Lead management in the automotive trade

Lead management is important for all companies, including of course every car dealership. Efficient online marketing leads to leads that the sales department can exploit. Controlling is now important: it ensures that the company's own marketing activities become quantifiable. What financial expenditure was made for a lead? What does the RoI therefore look like?

What are the goals of lead management?

It is all about generating qualified leads and controlling the related results. The car dealership can use the analysis to adapt its online marketing. After all, a wide variety of online channels play a role:

• own homepage
• landing pages
• E-mail marketing
• Online PR
• Search engine marketing (SEO and SEA)
• social media marketing
• affiliate marketing

Interested parties can come from any of these channels, but these channels cause a different effort in each case. It is therefore very interesting to know how many leads a channel generates based on which activities, what it has cost and what type of prospects it is. The last aspect is sometimes not given enough attention in lead management. There may be channels and activities that motivate a prospect to obtain more information about a car model, simply because a Facebook post, for example, appealed to him or her (was humorously presented or linked to a competition) - but this prospect may hardly ever become a buyer because he or she lacks the financial means for this car brand. This effect really does exist. Anyone who makes expensive sports cars appealing to a young, sporty, male target group is luring them to his site. But these sports enthusiasts do not have the money for the sports car that excites them. That's why people are always talking about so-called qualified leads, namely those with whom you can really do something. For this reason, lead management also pursues the goal of supplying the car dealership with usable leads that convert into buyers. Of course, there should also be many interested parties. In case of doubt, however, the class beats the masses: many useless prospects like the sports fans described above cost resources because they are being dealt with. They just do not buy. Few usable interested parties, however, generate real turnover and profit with less effort.

What does lead management practically do for online marketing?

• attract the right prospects
• Motivate interested parties to take part in the campaign (they contact the car dealership)
• average online behaviour of the interested parties
• Controlling: What happens through which marketing channels?
• Definition of the relevant contents in marketing communication
• Qualify contacts: What is the customer's condition, in what price range does he buy, what brand affinity does he have, how long does he drive a car, is he perhaps a cash payer, how is his solvency?
• Create added value for interested parties
• Optimize response rates

Controlling in online marketing

In online marketing, controlling is almost always done by tracking. It is easy to track digitally on which channel the customer first contacted us. All that is required are tracking tools, while powerful CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software evaluates the data. There are, of course, limits to the assignment, as we have already noted in another article: The customer may have become aware of the vehicle and the dealership through other channels before. It is possible that he or she will be asked to clarify the assignment. But even if not: An optimal (no maximum) control is better than no control at all.