Ready for some straight talk about how traditional bricks-and-mortar retailers are faring in the digital realm? The 2016 version of Deloitte’s New Digital Divide report is here, and the results aren’t great. Yet the insights uncovered offer exciting opportunities for dealerships just like yours to turn the tide and dominate online.

Here’s the deal: there’s a growing gap between the digital experiences that brick-and-mortar retailers deliver to customers and the experiences their customers actually desire. As a result, retailors have less influence over the purchase journey even as more people flock online to shop for goods and services. What’s going on? The report points to huge platforms like Amazon and Pinterest that interact with customers every day (sometimes for several hours a day) and so have deep troves of customer data that allow them to tailor content and messaging to each user for a dynamic and exceptional customer experience; an experience which customers come to expect from every digital interaction.

You may be thinking “how can I compete with that?” After all, most dealerships and other retailers have limited interaction with customers – an average of six to eight transactions a year. This limits your understanding of the “moments that matter” in a personalized experience, such as purchase intent and customer preferences. But you can compete and offer the personalized digital experience your customers’ desire. The answer lies in leveraging multiple sources of data from inside and outside your dealership to truly understand your target markets and create a broad range of customized experiences that will help you dominate in the digital world. Here are five ways to do it:

1. Seek an in-depth understanding of your customers

In today’s digital world, personalization is everything. Just look how Amazon customizes what a customer sees based on prior searches, page views, wish-list additions, and purchases. And the personalization payoff is huge – the Deloitte study found that 48% of shoppers and 58% of Millennials are willing to share personal details to acquire better service or perks, or to receive more personalized emails with offers and recommendations. You can take a page from Amazon’s book and learn more about your target consumers thanks to research companies like Experian and Nielsen that closely track consumer behavior and preferences. Whether you work directly with these companies or partner with an automotive data expert, you can access the makeup of car buyers in your target zip codes, drill down to see what interests buyers in a particular vehicle model, and learn what they value in a buying experience.

2. Embrace diverse digital initiatives

It follows that once you have a more personal understanding of your customers, the old “spray and pray” campaign where you put a generic message and out there and hope for the best just won’t cut it anymore. Dealers who recognize that digital initiatives appeal differently across customer segments will have an advantage in today’s digital marketplace. With the right data and analysis you can also determine where your customers are already interacting and transacting, and be there for those “moments that matter” when they’re ready to move forward in a vehicle search. Whether that’s third-party automotive sites or social media platforms, you can capture the customer at a time when digital influence is high and set your dealership up to win a motivated, low-funnel lead. A combination of initiatives is the way to win in today’s marketplace.

3. Move from a campaign mind-set to a customer mind-set

Again, this strategy is all about putting the customer’s desires and preferences first. As the study points out, retailers have been painfully slow at moving from a legacy campaign mind-set (where everything is planned around sales events) to a customer mind-set (where the planning process is built around the needs of different segments of customers, not sales events). This has to change. Companies doing it right understand that it’s all about the customer, not the company. Following the two strategies above will naturally lead you to think more about your customers, but don’t make the mistake of using this information only to better target the message you want to deliver. Instead, use it to uncover your customers’ pain points and address their needs.

4. Allow for self-directed purchase journeys

It’s natural to want to lead customers down a linear path to purchase, but that’s not how most customers shop today. They want to be in control of how and when they engage retailers. This is backed up by the Deloitte study where 66% of respondents wanted a self-directed journey, a steep increase from just 30% two years ago. In practice, this means using digital to allow customers to find their own way instead of following a prescribed path through your inventory and purchase process. A fluid structure where customers can find inspiration at the moment that matters most to them will naturally lead to a better experience and further engagement.

5. Engage in meaningful ways

Not all engagement is created equal. Today’s digitally-savvy consumers’ demand value from every engagement – otherwise it’s just noise to be ignored. The more you can dig into data and uncover your target markets intents and preferences, the more meaningfully you can engage with personalized offers and recommendations. This is the type of valuable content that motivates consumers to take action.

This is an exciting time to re-evaluate your digital strategy so you can be one of the retailers doing it right and winning more market share. Just like Amazon and other big players, let data drive your targeted marketing efforts and capitalize on those digital “moments that matter” to lift leads and sales. When you create a broad range of customized experiences and put personalization first, you can dominate in the digital world.  

Groton, MASS (October 18, 2016) - String Automotive, provider of the auto retail industry’s first and only Dealer Positioning System® (DPS), outperformed their peers significantly in August, selling 16% more midsize sedans than the national average.

The midsized sedan segment has been in freefall, with demand hitting a five-year low in August, according to Automotive News. Across all midsize nameplates, the declines averaged 27%, a loss of more than 60,000 units from August 2015. But String Auto dealers, by comparison, only saw an 11% drop.

“To stay competitive in today’s market, it has become increasingly important for dealers to be data-driven,” said Ken Kolodziej, String Auto’s CEO. “Our DPS platform makes recommendations based on real data that increases effectiveness and profitability. Our clients’ ability to convert more leads than their peers — despite adverse market conditions — is proof of that.”

