OOH Insider - Episode 005 - Specifically for car dealers who need to CUT BUDGET and GROW!

There we go. This is going to be a fun one. It's going to be a fun one for a lot of reasons. It's going to be a fun one for me, particularly because we're talking about a topic that is near and dear to my heart. And that is the automotive industry, the car business. I spent about a decade of my life and that's sort of fragmented time.

I started out as a parts delivery driver and a Porter and a service rider, and I sold cars and I've been a BDC manager and a marketing director, and I've worked at an automotive advertising agency. So what I am telling you is based on my own experience inside of the business, and what I know is not being told to you.

Because again, I worked on the other side, I worked on the vendor side. I've worked at the agency, how the agencies make money is not the same way that you make money. And that's immediately a conflict of interest. My name is Tim Rowe. I am the host of the at-home insider show where we're bringing you tips, tricks, and insider insights to the world about a home advertising.

Absolutely dominate and amplify your campaigns now in the future, sustainably and predictably going forward, like I said, the top of the top of the episode, this is specifically for automotive. We're going to be talking dealership today. There's going to be a few parts to this series. I'm thinking it's going to be a three or four part series today.

We're going to talk about sales. We're going to talk about fixed operations a little bit. I'm going to go deeper in a fixed. Tomorrow in the next episode, uh, after that, we're going to talk, uh, third parties. We're going to talk about how your vendor partners can do a better job to help support you and selfishly for the vendors so that they can help themselves.

So we'll have a special vendor episode is. Uh, we'll also have a tier one tier two discussion to talk about how they can support the dealer body with these same strategies and techniques that I'm going to talk about here today. And then last but not least, we are going to have an all independent dealer discussion.

We're going to talk about how to target people based on price point, but this is all about out-of-home advertising and how we can use technology to help you create more. And more effective campaigns. 2017 Nielsen did a, a study that looked at out of home advertising, television, radio, and print advertising.

I'll put a link in the show notes in the description here. Uh, if you, if you wanna check it out, it's only like a one pager, um, PDF, so it's super easy to digest, but what it showed us was that out of home, advertising drives more search activity than TV, radio, and print combined. Let me say that again, out of home, advertising creates more search activity than TV, radio, and print advertising combined.

I'm gonna let it sit there. So Ken, for a second, when we look at Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all the other social media platforms, the same holds true. How is out of home driving that much search and why does it matter? We see digital budgets, swelling to all new unprecedented levels. And it just doesn't make sense, right?

So why are we spending more money than ever to sell the same number of cars? Our business is about the same. Our cost per car keeps getting hired out. It's not true for everybody, but there's dealers that are losing significant market share, and it is at the behest of the agency. Who's not doing. What is essentially a, of what I believe required of them as a steward of the dealer, principals money to be making recommendations like I'm about to make to you.

Now, what's really important thing to know is that most of you, I can't sell anything to you. Some of you I can, and in those cases, I'm happy to do so. In most cases, I can't sell you anything. There's no financial incentive in any of this. For me to tell you. So keep that in mind as we go through this, but what these digital agencies don't want to do is they don't want to tell you, Hey guys, we can't create more people looking for you.

They can't do it. They cannot create new people looking for you because of talking to the same pool. Right? So, uh, if you have a digital agency that's spending money on search engine marketing, they didn't create any of those searches. Right? Manufactured in tier two did, right? Because they did their job.

They sold the product, they sold the deal. And that led people to go online and search for that product or deal particular model, at least special that maybe they saw that they heard about. The digital agency cannot create more people looking for you. Okay. So if we can all agree to that, then SCM we've already took that thing off Facebook and Instagram, for the most part, it's just not really done.

Right. Um, and a carousel ad of your for lease specials or, Hey, this featured inventory. I mean, I don't know. Do you go on social media to, to look at, to see. Uh, and price points, maybe if you're looking for a car, but you know, what would do a much better job of creating social engagement or something that was actually socially engaging, like maybe that the dealership, uh, donate stuff or they, they have normal human beings who work there and make silly videos.

