Surely, if you’re a dealer or agency looking for marketing success in 2023 and beyond, you’ve got the Automotive Nomadic Customer on your radar, right? If not, catch up here.

In the past, we didn’t need to worry about the Automotive Nomadic Customer. Anyone who wanted to reach auto shoppers only had to cast a very wide net on Facebook and Instagram, and watch the leads roll in. With just 2 channels, auto marketers could reliably deliver their messages to nearly all social media shoppers.

In other words, luck was on our side.

Today, those who understand the Automotive Nomadic Customer will hold the advantage over those who continue their costly spray & pray advertising strategies.

If your goal is to dominate your market and capture more than your share of the Automotive Nomadic Customers, luck won’t cut it anymore.

Instead, you’ll need an omni-social strategy backed by data.

Omni-Social? 

The demographics of your target buyers are changing.

Millennials, for example, now make up the plurality of vehicle buyers. And guess what? They’re not all on Facebook. They’re not all on Instagram…or Snapchat or Pinterest or TikTok either. 

They’re scattered everywhere; and the only way to reach them is with a true omni-social strategy – one that gets your ads, offers, and inventory in front of virtually every vehicle buyer in your market – to ensure you’re gaining share in a challenging market. 

Most dealers love Facebook and Instagram’s targeting capabilities, but you should be aware that without a true omni-social strategy, many automotive intenders in your market will never put you in their consideration set when it comes time to purchase. 

Why?

Because you missed them on the 6 other apps they’re using outside of Meta.

And if you’re not on the majority of these platforms with a real brand presence, engagement, steady frequency, and — yes, ads —you aren’t reaching shoppers throughout the entire customer journey, which began around 90 days ago.

That is, unless you’re employing a true and targeted, omni-social strategy. 

Okay, I Get I Need To Go “Omni-Social,” But Now What?

Well, it’s pretty simple. You first have to answer these 2 questions:

1. How many shoppers can you reach and on which platforms?
2. How much money do you need to spend to reach these shoppers on those platforms?

Before you start throwing money at the growing problem of a softening market, it’s important to understand the omni-social opportunities in your own market / DMA.

To answer all of the above, simply use the free MarketAnalyzer created by the team at BuyerBridge. It’s a super-simple tool to help you and your team get a handle on just where the Automotive Nomadic Customer is hiding online. 

As you use the tool, you can adjust the overall radius to where you feel your marketing will be most effective – this allows you to see your target audience and channel opportunities in real time. 

Additionally, you can resize your target market individually for each social channel including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and TikTok. 

(For example, if you don’t want to advertise on Snapchat, just remove it from your report.)

What About Budget?

As with the rest of your marketing spend, there is no one-size-fits-all budgeting strategy when it comes to omni-social marketing.

Every brand and every market are a little different. Therefore, just because a Honda dealer in Dallas determines that dedicating 1/3 of their overall digital budget to omni-social delivers an effective ROI, doesn’t mean that’s the correct mix for you.

Fortunately, by using the MarketAnalyzer you’ll be able to dial-in a reliable omni-social budget starting point. Moreover, because you can adjust your target area by social channel, you’ll quickly learn where the Automotive Nomadic Customers in your market are located and how much it’s going to cost to get your ads, offers, and inventory in front of them.

The only question that remains is do you want to dominate your market in 2023 and beyond by going all-in on a true omni-social marketing strategy?

…or do you want to continue costly spray and pray advertising with the hope you’ll capture your share of the Automotive Nomadic Customers? 

Check out the MarketAnalyzer now and start reaching the Automotive Nomadic Customer today.

Media dollars aren’t getting dealers as far as they used to, and automotive marketers everywhere are stuck asking themselves: Why is there a sudden shift in lead volume? 🧐 👎

When we break-down past events, you’ll find that it’s not as sudden as you think! There are a handful of factors that have been catalysts for this decrease in auto shopper leads…

It all started with the explosion of digital media – which soon created a much more complicated, costly customer – the Automotive Nomadic Customer. 

