The JD Power Automotive Marketing Roundtable brought leading industry executives, automakers, auto part manufacturers, dealers, and agencies to Las Vegas last week. We’re thrilled to be the technology solution enabling people-based marketing across the many channels in the customer path to purchase for many of the brands at this major industry event.
On Wednesday, Signal’s SVP of Sales Jonathan Ricard shared the stage with executives from General Motors, Cars.com, and Dealer.com to discuss the fragmented customer journey, the challenges this journey presents, and how the need to manage this fragmentation has led them to implement solutions to harness customer data and insights.
Here’s great insight from Jon Beebe, Director of Digital Advertising & Analytics, General Motors:
There are now more devices in the world than there are people, and it’s expected that there will be 50 billion devices by 2020, including connected vehicles. That’s great for the device makers, but for marketers, it adds complexity to understanding your customers and their journey. We know that these hyper-connected consumers are interacting with brands just about everywhere, and that they’re researching online and across devices before making buying decisions.
Customers are continuously and seamlessly shifting from channel to channel, from digital devices to brick-and-mortar dealerships. That makes interactions difficult for marketers to predict, and it’s hard to identify customers as they move across channels. It isn’t enough to merely collect data on customers: Brands must be able to reliably identify customers across channels in order to communicate with them in the right way at the right time, and deliver a consistent message throughout.
“We need to be seamless across all the websites,” said Charles Miller, Manager, Insights & Analytics at Dealer.com, a Signal client. “Right now we have no real understanding of the same device being used in many different ways and different users. We should be gathering attributes creating segments, watching behaviors, and adjusting. With multivariate testing, the next best action can be determined.”
Brian Archey, Director of Analytics and Dealer Reporting at Cars.com, also a Signal client, concurred. “There’s a wealth of knowledge and insights waiting for you if you can connect [customer identity] at the behavioral level. Even if you can do this with 15% of your customers, that’s huge.”
Here’s more from Brian Archey at Cars.com:
While the goal of connecting customer identity spans all industries, it’s particularly important for marketers in the fragmented automotive ecosystem. Because this marketing ecosystem is made up of many stakeholders (brands, dealership groups, and the individual dealer), data is disparate and it’s harder than ever to connect costumer intent signals as they zoom across channels.
Auto brands know they need to reliably identify and react to in-the-moment live intent signals in order to truly own the conversation with the customer. Marketers need a centralized, neutral platform to connect all of their data and customer engagements into a single persistent identity that can be activated in real time for a personalized and relevant customer experience—and create satisfied customers for life.
Want to learn how Signal helps automakers connect to their customers by leveraging their data and insights to drive better customer experiences and ROI? Check out our ebook, First-Party Data: The Marketer’s Secret Weapon.
Originally published October 28, 2015