Many people consider their vehicles personal to their identity. It should come as no surprise due to the many people who name them, keep pictures of old cars, or spend weekends detailing them. Vehicles are incredibly personal to the people who drive them – and that's why personalizing automotive ads is so crucial to your marketing.
Personalizing ads using digital ads and online mediums is a highly effective way to connect with your ideal buyers. It is even more critical when you have a specific audience in mind. Engaging your audience with personalized marketing means understanding what your buyers value, how they shop, and what drives their choices.
In this post, we'll explore what you need to do to craft an effective personalized automotive marketing strategy.
How To Personalize Automotive Marketing
Many major brands use personalization to attract sales leads. They craft their messages so they address the very questions or needs the customer is experiencing. It's like the answer they've been searching for directly on their screen. These brands achieve this through customer analytics and demographic data.
You've likely experienced personalized marketing within the last few days. You searched for products that would solve a problem, only to see ads for many companies in your search results pop up in your social feed, email, or search engine. It's called retargeting, and the goal is to reengage people who may have visited the site once and for previous customers.
Let's look in more detail at how you can add personalization to your automotive marketing strategy:
Develop Customer Data
The first step to any successful marketing strategy is learning about your customers to understand their ages, interests, and needs. You can use data gathered directly from your current and past customers or companies like yours to create buyer personas.
From the persona data, you can begin to understand what engages and motivates them so that you can create ad copy that resonates with them. For instance, if your target audience is people ages 21-35 with an income of $60,000-$70,000 per year, marketing your high-end luxury sedan to them is not going to be as effective as it would be to a more experienced age group with a significantly higher annual income.
Tailor Ads to Specific Locations
Vehicles are as emblematic of their locations as home styles are. You tend to see more of some vehicles in different areas than others. City drivers typically favor smaller, compact cars that are easy to maneuver and park in congested areas. Whereas suburban and rural drivers often go for larger trucks or SUVs.
When planning your ads, consider the geographic location to personalize ads to your customers’ needs to craft ads highlighting features that make their daily lives easier. Focusing on vehicles’ capacity to handle snowy conditions can help you stand out in northern regions, which tend to get heavy snowfall, and will help your brand stand out for better reasons than if this misses the mark.
Include Time-Sensitive Elements
Seasonality is vital in all areas of marketing, and the automotive market is no different. Consider fuel efficiency as the draw during summer when people start planning road trips. On the other hand, as winter comes, people may like the idea of an all-wheel drive vehicle for safety.
Launching these ads ahead of that season's start gets customers considering it early, making it easy to make early sales or entice people when they recognize the need. Don't forget the Christmas season when showing ads with new vehicles sporting giant bows for extravagant gift-giving can provide a significant revenue boost to car dealers.
Retarget Current or Past Customers
Retargeting ads can remind your customers that you have other services to help them, such as an award-winning service department or a shop that sells branded accessories. These work well when combined with specials for oil changes, inspections, or even perks like complimentary car washes or special discounts for return customers. Continue looking for opportunities to engage your automotive customers in ways that bring them to your facility and present them with new product opportunities.
Putting Your Ads Together
Now that you've done the work to identify your customer personas and what motivates them, it's time to put the ads together. But first, you must decide on the medium, whether email, social media, native content, audio, or video. The gathered data helps you determine the best place to meet your customers and personalize your ads for maximum impact.
Let's say your target customers are in their 30s to 40s who may or may not have children. Depending on where they live, they may be interested in small sedans or SUVs, or they could favor larger sedans, trucks, or hatchbacks.
So, how can you most efficiently customize your ads to the areas? McClatchy's targeted platform lets you nationally scale ads to specific locations, saving you time and increasing your return on ad spend (ROAS).
Executing Your Automotive Marketing Strategy
As the nation's second-largest local media agency, McClatchy understands their audience well. Due to that, we have achieved deep local penetration across an extensive national reach, allowing us to reach highly specific customers and track trends across groups. Our targeted marketing platform, experience, and expertise can help connect you to your desired customers.
Contact us today to talk about your goals for your automotive marketing strategy and let us show you how we can help.
