The Importance of Local Marketing to Multi-Location Automotive Businesses

Transcription

1 The Importance of Local Marketing to Multi-Location Automotive Businesses

2 Automotive Consumers & Brands are Increasingly Online, Mobile, and Local Whether purchasing a new car, finding a gas station, buying auto parts, or locating a service center, consumers are increasingly using online resources like search engines and social networks often with a mobile device to find what they need. For example: Two Google studies 1 published in November 2013 found that 76 percent of auto aftermarket purchasers visited multiple parts websites prior to purchase. Among tire purchasers, online usage increased 21 percent year-over-year. And for both categories of buyers, search engines were the number one research tool utilized by 70 percent of buyers. A 2013 xad/telmetrics study 2 found that 2 out of 3 searchers use mobile exclusively when searching for gas and convenience store locations. Millward Brown and Google released a September 2013 research report 3 asserting that among buyers researching new car purchases, 37 percent used social media and 77 percent used search engines a 20 percent increase over the prior year. The data clearly illustrates that the information automotive consumers find online influences their decision on what to buy and where to buy it. In fact, location is critical. The 2013 xad/telmetrics study 2 found that close proximity is crucial, with 53 percent of consumers desiring a provider within five miles of their location. Furthermore, Google has observed that 20 to 50 percent of searches have a local intent. The automotive industry has taken note of these online, mobile and local trends and brands have taken action. The U.S. automotive industry will spend $7.8 billion on digital advertising by 2017 (an annual growth rate of nearly 13 percent) according to an emarketer report 4. This spending puts the industry on track to be the second biggest buyer of paid online and mobile media by 2015, behind only the financial services industry. emarketer predicts that search and display advertising will command the largest chunks of digital spending, with the greatest growth in the areas of mobile, video, social and local. Local advertising is not only a high growth area but also comprises a large portion of existing spend in fact, a 2013 Verve Wireless study found that the automotive industry is the second highest-spending industry when it comes to location-based advertising, accounting for 18 percent of all such advertising.

3 Your consumers and your competitors are online, mobile, and local, so it is imperative that you act now to build or expand your location-based, online marketing for your automotive business. This paper will address three essential local marketing strategies that will ensure you are where your customers are, and that you are differentiated from your competition: 1) data accuracy, 2) online coverage, and 3) highly relevant and customized content. Lap 1: Be Accurate As a multi-location automotive brand, at the core of all online marketing activities is the data about your hundreds or thousands of locations. A 2014 comscore 5 study found that the primary information sought during local searches includes address/location, Consider a 2,200 location company phone number, hours of operation, and that provides oil changes and driving directions. It is critical that this data other vehicle maintenance. If the is readily available across search engines, company had phone data errors social networks and online listings for each with just 5% of its locations it could mean a loss in revenue of and every one of your locations. It can $990k from oil change customers be difficult to manage such dynamic and that choose to go elsewhere 9. abundant data but it is absolutely critical because all downstream activities will suffer from inaccurate or incomplete data. Consumers will notice if the data is bad. Placeable s own consumer research 6 found that 73 percent of consumers say they lose trust in the brand when the online listing shows incorrect information. And unfortunately, studies show that missing and bad data is widespread across the web. A Search Engine Land article 7 cited that 18 percent of listings have missing or inaccurate phone number, while 43 percent of listings have a missing or inaccurate address! These data omissions and errors are costly. Take the simple example of phone numbers. What if a location is missing a phone number or the number is wrong? A September 2013 study by Google and Ipsos 8 found that 70 percent of mobile searchers have used click-to-call to connect directly from the search engine, and 47 percent of mobile searchers say that if a business does not have a phone number associated with its search results, they will be more likely to explore other brands. Placeable Automotive Guide

