Automotive Marketing |
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Our Services |
that buy the largest number of Total Cars." Every neighborhood, in every zip code, buy
your cars
at identifiable rates.
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Listed below are the stock value declines of newspapers in major cities around the country. |
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Company | 12/31/04 | 12/31/05 |
Percent |
Two year |
Decline from |
Dallas |
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Source: Yahoo finance, Merrill Lynch research. Stock
values are rounded to whole dollars and percentage change calculated on that basis. | |||||
That makes the direct mail with Managed Marketing™ a tremendous asset to any marketing mix in the auto sales business. Unlike any other marketing tool, Managed Marketing™ accounts for every household, on every street. Every time you execute a mailing, households are selected for targeting in neighborhoods based on how the neighborhood as a whole buy your various makes and models of cars. 2 events take place that you can't get with newspaper or broadcast media. First, you get to control that every household that gets your ad, actually sees it when it comes out of the mail box. And second, you want your ad dollars to go further and sell more cars. With our Managed Marketing™ product, you get exactly that. The least number of households targeted that buy the largest numbers of your total cars.
YOUR
INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Information worth collecting and storing for long term use.
"The most valuable commodity I know of is information" said Michael Douglas (as Gordon Gekko) in the movie WALL STREET. How right he was. Now that we're in the computer age, there's actually so much information flying around out there, it's becoming increasingly more difficult to know what's really valuable and what's not. Here's where we sort it all out.
Step 1 - The Physical Address
The Cornerstone of Marketing Success.
Out of all the information collected and stored in dealership computers, the most important piece of information to collect and maintain correctly and accurately is the physical address of both prospects and customers. The physical address, whether it be for a prospect or customer, is the one piece of collectable information that almost never changes, never moves or never dies. The address is the single most important piece of collectable information. Every other piece of information collected on buyers, prospects and sales will eventually hinge on the address. It will be the cornerstone for marketing and promotional programs of everything that is measured, computed or calculated for any product or service you intend to sell . . . now or in the future. If you wish to build your information system around any other piece of criteria, your maintenance cost long term will be astronomical by comparison. Unlike any other piece of information attached to the record, it's one of the few pieces of information that can be quantified to other information in other files.
Step 2 - The Zip Code
The second most important piece of information attached to the record is the postal zip code. Since 1966 when the US Postal Service implemented the zip code system to speed the delivery of mail, it has been one of the most widely used 5 digit numbers to quantify lists that there is. With these 2 pieces of information you have the beginning pieces of a database system.
Step 3 - The Trade-In
The third piece of information you'll need is trade-in information for new cars actually purchased by the customer and actually delivered. This tells a lot about the dealership product demand. First and foremost, the dealership needs to know how many trades it's taking in for same make/ same model sales and how many trades are competitive makes and models. This is very important. The average dealership trades for 65 to 85% competitive makes and models. With this in mind, there needs to be some kind of marketing effort directed to households that do not own makes of vehicles sold by the dealership. A mailing list of non owner households living next door and across the street from owner households in neighborhoods that produce sales at high rates would be the most productive mailing list for generating NEW sales for the dealership.
With just 3 pieces of information, you could build the most accurate and effective database system you could possibly conceive for generating a constant flow of new business. Now, it just has to be managed and maintained.
OUR CUSTOM SOFTWARE
What our software does and why we sweat the details.
Our software monitors automotive make and model density by owner household in each individual neighborhood so we have more flexible marketing options when it comes time to spend promotional dollars. We want to spend our marketing dollars on the least number of households that buy the largest quantity of cars. By measuring owner households in each individual neighborhood, we are able to identify which neighborhoods actually buy the largest quantity of the make and model of car being measured in the least number of total households. Once we know which neighborhoods are the high performers, we are able the make a custom mailing list of households next door and across the street based on how the neighborhoods actually buy each make or even each model of products our clients market. The mailing list would then consist of the least number of non-customer households (or a combination of customers and non-customers) in neighborhoods that already buy, pay for and take delivery of the largest quantity of product or service.
In our sample zip code shown below, we have sub-divided the zip code out into 100 separate neighborhoods. If all of the neighborhoods in the zip code bought cars equally, you could just send an ad to every household on every street in the zip code and know you made the right marketing decision. But neighborhoods don't buy any products or any services equally.
Therefore neighborhoods get prioritized based on the number of units already purchased . . . ACTUALLY PURCHASED . . . not ASSUMED PURCHASED.
Like every other product or service, neighborhoods in the zip code don't buy cars equally. Here's where Managed Marketing™ enters the marketing mix. With our Managed Marketing™ product, you can measure the demand for each make and each model of car in each neighborhood and adjust media targeting according to which neighborhoods actually buy your cars. You would also be able to identify where you spend promotional advertising dollars on neighborhoods that don't buy cars from you and eliminate those from the budget. Shown in blue on the chart below are the top twelve 3 digit neighborhood numbers that actually buy the largest volume of "Luxury SUV's" for the zip code 75093 in Plano Texas.
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SAMPLE
ZIP CODE NEIGHBORHOOD MAP Measuring & monitoring the 100 neighborhoods in the zip code based on how each neighborhood buys your cars. |
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Shown below is an actual zip code map segmented by neighborhood.
HOW DO YOU QUANTIFY
SALES IN RELATIONSHIP TO AD EXPENDITURES?
