A multitude of strategies are available to marketers to help push customers along the purchase funnel. While these marketing tactics may be widely available, the slow adoption of such strategies and industry technologies places a limitation on the success of certain verticals and brands. This especially rings true for industries traditionally built on in-store purchases.
During the 2015 Automotive News World Congress conference in January, a panel of auto industry experts discussed the necessity for better adoption of online tools to improve customer satisfaction in the auto industry. Jared Rowe, president of car-shopping site AutoTrader.com, said that the average vehicle shopper visits almost nine sites before buying a car and that mobile vehicle consumers are demanding thorough, easy-to-navigate websites.
In order to best attract and convert car shoppers — or any online consumer — marketers must adopt a few key strategies to ensure that time spent online effectively pushes consumers toward a purchase.
Integrate Mobile Strategies And Attribution Models
Mobile marketing strategies and attribution models should go hand in hand.
Several studies prove mobile is a highly effective channel, one that all marketers must incorporate into their omni-channel strategy. While these studies show promise for mobile, other statistics show the majority of conversions are still taking place on desktops and in-store.
To determine the effectiveness of mobile channels, brands should be diligent in adopting a cross-device attribution model. This will allow marketers to get the most accurate reporting on their customers’ mobile usage and what converts to sales.
While attribution is critical to understanding the origins of conversions, it’s also important that brands deliver streamlined messages across all channels, taking advantage of each channel’s features.
For example, your mobile creative should include prompts for users to help them locate brick-and-mortar shops, watch mobile video, and share customized products across their social media channels.
Incorporate CRM Data And Understand Evolving Metrics
Incorporating customer relationship management (CRM) data into digital strategies is imperative for marketers to be able to effectively upsell or cross-sell customers. Without CRM integration into digital channels, marketers lose out on a big opportunity to help tie online and offline attribution together.
One of the biggest missed opportunities for brands using data-driven display advertising is that they aren’t focusing on the right metrics, meaning that the wrong goals are given to each partner and ultimately, they’re not driving incremental value to the client.
Prospecting partners should have goals that focus on driving new users to an advertiser’s site and measure metrics such as cost per view (CPV), while site retargeters should focus on cost per acquisition (CPA). Instead, clients are still giving the same CPA goal to all partners and not creating relevant or effective goals for different strategies.
When Magnetic (my employer) ran search retargeting for an auto advertiser, the prospecting goal was CPV, and for site strategy we had an LFA (lower funnel activity) goal. This enabled the marketer to look at the value that search retargeting contributed to the campaign separate from the site strategy.
The advertiser also had cross-device targeting where the brand message was streamlined across all channels, but took advantage of each channel’s features. For example, the mobile creative was an MRAID where users were able to do things like locate a dealer, watch mobile video, and share their customized car to social platforms.
Offline measurement also was used to analyze the digital campaign by seeing how the online portion of it was correlated with having cars drive off the lot.
The auto campaign was based around an omni-channel strategy. It was able to measure all touch points through attribution and provide results across partners so that the campaign could be optimized for the best results.
It’s important to remember that one break in the funnel — that’s one missed touch point and lack of measurement along the journey – can cause an entire marketing strategy to be ineffective.
Marketers must acknowledge that there are many opportunities out there, from mobile, video, offline data and more, which can help brands get their message out and positively impact sales. The ones that put the proper metrics in place will have an advantage over the competition.
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