In the past two posts I explored the topic of automotive companies merging online and offline data to build better customer profiles and better understand their consumer base. In the first post, I discussed the data landscape in automotive and the overall need to combine online and offline data. In the second post, I focused on the basic tools and technology needed to merge online and offline data, make sense of it through reporting and house it all. The focus of this post will be the additional tools needed to create personalized and precisely targeted experiences to your individual consumers, based on the improved customer profiles created through the merging of online and offline data.
Testing, targeting and personalization
The first, and perhaps most obvious, action auto companies can take with their improved data-sets is increase the targeting accuracy of their digital advertising. They can do this by using the new audience segments they create with the additional customer attributes they were able to include after the data merge. The behaviors these consumers are displaying, both online and offline, give insights about them that marketers can use to more effectively target and message to these consumers. In order to carry out this action, you need a cross-channel engagement platform that allows you to manage all the delivery options of your marketing campaigns. This engagement platform should connect with your DMP and your analytics platform, with bi-directional capabilities, allowing you to pass data and information from one tool to another.
A second action auto companies can take after combining online and offline data is improving their on-site targeting capabilities. In other words, the ability to serve the right content to the right individual while they are on your website. This requires the implementation of some sort of rule-based testing and targeting tool. As with the engagement platform discussed above, this targeting tool will need to fully integrate with your DMP, analytics platform, and even with the engagement platform. Now that you know more about your consumers, you can serve them more relevant content and provide them with a better user experience, leading to improved conversions and ultimately more auto sales.
Final thoughts
Hopefully, you now have a better understanding of the need to merge online and offline data, the tools needed to make it happen, and the resulting benefits. Implementing all of this technology and finding the right talent to maintain it can be a challenging feat for automotive companies. As discussed before, the auto industry has numerous ways to collect consumer data and is collecting and housing huge volumes of it. Choosing the right technology and digital partner can be crucial to successfully merging online and offline data, and to successfully utilizing it to improve your digital marketing and consumer experience. An incorrect implementation can lead companies to make important business decisions based on incorrect data. So, the damage done by a poor implementation goes far beyond the implementation itself. The right partner should have expertise in all tools discussed in this blog series and be able to navigate the implementation in a successful direction.
