Today’s technology gives dealerships an abundance of data at their fingertips. Yet most dealerships lag in
their ability to leverage that data to market to and win shoppers.
You’ve likely heard a few astonishing data stats recently —
– 90 percent of the world’s data has been generated in the past two years¹.
– 1.7MB of data will be created every second for every person on earth by next year².

While other industries are actively harnessing this data, automotive dealers have continued to rely on the traditional data strategies. Those strategies may have moved the needle in the past but have a lesser effect on shoppers today. To garner a competitive advantage today dealers must recognize how the data landscape has changed.

Data that creates a holistic profile of a shopper is today’s required currency for marketers. In automotive, a holistic view MUST include online shopping behavior. The typical car buyer starts online with more than 60% of customers deciding on brand, model and price before visiting a dealership.  The information dealerships previously gathered in person to influence a shopper towards a sale has increasingly moved online. Understanding a potential customer’s shopping activity, intent to purchase, preferences and more – requires online data that is shared before they ever reach the dealership. Data profiles that do not incorporate online behavior fail to offer the precision and effectiveness dealers need to deliver in relevant messages to actual in-market shoppers.

The automotive industry isn’t ignoring online data altogether, however dealers are too often settling for anonymous data to fuel their marketing. Anonymous online shopper data is a step in the right direction for the industry, but it is still far from the gold standard of what dealers truly need to be successful.

North American consumers have on average 13 internet connected devices. And while anonymous marketing can track indicative shopping behavior by device – it has no way of connecting that behavior across devices to a person.  Imagine the opportunities dealers are missing by not connecting these devices. And with less than 60 percent of web behavior being actual humans , targeting anonymous data points has an equal chance of targeting a bot as it does an actual human. Dealers must be looking for opportunities to connect the trifecta — shopping behavior to devices, devices to actual people and people to all their devices. This is identity resolution. To incorporate anything less, yields a marketing approach that is both inefficient and ineffective.

Most online data tools in automotive are hyper-focused on connecting anonymous data to shoppers within a dealer’s database. Yes, this moves dealers towards connecting online and offline data, however these tools only identify shoppers after they have visited their website and do not track their online activity before that point of the shopper journey. Restricting identity resolution to a dealer’s database misses most shoppers in a market, generating a built-in limitation to gaining competitive advantage.

Data cannot be an accessory in a dealer’s marketing strategy in today’s digital age – data must be the foundation. A data foundation that ignores online shopping data, settles for anonymous data or limits a dealer’s ability to activate marketing messages to the entire market – or any combination of the three – provides a rocky foundation at best. Today’s tech empowers dealers to harness online data available for today’s marketers to regain competitive advantage – especially as other industries set the pace and expectations with personalized marketing messages with today’s shoppers. And with the shopping experience moving increasingly online, dealers cannot afford to use data that doesn’t connect them with active shoppers.

1 IBM Marketing Cloud, “10 Key Marketing Trends For 2017”
2 Domo Data Never Sleeps Study, 6th edition, 2018
3 Bain Consumer Research Study 2017
4 https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/302663/north-american-consumers-to-have-13-connected-devi.html
5 http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html