How to Easily and Strategically Boost Your Dealership’s Brand Awareness

The Importance of Branding for Auto Dealerships

Your brand is everything. It’s what drives customers to choose your dealership over competitors and establishes long-term customer loyalty. It’s why people remember you, even if they’ve never interacted with you or purchased a vehicle at your store. Your brand is meant to encapsulate everything about your company including the customer experiences, advertising, and services you provide. 

Take Nike, for example. They don’t own the sporting goods market and face competition from several major brands. Yet, when thinking of sporting goods, Nike will be the first brand that comes to mind. What is it that makes their brand so impactful and meaningful? 

Much of Nike’s advertising isn’t solely focused on their products and offerings. Instead, they promote their brand ethos—”Just Do It.” This approach ensures that shoppers are more likely to remember the overall message and unique identity of the brand rather than just a specific product that may come and go as a trend.

Building brand awareness for your dealership is far more than driving sales in the moment. It’s about making sure that your dealership stands out as a relevant and solid business in the market to ensure you remain a top-of-mind option for future customers. Consistent brand awareness campaigns build long-term trust with your customers, leading to increased customer engagement and market recognition over time.

Leveraging Data for Powerful Dealership Branding

You already know your dealership is the best in your area; branding is about ensuring that everyone else believes this too. While billboards and print advertising are always relevant, it’s essential to incorporate digital marketing into your branding strategy to achieve widespread brand awareness.

One of the advantages of focusing on digital marketing strategies over traditional print options is the ability to create dynamic campaigns that can be updated almost instantaneously, allowing you to adapt to the evolving needs of your dealership or the market.

With a Customer Data Platform (CDP) in place, your dealership can access real-time data insights on your digital marketing and sales activities that directly relate to your branding efforts. The CDP utilizes artificial intelligence to process shopper data from your DMS and CRM, as well as from ad platforms like Google or Facebook, or really any other sources where you collect customer data. This comprehensive data can inform you about which content or placements resonate most with your audience and are performing best when it comes to promoting your brand.

While tracking sales is one of the more straightforward methods to measure success, analyzing campaign data—such as impressions, engagement, and clicks—will help you identify which dealership branding campaigns are performing best and which may need updating or pausing. The right digital advertising platform can automatically adjust ad budgets according to your campaign goals, ensuring that your branding budget is maximized across all relevant channels.

Running Targeted Brand Awareness Campaigns Across Digital Marketing Platforms

By harnessing the power of AI, you can transform your first-party data in your CDP into smart digital advertising campaigns that can help you reach both new and existing shoppers on high traffic platforms like Facebook and Google.

Digital advertising provides several key advantages for brand awareness campaigns, including:

• Promoting your dealership brand within a specific area, 
• Delivering targeted ads to anyone who has searched for a specific topic or product, 
• Retargeting individuals who have previously engaged with your ad or visited your website but didn’t submit a lead.

With measurable results, you can track ad views, clicks, website visits, and purchases, allowing you to refine your marketing strategy and budget accordingly.

Additionally, the flexibility of digital campaigns allows for quick updates or pauses in response to market trends and business needs. For instance, your dealership might run a brand awareness campaign highlighting your internships for local school students. However, if a crisis, such as a hurricane or flooding, affects your community, you can promptly pause your campaign and redirect that budget to inform people of your crisis-related activities.

Meta Campaigns

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, provides business users an Awareness ad objective designed for businesses seeking to promote memorable ads that focus on brand perception rather than sales. This strategy also includes retargeting options, allowing you to specifically target users who have previously engaged with your ads and may still be considering a purchase. 

Dealerships can leverage their unified first-party data to segment audiences effectively for these Brand Awareness campaigns. By utilizing advanced segmentation capabilities offered by a CDP, you can create tailored audience lists based on a variety of hyper-specific factors such as vehicle detail pages (VDPs) visited, interests in specific body classes, and previous ad engagements. 

Customer Data Platforms contain extensive customer data. By leveraging AI, the CDP creates dynamic audiences that continuously optimize based on your specified goals, adding or removing individuals as they meet or no longer fit the criteria. These segmented audience lists are then utilized to deliver hyper-targeted ads focused on brand awareness rather than direct sales pitches. This approach cultivates greater customer trust and engagement over time, ultimately enhancing your marketing recognition and fostering customer loyalty.

Google Ads Campaigns

Google Ads provides campaign options specifically designed for brand awareness, aiming to elevate your dealership’s visibility rather than push for sales. These campaigns focus on driving traffic to your website, encouraging potential customers to learn more about your brand and products without presenting specific offers.

Like with Meta, a CDP that integrates with Google Ads will enable ad placement at the top of search results and across millions of websites and apps, so you can precisely target the individuals you want to engage with your ads using your custom-built audiences.

Since your local community is likely already familiar with your dealership, consider launching awareness campaigns tailored to your region. This ensures that potential shoppers think of you before turning to competitors. You can also target shoppers based on their stage in the buying journey. Even if they have already researched the vehicle they’re interested in and have all the necessary information, receiving non-sales-related ads can help build the trust they need to finalize their purchase decision.

How Fullpath’s CDP Powers Dealership Branding

To master brand awareness, your dealership must first understand the audience engaging with your brand. While simply getting your name out there is a basic strategy, the most effective campaigns focus on targeting or retargeting individuals identified by your data as potential customers.

One challenge is the diversity of data sources, as not every platform provides a consistent view of your shopper audiences. Fullpath’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) plays a crucial role in consolidating fragmented dealership data from various sources, including website interactions, CRM systems, social media platforms, and more, into a unified and actionable platform. With Fullpath’s identity resolution technology, duplicate shopper entities are merged to create comprehensive 360-degree shopper profiles for each individual who interacts with your dealership. 

The CDP’s data integration capabilities allow dealerships to gather and analyze shopper behaviors and preferences across multiple touchpoints. This analysis provides a deeper understanding of how customers interact with the dealership, what features they value, and which marketing messages resonate with them. By leveraging these insights, you can craft messaging that not only aligns with your brand identity but also speaks directly to your audience’s interests and needs.

Transform Your Dealership’s Branding Campaigns

Effective dealership branding is undoubtedly crucial for driving customer loyalty and enhancing market recognition. Wherever you encounter potential shoppers, making the right impression of your brand can help convert them into actual customers. By unifying and cleaning your data with a CDP, you get a clear picture of every shopper at your dealership and can then activate the data insights provided to optimize your marketing for brand awareness, personalize your engagements with each shopper, and create year-round targeted brand awareness advertising campaigns that truly resonates with your audience.

Transform your first-party data into lasting brand loyalty. Book a demo today to discover how Fullpath’s Customer Data Platform can revolutionize your dealership’s branding campaigns, ensuring your brand remains top-of-mind for potential customers so they choose you over your competitors the next time they’re ready to make a purchase.