campaigns that resonate with their target audience. By analyzing customer data, leaders can identify customer pain points, preferences, and expectations. This information can then be used to create more personalized marketing messages that speak directly to the customer's needs.
For example, targeting specific fixed operations campaigns for those who need the service versus a more generalized campaign containing multiple offers which don’t connect. The more targeted ads are, the better you can customize based on how customers are interacting.
Identifies Competitor Strategies
Auditing your marketing results also allows you to gain insights into your competitors' marketing strategies. This is a step often overlooked. Leaders focus on their message at the expense of understanding the messaging in the marketplace. By analyzing competitor data, businesses can identify their competitors' strengths and weaknesses.
This information can then be used to create more effective marketing strategies that are designed to outperform competitors. Finding ways to compare your customer experience versus theirs. Comparing products or services head-to-head on value or even price. This allows businesses to stay ahead of the competition and gain a competitive advantage.
Determines ROI
Measuring the ROI of marketing campaigns is essential to determine the effectiveness of marketing strategies. Marketing auditing allows businesses to track the ROI of each marketing campaign. By measuring ROI, businesses can identify which campaigns are generating the most revenue and which ones are not. This allows businesses to adjust their marketing strategies and allocate resources to campaigns that generate the highest ROI.
Improves Performance
Auditing your marketing results allows businesses to identify areas where they can improve performance. By seeing what messaging is connecting, be it your customer service promise or your explanation of a process, allows you to work with your team to make sure you deliver on these promises.
This helps businesses stay relevant and adapt to changing market conditions. Price may motivate some of the market but saving time may be important to others. By continuously auditing marketing results, businesses can improve team performance and maximize the connecting between marketing and execution.
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Key Metrics to Consider in Digital Marketing Audits
To avoid creating a situation like an agency reporting call, talking about metrics and for fear of losing the reader at this point, let me share a few simple thoughts on how to approach metrics
Not all campaigns are equal. Understand the goal of each campaign. View of a video is different than click to the website. What are you trying to accomplish and understand that before you launch a campaign.
Traffic to website: Clicks to the website is a start but what did they do when they got there? Follow the user flow in analytics. This allows you to make sure you are sending the traffic to the right place, and you are measuring results.
Flow of visitors. How many continue the journey on the website? But beware, Pages viewed can be misleading if it takes the consumer 5 clicks to find what they are looking for.
Form fills or leads: This metric must be looked at in two parts. First, you have your end number or names. Second, you must understand how people clicked the button to pop the form up and left frustrated because their expectation, based on what the button promised them was not met. For example, customize your payment leads the consumer to believe they can access your price tool. But now you need their name to use the tool? Why?
How much is being lost versus what was gained. In our PCG audits we see excitement from a dealer receiving 50 “leads” from a certain tool on their website, only to be stunned to learn over 600 people click the button to begin the journey only to leave. I am not making the case to remove forms, but this must be examined and a monitored.
Engagement metrics showing shopping behavior. Are they looking at photos, videos, visiting informational pages (trade-in, finance, model pages, specifications etc.) Having higher funnel shoppers engaging on your site is key to eventually moving them down the funnel.
Enhancing Customer Experience
Auditing your digital marketing results can also help you enhance the customer experience. By analyzing customer behavior on your website or social media channels, you can identify areas where you can improve the customer journey. For example, if you notice that customers are engaging with inventory but not submitting their name or calling, you may want to see if new photos are required or pricing may have to be adjusted.
Building Brand Reputation
Auditing your digital marketing results can help you build a strong brand reputation. By analyzing the data and metrics, you can identify areas where you may be falling short in terms of customer satisfaction or engagement. Addressing these issues can help improve your brand reputation and build customer trust. For example, if you notice that customers are leaving negative reviews on your social media channels, you may want to address these issues and respond to customers in a timely and professional manner.
In conclusion, auditing your digital marketing results is crucial for automotive dealers today. It helps you measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, improve your ROI, stay ahead of the competition, enhance the customer experience, and build a strong brand reputation. By regularly auditing your results, you can make informed decisions on where to invest your marketing budget and optimize your efforts for maximum impact.
If you found this article helpful, please share it with your network. If you would like the PCG team to do a marketing or sales process audit, click here for more information.
Dealership executives and marketing managers who would like to learn more about the most topical issues around marketing & data, should register for the 2023 Digital Marketing Strategies Conference (DMSC) in May, in the beautiful city of Austin Texas.
Vendor Accountability Advocate
1yExcellent article. It was easy to not pay attention to marketing expenses these last few years (though everyone still should) but going forward it will be more important than ever that dealers audit their marketing regularly and hold their vendors accountable.
🚗 Automotive Marketing Director - Driving Digital Growth | AI Futurist | AI Visionary Architect | Car Talk Weekly Host | Prompt Designer
1yThank you for sharing. 👊
Founder & CEO @ LPJM Solutions | What do Companies WANT? - TRAFFIC - AI Marketing Tools and Strategy Expert (Keywords AI, Reputation AI, Social Media AI, Video AI, Profit Funnel Websites AI and more to come).
1yExcellent Job Glenn. I left you a message.
Your Why will lead you to and through any thing you could ever want.
1yGlenn Pasch!! This is ABSOLUTELY SPECTACULAR!