How can you improve online marketing? Make it personal

By Ezequiel Arredondo

Are you struggling to connect with your online audience? Does it seem as though even the most carefully crafted ads fall short of achieving your marketing goals? If your ad campaign ROI isn’t where you need it to be, take a long, hard look at who is seeing your ads and whether your ad content fulfills the needs of your audience.

Personalized Marketing

Companies that shifted their marketing strategies to be customer-first in 2020 have seen a stronger return to sales and higher customer retention over the last year. Through personalized marketing, boat dealers can avoid generic “sales-y” messaging and instead grant their buyers a customized shopping experience. Investing in the individual shopper’s experience helps dealerships create long-term value and outperform the competition in both customer service and sales.

A highly effective method to personalize your marketing is to align your approach with your prospects’ online behaviors. This means engaging in behavior-based marketing.

What is behavior-based marketing?

Just as it sounds, this style of marketing gathers intel on prospects’ online shopping habits and tailors ad content to their specific interests. Instead of casting out one-size-fits-all marketing content for search engines or social media and hoping you receive a few bites, let your shoppers’ actions dictate how you connect with them.

Behavior-based marketing benefits your marketing strategy in the following ways:

• Higher lead quality: While generic marketing targets anyone and everyone, resulting in a low conversion rate, behavior-based marketing conserves your dollars by engaging only the leads who are searching for boat models and services that you offer and who have demonstrated a strong intent to buy.
• Precise location targeting: With shoppers sticking closer to home these days, local search should be your dealership’s very close friend. Behavior-based marketing funnels leads based on location to help local consumers discover and visit your store.
• Flexible campaigns: Consumer habits change over time, and recently they have changed significantly. With behavior-based marketing tactics, you can pivot your marketing to follow shoppers’ shifting priorities and expectations and still reach them at key decision-making moments.

Highly focused digital marketing tactics such as Targeted Digital Advertising make it easy to base your marketing strategy around customer behaviors.

Targeted Digital Advertising (TDA)

TDA is the gold medal champion of behavior-based marketing. As its name indicates, it is designed to identify and advertise to specific audiences—typically, those who are highly motivated to buy.

According to Accenture, 91% of consumers who receive personalized and relevant offers are more likely to make a purchase. TDA gives you the freedom to create customized ad campaigns based on shopper factors such as:

• Location
• Keyword searches
• Age
• Demographic
• Prior website visits
• Online interactions

By personalizing your marketing to your prospects’ online behavior, you can provide each shopper with a pleasantly customized experience and gain their respect for your brand. Digital marketing strategies such as TDA keep your dealership in tune with shopper priorities, ensuring your marketing campaigns remain relevant and successful.

Ezequiel Arredondo is the vice president of operations for Dealer Spike.