By Gary Marcotte, 3 Birds Advisory Board Member
The most recent Digital Dealer Conference in Las Vegas has convinced me that today’s progressive auto dealer is more open-minded than ever…more open to challenging convention…more focused on the future…and more willing to tackle the uncertainty that lies ahead with aggressive experimentation and thoughtful innovation.
The exhibit hall was jam-packed with professionals who were really intrigued by the new products and solutions from vendors with real technology. Breakout sessions were standing room only, especially those that embraced new ideas and challenged convention. Here’s my quick take on the themes.
#1: What to do with social
There was no shortage of resources for dealers who are continuing to struggle with the role that social media plays for their business. The most valuable sessions focused on using social to expand the reach of content marketing, humanize the dealership, and showcase the store’s talented associates as a way to build trust. The most effective tools in the Exhibit Hall where those that helped dealers easily spread their content into social channels and target more productively.
#2: Transparency, transparency, transparency
The Exhibit Hall was packed with tools designed to help consumers get more information more easily. Clearly it is becoming accepted that greater transparency equals greater conversion. There are more products than ever that enable customers to do more and more of the transaction from appraising (or even selling) their own trade to estimating payments to building their own deal. Speakers offered example after example of how providing more functionality and more transparency to consumers drives dealer market share.
#3: All this data
Speaker after speaker demonstrated product after product offering new ways to use the mountains of dealer, market, and OEM data to market more effectively. From targeting to attribution, vendors are providing more models and more tools to improve efficiency and dealer results. The tools are becoming easier to use and integrating more easily into content systems, making it possible for dealers to do more advanced and more productive marketing. Search engine marketing systems that use sales, inventory, and consumer shopping data and eMail Marketing/Digital Campaign products that use behavior based models led the way.
#4: Integration, please!
The days of point solutions that don’t integrate to DMS, CRM, or other dealer systems are going the way of Oldsmobile. Dealers are no longer willing to accept all the extra work, disconnected content, and cost inefficiency that these solutions require. Dealers now demand that content move seamlessly from channel to channel. Messages must adapt to the devices consumers use, especially mobile. The exhibits that made marketing easier and more automatic had some of the longest lines in the hall. Dealers are clearly excited by new products with integrated attribution and reporting that includes transaction and market data.
#5: Mobile first
Products that don’t provide mobile functionality or apps to ease usage are simply no longer viable for dealerships. There is broad acceptance that consumers will be doing more and more of their shopping on their smartphone.
#6: Visions of the future
During one session I attended, Eric Brown, founder of Dataium, made the case that privacy will force consumers to become anonymous streams of data. He challenged dealers to rethink their marketing to address this soon. I was proud of the fact that the team at 3 Birds is already thinking about what this all may mean to how we market today, and positioning ourselves for tomorrow with tools that will help dealers filter down to the minutest level of customer data. This isn’t the last you’ll hear about marketing streams.
Frankly, I am glad that there are so many good choices and many strategic imperatives—it only pushes us harder to be the industry’s clear choice for integrated digital marketing I was also encouraged by the attitudes of attendees who are focused on figuring out what to do next, what to try, and how to do things better. Gone are the “never gonna happen” discussions that we used to hear. I left the 19th Digital Dealer Conference encouraged by the state of our industry and what the future holds.