4 Bad data means lost revenue. But how can you ensure data is accurate? Where is your location data housed, and how many systems must be accessed to gather such data? How labor-intensive are the data update processes, and how many people touch the data? To improve the accuracy and completeness of your data, consider a centralized database with easy importing and uploading processes. The ideal system should: Include batch upload and update capabilities Track all data changes Run data through automated address standardizations and verification steps Regulate who has access to the data and include version control and audit trails Provide synchronization capabilities with information stored outside of the system Feature automated batch geocoding capabilities and enable users to re-plot locations for ultimate accuracy Format data for easy export to third parties An automated, centralized system is the best way to ensure that location data is up-to-date and accurate. It is also the most cost effective way to manage this data. And because it is so efficient, it s easier to increase the depth and richness of your local data. Data accuracy is like the engine of your local marketing program: you can t start a race without it. Lap 2: Be Present Once you have accurate data, it needs to be visible to consumers wherever they are looking. And today that means coverage well beyond traditional resources like online yellow pages and business directories. A leading web analytics firm, Alexa, publishes traffic rankings that measure how popular a website is based on estimated daily unique visitors and page views. The lower the ranking, the more traffic a given website has. Search engines and social networks are at the top of the traffic rankings according to Alexa s April 2014 rankings 10 for the United States: Google - 1 Facebook - 2 Yahoo! - 4 Bing - 11 Foursquare Placeable Automotive Guide

5 The top traditional online yellow pages and business directories rank considerably lower, as demonstrated by this sample of such websites from the same timeframe: YP.com - 2,475 YellowBook.com - 3,351 Hotfrog - 5,363 YellowMoxie - 53,090 The automotive industry echoes general web trends when it comes to the dominance of search engines and social networks. The auto dealer category is an excellent example of this. A study by Millward Brown and Google 11 found that 95 percent of vehicle shoppers use digital channels to research auto purchases. Seventy-seven percent use search engines to find a new car, and this grew 20 percent over the previous year. Forty-three percent used online mapping tools, a 23 percent increase year-over-year. Thirty-seven percent used social media and 35 percent searched via their mobile device a 460 percent increase yearover-year. A J.D. Power study 12 found similar results, with 29 percent of social media users obtaining recommendations about an automotive product or service from friends and family exclusively through social media. Business directories and yellow page sites appeared nowhere in the results. The online activity is not limited to product research, but increasingly includes online purchases. Consider the automotive parts and accessories segment. Frost and Sullivan 13 predicts that revenue from the online sale of parts and accessories is expected to reach $16.56 billion in 2020, up from $4.6 billion in 2012 accounting for nearly 10 percent of overall aftermarket sales. The report states that real-time communication through a website or social media, and purchase online, pick up at a store schemes can help draw buyers. It is essential to be found online not only by automotive consumers researching purchase decisions but also by those that are seeking to purchase online. Such findings make it clear that you need to be present online, and your location data needs to span search engines, social networks mapping tools and other online resources. Consider a leading automotive parts provider with $6.1 billion in revenue. If the provider does not take action to be easily found online they will lose both brick and mortar and ecommerce sales. When analyzing just the lost revenue from ecommerce if 10% of the market revenue begins to come from online sales, the retailer is putting $600 million at risk! Placeable Automotive Guide

6 What mechanisms do you have in place to deliver data in an automated fashion to these third parties? Is that data already in the format required by each of the online properties? How do you update formats as search engines and social networks change their APIs and submission requirements? How do you ensure that information displayed by listings aggregators is up-to-date? A marketing automation platform can automate delivery of your location data to search engines, social networks, listing aggregators, and even your own mobile and desktop web properties. Such a platform handles formatting and submissions in the manner required by each channel and directory type. And because the process is automated, it saves you time. With broad online and mobile coverage you are on the right road to capturing more location visits and revenue. Lap 3: Be Relevant Maintaining accurate data and being present in the right locations are a great start, but to win the race brands must provide the customized, relevant content demanded by today s consumer. While hours, location, directions, and product/service descriptions are essential, consumers seek additional information like reviews, customized, location-specific offers, videos, and photos. Let s look at an example from the aftermarket service category. A July 2013 Google and Sterling Driver Insights report 14 found that 43 percent of drivers perform a search online when deciding where to take their vehicle for service, and 34 percent used online reviews and videos to guide their decisions. The report also found that there is no clear brand differentiation between aftermarket service chains in a driver s mind and even loyal customers can be swayed to a competing service center. Accordingly, rich online content is critical to aftermarket service brands looking to keep existing customers or capture new customers from competitors. Relevant offers like a discount on an oil change or a free car wash with a fill-up work well to lure customers to your location. And with accurate location data, applicable offers can be placed on locators and landing pages such as offering snow tire discounts during late fall in Denver, but not in Phoenix! According to the Mobile Marketing Association 15, automotive industry ads that are dynamic and location-customized increase click-through rates by over 60 percent and eliminate the need for multiple versions of creative. Placeable Automotive Guide

