• Stop being a LURKER - join our dealer community and get involved. Sign up and start a conversation.

Conquest Marketing

MaryK

Green Pea
Jul 11, 2015
3
0
First Name
Mary
It seems like every dealer is looking for ways to get NEW customers into their showroom...

Other than typical newspaper ads, radio does anyone have some ideas to get new customers?
Web campaigns? Direct Mail? Phone Campaigns... Anything?! How can we get new blood through our doors?
 
I can't give you any hard numbers, but we've tried a few different things.
Please note that any of these could be executed on better or worse than we did it, but this was my experience.
  1. Regional billboards - very targeted to only customers heading towards the dealership - Low ROI
  2. Bus stop ads for sub-prime financing - Low ROI
  3. Weekly Facebook contests to acquire online traction - Medium ROI (we get many more followers, etc and those that win the service prizes DO redeem them, but I can't say I've found 100s of customers)
  4. Advertising all over a Newspaper website for a weekend - Negative ROI (Their numbers were about 500% higher than what we actually saw on the website, had an average weekend in sales both times we tried it)
  5. Postal Code mail drops - Positive ROI (as much as I hate it, these have worked for sales and service)
  6. Mailing neighbours of new car buyers, based on postal/zip code - Negative ROI (I pulled all the data apart and tried to find correlating postal codes 90 days after we tried this and didn't have any luck)
I know there's a bunch more, but that's all I can think of.
I'm looking at a few new ones now like parts departments sponsoring local car forums (ie: Toronto Subaru Club), Service departments sponsoring local one-off racing events, running community campaigns with a free 1 year lease through a radio station, etc.
 
Craig,

Do you do anything with email?
I do all sorts of things with email. Contests, advertisements, event invitations, finance upgrade campaigns, large and small BDC campaigns.. not many things I haven't done with emails.

As Joe mentioned, do you have any context for conquest customers?

Not sure what this means to be honest. Are you asking if I've ever done a conquest campaign?
 
I do all sorts of things with email. Contests, advertisements, event invitations, finance upgrade campaigns, large and small BDC campaigns.. not many things I haven't done with emails.



Not sure what this means to be honest. Are you asking if I've ever done a conquest campaign?

Craig,
My apologies I meant to direct that question towards Maryk.