But what is the origin of these Automotive Nomadic Customers? Why are these car shoppers so hard to reach? And how can auto marketers get ahead of them? 

The Digital Media Explosion

Less than 20 years ago, the mobile phone didn’t really exist! 

But in 2007, when the first truly groundbreaking mobile device was released (ever heard of the iPhone?! 😉), smartphones began paving the way to a monumental digital media  evolution.

And each year, with more and more digital opportunities added to the stack – the  digital landscape has become shockingly vast.  

Ever since, there has been a seismic shift in the depth of the digital landscape.

The digital media timeline below speaks for itself: 

Little did we know that as a result of these new, exciting developments in technology, auto marketers would be faced with two VERY costly challenges in the future.

2 Most Expensive Challenges For Auto Marketers Today

The two challenges are…

• Challenge #1: The online / data privacy landscape, which has impacted the ability for advertisers to track users as they move nomadically across digital media.
  
• Challenge #2: The ever-changing habits of today’s shoppers, which has sent advertisers on a wild goose chase, trying to blindly hunt down and reach this nomadic car shopper

Ask yourself: Have you noticed a change in lead volume for you or your clients over the past 2 years?

During the first webinar of our brand-new educational series, The Automotive Nomadic Customer Series, we asked our audience the above question, and 57% of auto marketers reported seeing a decrease in lead volume over the past 2 years!

Yet automotive marketers continue to invest more time and more money, arriving at the same destination…

In a 2021 survey from HubSpot: 44% of marketers predicted they would need to spend 5x more $$$ to hit the same goals in 2022 as they did in 2021.

But with BIG bucks at stake, do you really want to throw your ad dollars against the wall with the HOPE that they’ll stick?  

The Shift: Traditional Digital vs. New Digital

Back to the Traditional Digital era, or what some might call, the era of “Spray & Pray” advertising: decisions were simpler, advertising was easier, and most importantly…advertisers could reach a larger audience for less money! 

But that was before the shift to targeted digital advertising, which provided advertisers with an even better solution to reach the right audience, at the right time, for even CHEAPER!

…UNTIL the most unreachable car shopper, the Automotive Nomadic Customer,  surfaced.

And with the recent discovery of this mysterious customer, alongside endless options of “New” Digital, dealers are in a frenzy –  spending a ton more money in an effort to find this car shopper who is seemingly nowhere to be found.

In NADA’s Mid Market Report Analysis below, you can easily identify the large increase of ad spend being thrown at the internet in 2021, compared to 2016 (prior to the Automotive Nomadic Customer)!

Here’s the thing: going back to a “Spray & Pray” strategy in today’s NEW digital landscape, where there’s countless digital mediums, will simply not drive the same success it once did. 

Instead, auto marketers need to dig deeper into how the Nomadic Customer consumes digital media.

How Does The Nomadic Customer Consume Digital Media? 

On average, the automotive Nomadic Customer spends over 8 hours / day consuming digital media across social, search, games, OTT, messaging, news, etc.

Every year, the Nomadic car shopper is choosing to consume more and more “New” Digital media per day over “Traditional…” 

And they’re doing it all on mobile, which to no surprise, the #1 most used mobile apps are those categorized as social media / chat apps. 

How To Get Ahead Of The Most Unreachable Car Shopper

Understandably, the extensive number of “New” Digital mediums available for auto marketers to advertise on today can be overwhelming. 

But you have to start somewhere…and in this case, the best place to start is with this quiz to determine whether or not you’re maximizing your organic exposure!

After you take the quiz, we’ll make sure to send you 20 FREE organic guides to help you get a jumpstart on the most unreachable car shopper today!

Key Takeaways

Consumers are congregating on a ton of common mediums – and this provides a unique opportunity to reach them – if you’re paying close enough attention. 