String Auto’s DPS platform lets dealers compare market share, inventory merchandising, and average customer rating to other stores in their area, measure marketing ROI, and identify selling opportunities by drilling down on heavily cross-shopped models.

“The great thing about our platform is that it not only provides a clear picture of how a dealership is operating through data, but insight into how to act on opportunities,” Kolodziej added. “That’s why our dealers are able to outperform the competition.”

To find out more about String Automotive, or to learn about how its intelligence platform helps dealers turn data into insights, visit www.stringautomotive.com.

About String Auto:

Founded in 2005 and based in Groton, MA, String Automotive delivers transparency, insights and innovation to forward-thinking dealers. String’s dealership intelligence platform, the Dealer Positioning System (or DPS), takes the pulse of each dealership’s local market and guides dealers to make the most profitable, proactive decisions for every store and unique situation. When used in concert with vendors and agency partners, this powerful analytics solution simplifies choices like how to spend marketing dollars, what inventory to stock and where to conquest by letting a dealer’s data drive decisions.

Media Contact: 

Laurie Halter

Charisma! Communications

503-816-2474 

"Who will watch the watchers?" This paraphrasing of a famous line from the ancient Roman poet Juvenal came to mind as I was reading the news about Facebook’s video metrics snafu.  To put it simply, Facebook admitted that it has been miscalculating the average duration of video views on its platform for the last two years(!)  Rather than include all views in its calculation, it excluded any views less than three seconds in length.  That practice left out millions of views and skewed the average viewing time higher by “between 60% and 80%,” according to Facebook.

For any digital advertiser or agency, this sort of error is scary. We rely on reporting from the platforms we use to buy ads to tell us how well those ads performed.  We then make crucial decisions to change our strategies (or not) based on that information.  If the data coming out of these platforms is erroneous or incomplete, our decisions will be based on fallacious assumptions, which leads us to make bad choices and costs us business.

So, what’s at stake?  In the case of a single dealer, it might mean a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands of dollars in advertising. This doesn’t even account for spending money on campaigns that the dealer thinks are working well, but which are instead being over-reported.  Overall, in the case of Facebook’s video advertising business, we’re talking about billions of dollars.

In the case of Facebook’s error, this was only one metric – albeit an important one – that was incorrect.  To me, this is an important lesson for anyone making data-driven marketing and advertising decisions: Like Juvenal’s quote above implies, if we don’t scrutinize our vendors, partners and advertisers, then who will?

My first reaction to Amazon’s recent release of their Vehicles department was, “Wow: The absolute last thing the world needs right now is another automotive research portal.”  Because, really, that’s all that Amazon Vehicles is at the moment: a research portal chock-full of vehicle information, but devoid of any inventory.  As a consumer, my first reaction might be, “This is great info, but where’s my One-Click order button?”

Although I doubt we’ll see drones flying in a 3,000-pound sedan for curbside delivery any time soon, Amazon’s surely taking a methodical approach to eating up a chunk of the very lucrative, and insanely frustrating, auto purchase process. The company will do so by leveraging its core strengths, which, in my opinion, no other retailer or entity, online or brick-and-mortar, can touch.

These strengths include a unique nexus of user base, consumer data, and data mining capabilities, all at an almost unmatched scale.  Companies like Google and Facebook come close, or even surpass it, in areas like user base and overall wealth of personal data, but neither of these companies have the purchase transaction history.  Wal-Mart and Target have data warehouses full of purchase history for millions of consumers, but lack the online omnipotence.

Amazon has 300 million active users and 35 million users who have stored their vehicle information in Amazon Garage, myself included. From a scale perspective, 300 million users is dwarfed by Facebook and Google, but is an order of magnitude larger than the largest consumer portals in automotive. 

As this Motley Fool article points out, Amazon Vehicles could ultimately have a negative impact on TrueCar’s fortunes.  I’d argue that the same could hold true for Cars.com, Autotrader, Edmunds, etc., if, and when, Amazon expands beyond research into its bread-and-butter capabilities of product inventory listings.

For anything transactional or purchase-related, Amazon has everyone beat.  They even have product reviews for millions of products that I, for one, usually find very helpful.  The amount and diversity of purchase information, and the wealth of product information within Amazon, puts the company in a very strong position over the long term.

Sure, you might say, what does ordering a book, some toothpaste and a TV have to do with buying a car? Everything. Amazon has the capabilities to determine patterns in large data sets where a human on his or her own would never be able to see them.  A person can only look at so many data points, but a computer can look at millions or billions and look for meaningful patterns in all of the data. 

Remember also that Amazon is the company that was issued a patent for predictive shipping, which is just a complex way of saying Amazon could ship you items before you order them – or even before you know you need them.

The Vehicles experience may be underwhelming at the moment, but the long-term potential is not in the user interface, or even in the vehicle info because let’s be honest, you can find that information on hundreds of other research sites. Instead, Bezos and company’s competency is making the shopping process as seamless, and as painless, as possible so that shoppers never want to go anywhere else…perhaps even for the second-largest purchase of their lives.