Targeting Qualified Auto Buyers at Scale
The automotive dealership has for years been the prototypical brick-and-mortar store. Dealerships and the auto manufacturers rely heavily on television, direct mail, and local print publications to create interest and drive shoppers to stores for test-drives.
With U.S. consumers purchasing new vehicles at the strongest pace in several years and with nearly 85% of consumers online, the auto industry is shifting more marketing dollars to the digital outlets preferred by the next generation of car buyers. More recently, we have seen traditional television audiences move to on-demand and to digital programmatic content.
Knowing who you are reaching online is key. For advertisers to reach all potential buyers in their dealership trade areas, they need to know three things: prospects are in the market to purchase a car, they meet the demographic profile of a buyer, and they have the financial resources to buy one.
Most online advertising today is done through cookies. Cookie categories (such as “prospective auto buyer”) are determined through audience behavior — such as site visits or web searches. However, this doesn’t explain whether the audience can actually afford a car, or if they’re even in the market to buy one. A “prospective auto buyer” may in fact be a 12 year old kid who really likes cars. The cookie is also going to have limited reach — active cookies cover 30% or less of most audiences in a trade area.
Semcasting Smart Zones offers a big data solution to this problem.
The Smart Zones audience-targeting platform gives auto manufacturers, retailers, and aftermarket firms the ability to identify and reach the right customers at scale. Doing away with cookie-based behavioral targeting, our database of 250 million consumers in the U.S. and Canada attaches robust data to each prospect. In addition to current auto make, model and year, the data includes affluence measures (such as ITA credit scores), discretionary income, and home ownership.
Advertisers can also convert offline customer lists into online audiences. Online auto sites can be mapped back to prospective trade areas, and any trade area can be defined with 100 percent reach to qualified consumers within any specified radius of a dealership. Targets can be reached across all Internet-enabled devices – including desktops, smartphones, tablets, and some programmatic TV.
The U.S. automotive industry spent nearly $36 billion on advertising in 2014. Find out how to spend it smarter.
Semcasting : Jul 22, 2015 5:58:14 PM