Uh, that's a much better use of your social media dollars and that would actually create more interest. But right now we're not creating more interest by just putting up carousels and Hey, 2 99 at least special. So Facebook, Instagram. All right. That's off the table. We've got display. We've got pre-roll in there, but at the end of the day, look at your Google analytics.

I'm the guy who at the dealership level, I turned off paid search. I turned off paid search in the month of August, 2017, 2018, 2018. I turned off paid search. Guess what? My number of unique and returning visitors to the website didn't change. Why? Because people are going to look at the three dealerships closest to them.

To see if they have the car and how much they're selling it for. So we don't need to debate that. So my job for you is to create more people who are interested in buying a car specifically from you. Right. So I can do that without a home and I can do it in a few ways. So let's talk about a few other things.

So. Some of the digital marketing things. We were not going to go too deep into that because this isn't about that. Well, we know that there are a fixed number of car buyers inside the body of a month. Now we can do things like direct mail and move people a little bit forward in the process or interrupt them.

I know that there's, there's some agencies that go that model and I'm going to try to talk to the people who aren't in the market. See if I can move them into the market. But for the most part, there is a finite number of people looking to buy. And if we're not creating new search demand, if we're not creating more interested people, then we're all bidding on those same people.

Well, what's happening as privacy laws get more strict what's happening as fewer buyers are in the market. Well, all of our prices going up, it's just going to come down to who's willing to pay the money. For a customer who can afford to pay the most for a customer who has the highest lifetime value and who can see that realized return.

That's really tough, obviously with automotive, because so much of that demand is created by the manufacturer. If you're a franchise dealership, So much of the demand and interest is created at the manufacturer level. So your job as a dealership is really just to create a destination. We create, we can't create more demand.

We can't create more Toyota buyers in the market as Tim's Toyota. I can't do that. I don't have the money to do that. And frankly, it's not your job. It's Toyota's job. We know those things to be true. Okay. So if there are a finite number of buyers and the demand stays constant, or goes up from the dealership side, your budget has no choice, but to.

No choice. It just has to go up. The terrible thing about this is that third parties and vendors they're just as willing to sell it to you as they are down to the guy down the street. So there's no competitive advantage. Oftentimes with a lot of these vendors, it's just more, it's become more of a, I gotta be there because everybody else is there and there's eyeballs there.

So I gotta be there. That's not an advertising. I mean, it's, it is fundamentally I get it, but it's not giving you that unique advantage. So. All right. So we know that not more buyers being created, we know that the demand is higher than ever. We know that the third parties and vendors don't really have my back.

So what can I do as a dealership to create more opportunities for myself, it's out of home advertising and it doesn't just have to be billboards. There's lots of great ways to do it. It's companies like rapid Carver ties. I think that those are huge opportunities for dealerships. Uh, to turn their service cars, to turn their parts of the very vans and turn those into mobile ads.

There's ways that you can layer on if you have wrapped vehicles. So great opportunities to turn the service vehicles and your parts delivery van and your, your trucks and everything. That's all wrapped up. There's ways to turn those into mobile ads. So if you're interested, let me know in the comments below or send me a message, because that is something that I can have an expert.

Come on and talk to you more about how to turn your existing. Uh, vehicles and wrapped vehicles, specifically your mobile billboards and your inventory, how to turn those into ads and integrate them into the campaigns that you're already doing. So you, don't got to spend more money, which just make it all more effective.

That's one way to use out of home is to use your existing vehicle fleet. But specifically I want to talk about billboards posters and those big old structures that make our rides that much more entertaining. So because we carry this thing in our pocket and in our car all the time, what's it doing?

What's it doing? It's got all sorts of data associated with it. It's got a device ID and that device ID can do a lot of things for us in the out-of-home space. So I know based on mobile device ID, I know. To a degree is passing my structures. And what I mean is this, I know what types of behaviors they demonstrate, what things they're interested in about how old they are, how much money they make, um, if they have, if they own your particular brand via.

