While it might be tempting to pull back on advertising and marketing dollars during this period of record sales and profits that auto dealers are experiencing, now is not the time to skimp on brand exposure, said Bob Lanham, Head of Automotive Retail for Sales, Strategy & Industry Relations at Meta, the parent company of Facebook.
Lanham was part of a panel discussion on the NADA Live Stage Friday morning on how marketing firms can work with dealers and use data to tell a story that drives performance. He was joined by Amber Daniel, Product Strategy Director of Polk Automotive Solutions, IHS Markit, and Adam Stone, CEO/Co-Founder of Octane Marketing.
Joe Kyriakoza, Vice President and General Manager of Polk Automotive Solutions, moderated the discussion, and opened the session by announcing that IHS Markit is now part of S&P Global, an intelligence and insight company.
Kyriakoza started the panel discussion by noting that while marketing has changed drastically over the last 30 years, and the ability to measure advertising success has changed, the most important success metric has remained the same: Sales.
Daniel noted that nearly three-quarters of dealer ad spending is spent on digital, which is measurable in some way. But are those measurements being leveraged in the right way, Daniel asked, and do they tell the story that dealers need to tell?
It was a question that the panel focused on for most of the session.
“I still believe you can’t manage what you don’t measure,” said Stone. “But just because we have all these metrics doesn’t mean they’re the right ones.”
The key, the panel agreed, is to focus on the customer journey and be prepared to meet the customer at each step of that process.
“We want to intersect them at these points, then know that when I did intersect [with] them, I helped take them through the journey and influenced that sale in a meaningful way,” Stone said. “We have the tools to do it, but sometimes it gets lost.”
IHS Markit is a gold sponsor of the NADA Live Stage. Watch more of this session in the video below.