7 In order to deliver highly relevant and customized information, however, you must have a unique landing page and mobile presence for each and every one of your locations. How prepared is your team to create and update hundreds or thousands of landing pages? Will those pages feature custom offers, automated ads, local SEO, and rich content like videos and third-party reviews? Does your team have the necessary competencies in the areas of location data management, listings automation, locator development, SEO and geocoding? 2013 internal Google data 16 shows that there are 70 million monthly aftermarket service searches on Google alone. With more relevant and locally customized content an automotive brand will have higher rankings and capture more of such searches. For example, if a brand captured just.0001% of those searches and 20% came in for even a simple service such as a mirror glass replacement (which yields $50 in maintenance revenue 17 ) the brand would capture an additional $84k in revenue each year. And that doesn t even include the profit margin on selling the mirror glass part. A proven third-party provider that focuses on local marketing brings this expertise to you, and more sophisticated providers even offer automation capabilities for centrally managing content and propagating it to multiple pages all in one step boosting your digital presence and winning the highly competitive race to attract automotive consumers. 1 Auto Aftermarket: Today s Digital Driver, November 2013, Google and Digital Helps Tire Brands Gain Traction, November 2013, Google 2 Understanding Mobile s Role in the Consumer Path to Purchase, 2013, xad/telmetrics 3 Vehicle Shopper Path to Purchase Study, September 2013, Millward Brown Digital and Google 4 The US Automotive Industry 2013: Digital Ad Spending Forecast and Key Trends, emarketer 5 Trends Shaping Local Search in 2014, comscore 6 Be Found Location-Based Marketing Insights, March 2014, Placeable 7 The Most Common Problems With Local Business Listings, March 2013, Search Engine Land 8 The Role of Click to Call in the Path to Purchase, September 2013, Google and Ipsos 9 Assumes 500 searches per month per location, 10% conversion rate, 50% customer loss rate, and $30 per oil change 10 United States Web Traffic Rankings as of April 2014, Alexa 11 Vehicle Shopper Path to Purchase Study, September 2013, Millward Brown Digital and Google Social Media Benchmark Study Automotive, J.D. Power 13 Opportunity Analysis of eretailing for Automotive Parts and Service in the North American Market, July 2013, Frost & Sullivan 14 The Road to Winning Drivers - What Drivers Want in Automotive Aftermarket Service, July 2013, Sterling Driver Insights and Google 15 Location and Mobile Marketing: The Top 3 Location-Based Advertising Insights Across Retail, QSR and Auto, March 2014, Mobile Marketing 16 Internal Data, 2013, Google 17 Mirror Replacement Service Cost Quote, March 2014, Sill-Terhar Motors (Broomfield, CO) Association Placeable Automotive Guide

8 Victory Lap: Local Marketing Automation The key to accuracy, coverage, and relevant, customized content is a local marketing automation platform from an experienced third-party provider: it s the fastest route to capturing location visits and revenue from an increasingly online, mobile and savvy consumer base. At Placeable we eat, sleep and breathe local marketing. We have been delivering location data technology and local search solutions for over 15 years. Location marketing is the core competency of our implementation team they have decades of combined experience in software delivery, user interface design, local SEO, site accessibility, regulatory requirements, site security, APIs, and data integrations. Placeable brings you all of this expertise along with an automated SaaS platform that has been built from the ground up to host and maintain local marketing data for enterprises with hundreds or thousands of locations. Placeable enables quick and easy importing, organizing, correcting, cleaning, normalizing and updating of your location data. Our platform automatically formats and exports content to search engines and social networks (including Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Facebook, and Foursquare) and delivers accurate and expanded information to listing aggregators (such as InfoGroup, Yext, Acxiom, Localeze, and Factual). Placeable also empowers you to create unique web and mobile landing pages for every location with enriched, search-optimized content such as customized offers, automated and highly relevant ads, third-party reviews, and videos. Placeable s local marketing automation platform is a must-have investment for automotive brands that understand the importance of capturing online, mobile, and local consumers with digital marketing efforts done right and at scale. With location-based expertise, a proven product, and satisfied customers, Placeable is the perfect partner to have as your pit crew in the local marketing race. To learn more visit