If they have paid cash for service, if they've done warranty work in the last 12 months, I can do all that without a home. The other day, we had a great conversation. Uh, actually we've had conversations now with a few Subaru dealers. So when we look at our market, while I'm in Eastern Pennsylvania, when we look at our market Toyota, Ford, Honda, So Toyota Rav four Ford F-150 and the Honda CRV, probably no surprise there, but what would surprise you is this the average person in our area?

And it's about it's a little bit over 50% of the polled audience said that they were looking for a non-luxury SUV priced between 30 and $49,000. So that's probably in line with what the rest of the country seeing. Obviously, if you're in a major Metro or in a very rural area that could swing a little bit, but that's pretty much gonna hold true.

For the majority of the market. So no, no surprise there that you had the RAV4 and the CRV and the top three F-150 round in and out. But here's, what's really interesting Jeep as a brand is perfectly suited to tailor exactly what that market and wouldn't, you know, that in my market, specifically three of the bottom four, Top 15 sold vehicles and, and I'd love to have the chart next time.

You know, what I'm going to do is I'm going to come back to this episode and tie it back in. So you can at least see a lot of talking about, um, Jeep and Subaru, where the lowest let's say again. Toyota, Ford, Honda, top three. Bottom selling models. Jeep had three of the four lowest selling models. Subaru had the other that makes no sense.

Those are two of the most on fire brands in America, but I can tell you what's missing. I can absolutely tell you what's missing. And it is targeted outdoor campaigns. Uh, the Toyota dealerships, the Ford dealerships, the Honda dealerships. They all do a lot of outdoor, but here's the key. Here's the key. And this is how to stay.

The car dealerships and probably no surprise you on all of the major thoroughfares for us. It's the big interstates that run, you know, he's still west, but with the technology that we have available today, the Subaru dealer I was meeting with the other day, uh, we took, uh, we took a really holistic approach to his campaign.

This is how I believe that every out-of-home campaign should be delivered for a dealership or any SYEP of brick and mortar retail. Okay. We start by doing a foot traffic analysis of the dealership. Now, what we know about this device ID data is that it tells us a lot, and there's a lot that we can take away from it.

So we start by doing a foot traffic analysis of your dealership, and we're looking for things. How many unique customers have you had in the month? What days are the busiest? Where else do your people go? Do they like Starbucks versus Dunkin donuts? Do they like McDonald's versus burger king? And we start to get this really nicely refined picture of who your customer actually is.

Now I'm not talking about custom audiences and things online. Don't don't don't, don't go down that rabbit hole for a second. Just close that dorm. Really ignore anybody knocking there. Any vendors that are like, ah, customer. We know all this stuff. No, listen, I know where you're. I know what days they come.

I know what else they like to do. Most importantly, I know where they live, work and play. I can see heat map data that shows me here's your dealership. And this is where those people live. So if your dealerships right here, they live up here, let's get a finger on here. They live up here. They worked down here.

What's him. That's great. What do I do with all that information? Well, what we do next is once we have an understanding of who that person. Where do they live, where they work, where they play. We then go back to our handy-dandy data engine and we say, Hey, show me all of the, what are you looking for in this particular instance?

It was a Subaru dealer Subaru dealers, most interested in retaining his current customers because there's a very competitive dealership, not maybe 20 minutes away. So he's very interested. He wants to retain his customers as much as possible, and that retention can look like a few things. It can look like service, it can look like sales, it can look like lease offers to expiring lessees, and we're able to do all of that.

So we're able to sit down and look at this map and say, all right, here's where all your Subaru owners are. Now. You want to talk about lease? Let's talk to specifically, we've got a map and we've got. 25 of our top locations to reach Subaru owners. But do you want to talk about your lease specials? Well, the person most likely to lease another Subaru is somebody who's leasing one now.

