Today, automotive marketplaces face significant challenges in an era of increased competition and evolving advertising trends as we described in a previous article.
This requires a renewed value proposition and better advertising solutions, helping them maintain their position as the number one automotive marketplace for dealers.
Especially advertising solutions offer a way for these marketplaces to stand out and offer unique value propositions to their dealers and differentiate from the competition. This will not only benefit the marketplaces themselves but also help dealers reach new audiences and generate quality leads, ultimately leading to long-term success for everyone involved.
What Advertising Solutions Should Marketplaces Offer Their Dealers?
Looking at how marketplaces can offer better advertising solutions, it is first important to understand the key job that marketplaces fulfil for dealers and then how to improve that.
Boosting Lead Generation for Listings
When a car dealer lists their inventory on a marketplace, their main goal is to leverage the existing audience of the marketplace to increase lead generation for the cars they've listed. Ultimately, the primary objective is to make a sale, and a lead is the closest a dealer can get to achieving that goal.
Any type of marketplace offering should support this goal, strengthening the platform’s value proposition to the dealer. Other offers, such as finance possibilities and delivery services, create extra revenue streams for marketplaces but do not directly serve the primary goal of dealers.
Most marketplaces are already offering advertising solutions to get dealers quicker to their goals. The issue that existing marketplace advertising face, is, however, a substantial difference between the quantity and quality of leads generated across listings. Let us look at this.
Quantity of leads
Many marketplaces are offering on-platform marketing solutions like ‘star listing’ or ‘page 1 listing’. However, these are not always sufficient to boost lead generation, which is what the dealer is wishing for.
The right buyer for a listing may not yet be scrolling through the marketplace and therefore can not be caught by on-platform marketing. That is the point in time when it requires demand-creating advertising, to attract an outside audience to the marketplace. This type of demand-creating advertising includes both display campaigns and social media campaigns and captures the attention of consumers who are in the market for a new car.
Top-funnel advertising can be positioned as a product, that finds the right customers for every listing no matter if on- or off-platform, driving external traffic and leads generated per listing. The importance is thereby to have campaigns per listing. Many marketplaces already run large branding campaigns, however, they do not change the misbalance of listing traffic on the marketplace.
In contrast, listing-based campaigns on Display, Social Media, Google, and retargeting campaigns substantially drive traffic to single listings and improve the number of leads generated. They, thereby, run independent of typical trends of traffic movement on marketplaces, as they independently optimize to find relevant traffic. But does only more traffic and leads solve the problem?
Quality of Leads
Dealers want a lot of leads. This is an easy statement to make. However, a survey by DealerRefresh also found that nearly 60% of dealers believe that lead quality is more important than lead quantity.
The time of dealers and sales agents is limited and every outreach to a potential lead takes time and resources. This effort creates a high risk of wasting resources on irrelevant leads with no or low purchase intentions.
Any marketplace advertising solution must balance the quantity and quality of lead generation. Only if doing so, will the dealer be satisfied with the solution and continue paying for it.
This balance can be achieved through a campaign structure optimized toward lead quality, a high-intent lead form, a lead qualifier, or a lead filter. By identifying the leads most likely to convert into sales, such a solution will help dealers to prioritize their follow-up efforts and focus their resources on where they will have the most impact.
A renewed advertising solution
Focusing on a better advertising product that drives quantity and quality of leads, marketplaces are improving the prime objective of the dealer, quicker and more sales.
This creates a substantial advantage in the challenging competitive environment and provides a value proposition that increases the stickiness of the marketplace product.
How Nexta supports marketplaces in their advertising solution
Utilizing knowledge and experience gathered through years of partnerships with automotive marketplaces, Nexta has developed an automated, scalable solution to meet the advertising needs of marketplaces.
Nexta’s platform offers dealers the opportunity to boost the traffic and lead generation of a specific listing. Through Nexta’s automated campaign and creative management and the integration into all relevant advertising platforms, the created campaign is distributed across channels like Facebook, Google Search, Display, and more.
The automated solution is structured to cover the whole advertising funnel. Starting from top-funnel customer prospecting over mid-funnel retargeting of customers who have interacted with the ad or listing, to bottom-funnel pushing the user to convert to a lead.
Additionally, Nexta offers tools to help dealers evaluate the lead quality and prioritize their follow-up efforts, ensuring they make the most of their advertising spend.
For one of our EU automotive marketplace partners, this drove an increase in leads per listing by 96% percent and overall traffic by 1200% percent. Leading to a reduction in client churn.
Conclusion
With Nexta's expertise and automated solutions, automotive marketplaces can set themselves apart from their competitors and attract more dealers to their platform.
By offering advertising solutions that help dealers boost their listing traffic and lead generation while improving lead quality, they substantially enhance their value proposition.
Providing a range of advertising options, from top-funnel advertising to retargeting and lead-generation tools, automotive marketplaces can help their dealers stand out in a crowded marketplace and win more leads.