Digital marketing is always changing, and it can be challenging to know which trends might impact your business and which ones are passing fads. In conversations with marketing specialists, industry experts, and dealers, we’ve identified top trends expected to make an impact to automotive retail in 2022.
Keep an eye out for this new technology as you start planning your digital marketing in 2022, and check out many of them for yourself at NADA Show 2022 in Las Vegas in March.
Personalization
This isn’t exactly a new trend, but personalization continues to be the name of the game in digital marketing for car dealers. Today’s successful dealers are connecting with in-market shoppers by giving them a highly personalized experience throughout their buying and ownership journeys.
With the right data and the right technology, dealerships can deliver individualized digital marketing campaigns and website experiences, targeted at specific subsets of customers. By using first-party consumer intelligence, dealerships can speak directly to each shopper—appealing to their interests, incentivizing them to buy, and keeping them progressing down the path to purchase.
This focused auto advertising strategy is far more personal for consumers and far more effective for dealerships than one-size-fits-all mass advertising efforts. In fact, shoppers who saw personalized website content had a 216% higher form submission rate and a 175% increase in VDP views, and were four times more likely to pencil a deal.*
Digital-First Shopping Experiences
Providing flexible shopping experiences for consumers has been a priority in auto retail for the last few years, and that trend will continue into 2022. Expect to see even more digital-first shopping experiences that give shoppers the flexibility and convenience of choosing which parts of the car-buying process they prefer to complete online.
The technology helps dealerships drive automobile leads and give consumers more of what they want—a digital, convenient, streamlined, transparent car-buying experience. For example, Accelerate My Deal, Dealer.com’s guided online shopping experience, helps shoppers structure deals with real monthly payments, explore and select F&I products, schedule a test drive, complete online credit applications, and reserve a vehicle—all online.
Advanced Data Connectivity
Most dealers today know the power of data, but expect to see new ways to harness data—especially first-party data—across departments. Advanced data and workflow integrations across technology platforms will help dealerships bring in customers, increase profits, and promote dealership growth.
Modern technologies that combine workflows across sales, service, marketing, and operations bring the entire dealership in harmony. Working together, these technologies boost efficiency, elevate the consumer experience, and give dealers more opportunity to increase profits.
Cox Automotive brands Dealer.com, VinSolutions, Xtime, and Dealertrack DMS, for example, offer solutions that bring marketing, sales, service, and operations in sync. By leveraging first-party transactional data from trusted consumer sites Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book, Cox Automotive technologies work together to give dealers a complete view of each customer. This unmatched proprietary data and connected suite facilitates workflows across departments and enables dealers to deliver the right message, to the right consumer, at the right time.