So let me take those 25 and let me see which ones over-index against specifically. Lessees of Subarus. That's right. I'm able to take that 25 and condense it down to six or seven units specifically where the most Subaru lessees pass every day. And it's not just Subaru lessees. It's the Subaru lessees that, and where an interrupting those work, travel patterns.

In alignment with your dealership's historical traffic pattern. So then in addition to that, so if we say, okay, here's my dealership, this is where people live, work and play. They go to all these places. I want to have a lease message for my lease customers, uh, for my Subaru owners. I want to talk about service and convenience.

I want to talk about the fact that I do have loaner vehicles available or whatever your unique value proposition is. And maybe I want to do a little bit of. Stay top of mind something fought, have some fun with the market, because I know, I know that out of home drives more Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter activation more activity on all three of those.

So you can come up with a fun, creative brand message. There's all sorts of ways to do that. Uh, there's some funny things called extensions. If you've ever seen a billboard and something's hanging off of it, uh, a hat or a head or, or, uh, we've got one going up in the market with a K bar, it looks real cool.

It's hanging off. That's called an extension. Extensions are really good. Or have you ever seen that? Oh, it looks like you're the guys up there. He's about to fall and it's just a dummy. Um, those are all called extensions and those are great ways to draw more attention. So you can be more targeted with your dealership.

Now let's say that's an, in the case of how I talked to my owners, I want to talk to people who already own and drive my product, but maybe I don't want to just talk to them in my local. Audience. Right. So when we did that foot traffic analysis, we determined where do 80% of your customers live. Now there's ways to go into deeper detail with this, with things like Polk data and registered owners data, to really understand that we're able to paint that picture very quickly for you within 24 to 36 hours, I'm able to tell you where your customers live, work and play on a heat map.

And when we look at that 80% and we say, okay, 80% come within 10 years. Great. We've got that wrapped up. We've got it. Covered Tim. Great job. This campaign's awesome. We're not losing any market share. In fact, uh, sales are steady. Grosses are up because we're bringing back more customers or service more vehicles.

We've got less unapplied time or print money. This is awesome. Thanks so much, Tim. We're ready to grow. We've gotten to a plateau. We're operating very efficiently. We're ready to grow. How can you help me? Well, then the next step is to expand out from there. We can do things like that. Same foot traffic analysis on your competitive dealer.

How much of an advantage is that to do a foot traffic analysis on your competitive dealer to find out where it hurt or his or her customers live, work, and play. And what if you could then apply that same strategy? Just move it over five miles and interrupt that market. Cause you know, that out-of-home drives more search activity than TV, radio, and print combined, which means your SEO and SEM is going to be better applied because there's going to be more people looking specifically for you.

So there's more people looking specifically for you then your STM costs is going to go down unless you have a brand related campaign that involves your dealership name. But if you don't, then you're gonna be paying less for traffic because more people are going to be looking for you. What I wouldn't recommend is putting up, uh, just lease specials or just whatever your monthly special price point offer is.

If you've got digital out of home, those are those big, beautiful, light up things that they turn through. Advertisers. We'll talk real quick about that and how effective that really can be and why to not be concerned with it. Flipping through. But you can use that for things like selection. I love love of this is great.

Especially for driving search. Let's say you've got 50 pickup trucks priced starting at $15,000. Put that up there. Don't feature that one hot unit that you know, oh man, if I can get this thing out of here, it's a 10 pound deal and we're going to make all the money on this one. No, if you let people know.

50 trucks starting at $15,000. Guess what a lot of people looking for trucks are going to do. We're going to look you up looking for those 50 trucks starting at $15,000. And they're going to maybe see one that you wouldn't have typically advertised. That's a great way to use digital out of home, different inventory selections.

Now I'm just stealing that same idea from something that did very effectively on the digital side. What I had agency clients, that's something that we would do online to create more. Uh, it was just those more broad, Hey, we've got a whole bunch of vehicles that fit this. And if you're interested in that, this is definitely the place you should be shopping rather than tying yourself to some dynamically created Facebook ad based on what the last six vehicles were that the person looks at, do things that get you more opportunity, because the fact of the matter is mind share equals market share people.

