Leveraging Dealership Data to Customize Your Customer Journeys with Colin Carrasquillo

Colin Carrasquillo is the Digital Marketing Manager of the Nielsen Automotive Group. With over a decade of industry experience, Colin has carved a niche in implementing data-centric strategies to elevate automotive marketing. 

Colin has led the digital efforts for 13 dealerships under Nielsen, introducing innovative tier-two advertising models. Colin is recognized for his shrewd inquiries and relentless pursuit of actionable results, converting CRM data into dynamic campaigns that drive growth.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• How Colin secures actionable results from CDP platforms
• How early-stage funnel marketing captures customers’ interests based on vehicle types
• Understand the importance of maintaining a dialogue with vendor partners 
• How partners and vendors can work together harmoniously

In this episode…

Ever wonder how car dealerships are staying ahead in 2024? Colin Carrasquillo reveals Nielsen Automotive’s game-changing strategy, including group advertising and using your own data to make your car-buying journey smoother. He delivers keen insights into the holistic approach that plans to take, which fundamentally shifts from individual dealership marketing to robust group-level promotion. 

In this episode of Inside Auto Podcast, Ilana Shabtay is joined by Colin Carrasquillo, Digital Marketing Manager of the Nielsen Automotive Group. Colin artfully outlines their forward-thinking strategy for 2024, with an emphasis on cutting-edge group advertising and the sophisticated cross-pollination of CRM data to tailor the customer’s journey.

Resources mentioned in this episode

• Fullpath
• Ilana Shabtay on LinkedIn 
• Colin Carrasquillo on LinkedIn
• Nielsen Automotive Group

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Fullpath (formerly AutoLeadStar).

Fullpath is the automotive industry’s leading customer data and experience platform (CDXP).

Fullpath enables dealers to turn their first-party data into lifelong customers by unifying siloed data sources and leveraging that data to create exceptional, hyper-personalized customer experiences.

To learn more, visit www.fullpath.com

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:02  

Welcome to Inside Auto Podcast where we feature everyone and anyone you’d want to talk to you in and out of the automotive industry.

Ilana Shabtay  0:13  

NADA, I’m here with Colin.

Colin Carrasquillo  0:14  

How’s it going, everyone? So listen, I don’t work for you guys. But this is the best plug that you’ll probably ever get. If you want to talk about actionable CDP’s, right? 

This is the one, okay, you have a lot of vendor partners out there who will say they have these types of platforms. And what they do have though, is all of the data that already exists in your CRM, they just put it in a nice little presentation for you. 

But the question I always ask those vendor partners, including you guys, even prior to signing on to utilize your services, is how are we making it actionable? And you guys actually were the ones that made it actionable and could deliver on that. So here we are.

Ilana Shabtay  0:54  

Thank you for that.I love it. Okay, what’s just before we sign off, talk a little bit about what your goals are for 2024. And specifically at this conference, what are you looking at?

Colin Carrasquillo  0:57  

Yeah, so I love walking around seeing some old friends. We saw each other earlier today, some trusted vendor partners, ultimately learning about new technology that’s out there. I was once told by a former boss that there’s always a brighter red or faster Ferrari. 

So I will always strive to continue learning and be that brighter, better, faster Ferrari. And that’s these people, these are the Ferraris that you can learn from. So ultimately, that’s what I look forward to most. And like I said, once again, seeing some really good old friends. 

Ilana Shabtay 1:30

Amazing. Is there anything specific that you’re focused on for 2024? 

Colin Carrasquillo 1:33

Yes, great. So let’s do the follow up there. So ultimately, 2024 is becoming the year of Nielsen, the Automotive Group. Right. And so what I mean by that is a group approach to our advertising. Interesting, right, so we have 13 dealerships now that continue to expand and grow. 

But what we saw then from the Nielsen perspective, is the opportunity to make Nielsen, the tier two advertiser, so we’re originally a regional marketing group that may have existed for an OEM and there’s a handful that are still out there, but a lot have actually fallen by the wayside. So ultimately, instead of saying, Hey, we have you know, for us the Lantis dealerships, so Jeep, Chrysler, Dodge, Ram. 

We can say, let’s advertise the Nielsen Automotive Group, letting people know that we have those dealerships, as well as import brands, such as Hyundai, Kia, Nissan, Mitsubishi, or other domestic brands like Ford, and Chevy. And then the fascinating thing, which I think you guys will really like, is actually cross pollination of the data within the CRM. 

So leveraging the first part data, right, so imagine an hourglass, sorry, top of the funnel, if you will, this is your purchase funnel. So at top of the funnel, you have automotive group messaging, let’s say we go after people 120 to 180 days out in the purchase lifecycle, I take your entire take all the database, but get this, those people as their shopping may not know what type of brand they want, but they know a type of vehicle. 

So they’ll say, Hey, I’m in the market for an SUV. I might want a pick-up truck, I might want a sedan. Okay, so that’s 120 to 180. That’s where we serve them Nielsen Automotive Group marketing messaging, on direct connect to television, OTT and YouTube, right. So you’re getting in front of them a little earlier on casting a wider net. But as they get further and further down the funnel, remember, we’re on the top portion. 

Now, you have the middle funnel that is brand specific. So now let’s say I was in the market, I’ve identified I want an SUV, and I’ve started interacting with domestic manufacturers. So now from our perspective, with that data, and all of the signals and things that we could leverage from a platform like yours, we can now market that specific OEM to that consumer. But like I said, we have a GM store, we have a Ford store, we have all these different types of stores. 

So I can mark those types of vehicles and see what the person bites on and then it takes over your search, displaying retargeting all those things that’s the lowest funnel, but guess what happens? People convert, we have statistics and data that actually show the most engaged customer aside from a new active customer. 

Of course, when you’re sending out drip marketing or other types of marketing an inactive lowest bad customer. So now imagine the bottom half, right, so this is where I’d mentioned an hourglass earlier. I started with the top half of the funnel. Now the bottom is remarketing these people with the other OEM brands that we have. 

So let’s say I couldn’t get the deal done on Jeep, right? Maybe payments were an issue, maybe they didn’t have the vehicle I was looking for. But now I’m gonna get remarketed with Chevy product, I’m gonna get remarketing with Ford product and try to keep them in the Nielsen umbrella. So I advise dealers to look into some sort of process like that and arising tides raise all ships, if you will.

Ilana Shabtay  4:42  

Yeah, that’s really interesting. That sounds like an entire project for three months. 

Colin Carrasquillo  4:47  

That’s 2024 and that’s it. 

Ilana Shabtay 4:48

Wow. I wonder how your ongoing vendor partners are gonna respond to that book?

Colin Carrasquillo 4:53

So we have a you know, lucky enough including you guys, some really great relationships and to us they truly are partners. And it’s one of those things where success is actually on both ends in terms of we need to guide our vendor partners and let them know what we’re expecting. 

Ilana Shabtay 5:11

Yep. 

Colin Carrasquillo 5:12

Right and they need to do the same. So that dialogue is exceptionally important. But if everyone’s on the same page, because ultimately they’re going to try to assist the dealer, we can all kind of work harmoniously together.

Ilana Shabtay  5:22  

Amen to that.

Colin Carrasquillo  5:23  

Amen to that.

Ilana Shabtay  5:24  

Awesome. Thanks for listening to Inside Auto Podcast.

Outro  5:30  

Thanks for listening to Inside Auto Podcast. Check out our other episodes with top entrepreneurs and industry leaders.