Odenza – Review and Revise your Advertising Strategy
Albert Einstein once said that the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”. Is that what you are doing with your advertising? Are you doing the same thing you have been doing year after year and getting the same mediocre results? No matter how great of an advertising strategy your auto dealership has, it’s important to not become complacent. Consumer attitudes and expectations change, and so should the ways your dealership aims to speak to these consumers.
That’s why, each year, we encourage you to sit down and take the time to conduct an advertising strategy review. At Odenza, we believe this is one of the key components to ongoing success for any business; and this undoubtedly applies to auto dealers.
Why You Need to Review Your Advertising Strategy
An advertising strategy, much like any other business-related strategy, benefits from constant revision. Regardless of whether your current strategy is yielding good results or not, revision is necessary. You can always, and should always, strive to do better.
More importantly, revising your ad strategy allows you to identify any areas that are failing to yield good results. From there, you can assess whether those areas can be improved or if it’s simply more cost-effective to remove them for the time being.
As for the parts of your strategy that are doing well, you can determine if these strategies should remain the same, or if they can be altered and/or amplified. For example, if an incentive program is bringing in more sales, do you keep it the same for the next year, invest more money, or do you test some changes to the incentive program itself? Perhaps the incentive reward could be different or the circumstances as to when and why they’re rewarded are changed.
There is also the option of taking a well-received strategy and rolling it out into more sales areas. Did incentives work for bringing in more customers at the actual point-of-sale? Then how about using incentives for Facebook contests or at a trade show to bring more people to your booth? Good advertising and marketing strategy comes down to what catches people’s attention and compels them to take action.
What to Account for When Revising Your Ad Strategy
Determining what’s working, what needs to be improved, and what may be best done away with tends to come down to metrics. Metrics, or analytics, are what give you a solid overview of which ad strategies are working. When it comes to digital marketing, metrics are often up-to-date to the second as everything can be tracked, from ad views to clicks and conversions.
With a strategy such as an incentive package that can be used to bring in more customers and sales, you can easily assess how well they work. In the end, if you get 20 more customer sales because of a value-added travel incentive package, then you can calculate the ultimate return on investment.
For auto dealers that Odenza has worked with in the past, we have been able to let them know how many of their customers made use of these travel incentives. Many customers then go on to speak about the positive experience, which can act as organic long-term PR for these auto dealers – this is another unique point of consideration when it comes to revising your ad strategy.
Metrics you can look at and question you can look seek to answer:
- How much money did we spend over the last year?
- What areas of marketing and advertising did we spend this money on?
- Which area brought us the best results/profits?
- Which area brought us the worst results/loss?
- Did we receive the ROI we were hoping for?
- Which areas contributed most to this ROI?
- Which strategies can we improve upon?
- Which strategies should we drop for this year?
- Do we have more or less money for ad spend this year?
- How should this money be divvied up between each area?
During a revision, don’t forget to also take into consideration other avenues you’ve possibly not focused on before. Say you haven’t previously tried out social media; is there room in your budget to start trying it out? Each year, it’s worth trying one new thing – it may just prove to be your silver bullet against competitors.
Review and Improve
Business success comes from the constant drive to improve numbers and increase sales year after year, while also striving to provide a level of customer service and satisfaction that is simply unrivaled. That is why you should sit down and take the time to conduct an advertising strategy review. Odenza has helped hundreds of auto dealers across the US increase sales and customer satisfaction through the utilization of unique, valuable, and rewarding travel incentives. To find out how we can help you improve your ad strategy this year, fill out the form below.