Click here to watch our FULL webinar, “Why Is The Automotive Nomadic Customer Costing Dealerships BIG Bucks $$$” and learn more about out how auto marketers can reach these customers in hiding, without wasting ad media dollars along the way.

Having lived through more than a few ups and downs in automotive retail, there is one constant about advertising that’s been true for decades. That is, when the market begins to soften, managers and dealers most often look for answers from (and place the blame on) their marketing budgets. 

Whether they make knee-jerk vendor replacements or start chasing potential buyers across multiple channels, they usually do this without much data – these are gut decisions. Selling fewer vehicles? We need to spend more, be in more places, and/or fire our marketing vendors! Spray and pray, because if we throw enough crap against the wall, some of it will stick! 

When coupled with the new norm of the Nomadic Customer, the current market softness is already leading to spray and pray decisions that are more costly than in the past and resulting in lower overall reach. That is, while dealers are ramping up spending, they’re connecting with fewer car buyers. 

Today’s automotive Nomadic Customer is more than a moving target; they’re fleeting. Specifically, they never seem to be in any one place for very long. Additionally, the inventory shortages over the last 24+ months have taught today’s customers to look for vehicles in even more places than ever before. 

Cross-Shopping is Creating Inefficiencies

In the past, dealers seeking additional exposure to their inventory could double-up (or triple-up) on classified websites, buy leads from other third-party providers, and spend more on Google Ads. These strategies offered some incremental exposure, as cross-shopping (consumers visiting multiple third-party sites) was limited, and Google provided search term-level data in Google Analytics dealers could use to fine tune their spend. 

The problem with these strategies today is that the current low-funnel buyer is everywhere. They are, after all, the automotive Nomadic Customer. As these consumers cross-shop multiple classified websites, dealers end up paying double, triple, or even quadruple to reach the same potential buyer. Plus, Google Ads have become too expensive, and now – under the guise of “privacy” – Google hides nearly all consumer search terms from their advertisers’ Google Analytics. 

Spray and pray in the past was just costly; today, it’s costly and inefficient. 

Too Many Choices 

In the past, car buyers had few available media options. Decades ago, there was likely one daily newspaper, three or four channels on television, and just a handful of popular radio stations in each market. Add in a couple of strategically placed billboards, and car dealers practicing spray and pray could afford to be nearly everywhere. 

Today’s consumer has too many choices and a shortened attention span. To gain the same relative exposure now would bankrupt your dealership. 

Whether online or the old fashioned way, relatively few consumers read their local paper daily; and almost no one reads it from cover-to-cover as they did in the past. Your online and offline ads are almost never seen by the Nomadic Customer. 

Although about 80% of Americans watch television on a given day, they’re not all watching the same three or four channels – in fact, many are watching a premium streaming service without commercials. Even if you’re hyper-targeting with over-the-top media, between their shorter attention spans and the ease of channel surfing, the automotive Nomadic Customer is missing your messages. 

An astonishing 88% of Americans still listen to more than twelve hours of radio each week. Of course, only about one of every six of these listeners is going to buy a car in the next twelve months. If your goal is to reach the in-market buyer – say, someone looking to buy in the next 30 days – then only about 1.5% of those hearing your ads today is likely to buy this month. There is no tangible ROI if your goal is to reach the Nomadic Customer.

It’s Digital or Bust 

As most dealers already know, the remaining option is digital marketing. While digital marketing in the past promised lower acquisition costs coupled with superior tracking and measuring, the realities caused by the automotive Nomadic Customer and privacy challenges are leading to bloated budgets with little or no measurable return. 

Reaching the Nomadic Customer without breaking the bank is the problem; and the answer – if there is going to be one – will depend on finding solutions that can effectively be everywhere at all the right times. Because the market will soften (if it hasn’t already for you), and dealers can no longer rely on their gut plus a little spray and pray to drive today’s buyers into their stores.