Target DFW is the only firm in the DFW metroplex that can quantify sales in relationship to the metroplex neighborhoods based on how consumers actually buy cars. Our clients spend fewer promotional dollars on households that can't buy, don't buy and won't buy because our database systems have already measured sales and ownership to pre identify who actually buys, actually pays for and actually takes delivery of product.
The chart shown below demonstrates how sales are measured inside the zip code by neighborhood. The primary objective the measuring process is to convert all aspects of the sales and marketing process to a mathematical equation. Under the column "Total Luxury SUV Owners" we use actual owner data for the Lincoln Navigator and the Cadillac Escalade. The objective was to define the neighborhoods where the largest demand for a Luxury SUV existed and we wanted to be able to identify the household addresses in the neighborhood that had not purchased a Luxury SUV at the time this data was compiled. Now we have a complete mailing list of households that have not purchased a Luxury SUV in neighborhoods know to buy Luxury SUV products at the highest rate. The process of keeping track of neighborhoods, households and how to rank neighborhoods is based on how many households in the neighborhood actually buy your products or services.
. . . why does the neighborhood on Line #1 of the example below have a higher percentage of total households as Owner Households than the neighborhood on Line #50? (On line #1, 19% of all households own a Luxury SUV. On line #50 only 4.7% of all households own a Luxury SUV.) The short answer is because the demand for the product or service is greater for the Line #1 neighborhood than it is for Line #50 neighborhood. Wouldn't you like to know where the demand for your products or services are before you spend your ad dollars? WE CAN MAKE THAT HAPPEN!
| SAMPLE REPORT - ACTUAL SALES DATA FROM 17 METRO ZIP CODES IN THE DALLAS TX SALES UNIVERSE. | |||||||||
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Column 1 | Column 2 | Column 3 | Column 4 | Column 5 | Column 6 | Column 7 | Column 8 | Column 9 | Column 10 |
NEIGH |
NEIGH- |
ZIP | TYPE OF |
ECO- | CITY |
TOTAL |
PROSPECT |
TOTAL |
% OF |
MARKETING,
ADVERTISING & PROMOTION
What works . . . what doesn't . . . and how come.
TEST, TEST, TEST and TEST again. Every promotion is a test, and every test has monitored results. If you monitor your results, no matter how many promotions you run, you will always have a ranking order to every promotion you ever ran. Looking back on all your promotions, do you know which one ranked #1 or which one ranked #2. Now that a process exists to target the households that actually buy, actually pay for and actually take delivery of your cars, what next? The next step is to send a message to the households that they want to hear. If you send the wrong message to the right households, you can expect to sell nothing. If you send the right message to the wrong households, you can expect the same result.
THE RIGHT MESSAGE
The 2 most successful words in the advertising business are FREE and SAVE. If you expect some kind of performance from your target audience, it would be wise to use one or the other . . . or even both. The promotions should also be designed for the consumer to bring your ad back to you so you can track performance. Since advertising is in a constant state of refinement, you are always looking for the ability to measure performance of both the message and the target audience.
WELL, THAT
DIDN'T WORK, LETS TRY SOMETHING ELSE.
The most famous phrase in the advertising business.
If you target the right household audience known to consistently buy with a message the audience wants to hear and they actually see the message when it comes out of the mail box, you are going to sell product. It's real simple. When any of your promotional ad programs don't sell product, you should know why the campaign didn't sell product. There are 3 key variables to every advertising campaign that are easily controlled to make the campaign successful.
Every ad needs to actually get seen by every targeted household.
Every ad needs to communicate the message buyers want to hear.
Every ad needs to target neighborhoods that produce high sales rates.
Advertising in many cases gets placed because "the competitor does it" or "we've been advertising there for years". If for what ever reason your advertising campaigns are not measurably selling product, it's time for a change. 2 prime examples of shifts in advertising placement are newspaper and yellow pages. Both are looking for ways to divest themselves of those products in exchange for more profitable ventures.
The reality about the marketplace is that every neighborhood buys every product and every service differently. Our data systems measure and identify how much of your products or services each neighborhood actually buys. We don't create markets for products or services . . . our targeting process identifies where the actual market for your product or service exists and then we target those neighborhoods. We're looking for new customers for your business in neighborhoods that already produce business at the highest rate!
We're different because we give our clients more marketing flexibility.
1. For clients that want to measure which neighborhoods actually produce sales at the highest rates . . . Target DFW can identify where they are.
2. For clients that want to extract existing customers from marketing so they don't give away promotional marketing dollars to business they already have . . . Target DFW can extract them from your promotions.
3. Target DFW can measure sales performance by streets and neighborhoods so you know for sure that you are marketing to the right audience.
4. If clients want to control exactly which households get targeted . . . Target DFW can give you that control. . . by neighborhood, by street and by household.
5. Target DFW can actually get every message seen at the household level when your ad gets to the household.
6. Target DFW can measure how the consumer perceives the message you send and how you can increase the value of your ad message at the household level.
Target DFW counts houses, tracks sales, manages customer flow and reports market performance to clients. Unlike regular advertising products that sell space or time, Target DFW sells
"Household Management™". We measure sales by neighborhood, by street and by customer to provide maximum marketing flexibility before you spend your promotional ad dollars. Now you can make sure you are spending your dollars on the right target audience before you spend . . . NEIGHBORHOODS THAT ACTUALLY BUY!1016 Edgefield Dr.
Plano, TX. 75075
214-906-4612