Aren't going to remember the 1 99 lease price. Frankly, most of them don't believe it anymore. There's plenty of studies on that, but I'm not here to pick it up on. Because if we can create interest, if we can create great things for people to talk about digital out-of-home is a great place as well. A lot of fun stuff.

I'm just chomping at the bit for a dealer to take advantage of this. If you are consistent at taking pictures of your happy customers, there's a really easy way that you can feed that directly up to the billboard, little to no work for your team whatsoever. And you can have great little discipline. All day, feature new customers and then get, what's it going to feel like, what's it gonna feel like, oh my gosh, this guy, this gal, they must sell all of the cars in my area.

This must be the only dealership to buy from because all I see are happy customers up there. There's so many ways to you as out of home, a great campaign that we had a while back was actually a Kia dealer down south by Ikea Winnebago. Phikeia when a billboard there is there's grandma's up there. There were doctors, uh, I saw one, a doctor that bought a Kia and use the billboard that he wants to promote his practice.

Uh, another was a, a grandma on, and there was just a great picture of a grandma with her happy, uh, smile and a brand new key up there. There's so many ways that you can use this to create more. And as you're out there creating more engagement, engagement, and creating more search activity, it's creating more Facebook activity.

It's creating more Instagram activity, Twitter. If you're in a major Metro, or if you're a dealer active on Twitter, it creates more activity. Your digital. Advertising agency cannot create more interested buyers because for the most part where, who they target auto intenders, people that have already identified themselves as being in the process, being them a funnel.

Now out of home, when you look at it as a traditional media, how am I buying it? Uh, there's lots of ways to. The best way that I see right now is programmatically, because you can go in, you can set a budget and you can get the most effective delivery. So what I've started doing for myself for my clients is actually offering a programmatic type of in-house buy that circumvents, the need to learn new technology and software and.

Uh, any sort of intermediary feeds, it cuts out the middleman still gives you the same advantage because at the end of the day, we're going to look back real, look back it out at home, and we're going to realize it was the most undervalued medium we've ever seen. And by the time we realized that the bus is already gone, this is something that's a theme that I'm very, very passionate about.

You can buy out at home. For between eight and $10 cost per thousand, you can't buy a broadcast for that. You can't buy radio for that. And it could still got by young, old, urban, rural, you got to buy it. When you use out of home when you use it, the way that we've talked about here today, strategically using mobile device ID data to qualify where my best potential customers, I'm a Subaru dealer, I'm trying to reach Subaru owners, or I know my best conquest opportunities with this particular brand, or I know that.

I'm on all of these third parties. So you know what Tim show me your inventory. That over-indexes for people who are visiting Carfax cars.com Autotrader, because I'm spending money on those sites and use cars are the opportunity for me to grow right now. So I want to be in front of those people, talking about my selection under $20,000.

There's lots of ways to use it again. We talked about it briefly about the, uh, warranty work versus cash work. There's lots of different ways, and we're going to dive deeper into that. So this has been helpful. This has been interesting. Please do like comment, share, subscribe, do all of those things, share it with somebody that you think would be helpful for if you're a dealer and you're interested in what this technology looks like.

Just send me a message, a confidential message. Um, don't want any sort of conflicts or anything like that for anybody out there. Uh, but I would be happy anywhere in the country. You are in the United States of America and have a dealership, whether or not I can help you directly with the actual out-of-home purchase.

Uh that's yet to be determined, but I can also. You a confidential consultation. We'll look at your dealership. We'll look at what some of those best units are. And I'll give you a recommendation how to take that far for your dealership. Ultimately, at the end of the day, it's to cut the digital, spend down.

If there's more people looking for you, it's less money that you have to spend getting them to your. Dealers to get more than enough traffic to your site, but you get to own that attention from the top of the funnel to the bottom. Right now, we're all bidding on it at the bottom of the funnel. Hopefully this has been helpful.