Discriminate Media Buys With a Small Budget
Individual dealerships often have limited advertising budgets. Even after pooling mainline and shortline funds, dealers have to pick and choose which media outlets they’re going to invest in. With dense competition, choosing the correct media channels to advertise on, can become overwhelming quickly. As with most other dealer-level advertising woes, data is the solution.
Some advertising firms like Kirkpatrick Creative have seen the writing on the wall and developed proprietary algorithms to test data further than basic data like demographics, geography and the like. Some media outlets have also done this. When they come through your door selling, you have to ask yourself, “Whose perspective does that data support?” Data can and should be trusted. However, trusting a media outlet’s data claims, would be like trusting a used car dealer’s mechanic — you’d probably rather have “your guy” look at it. That is why you need “your data.”
If you’re trying to choose between different outlets, buy identical packages from each of them for a short period of time, such as a month. Then run identical ads for that time. At the end of the period, terminate the contracts that aren’t performing, and move that money to the successful outlets (or use it to run second tests.) The packages and ads have to be identical, so that you can know that it is the different outlets creating the difference in performance.
A Year-Long Ad Plan from Purchasing Key Months
Sometimes it seems incredible — the small amount of money a dealer has to advertise for twelve months. Let’s say you have $1500 to advertise all year, that’s only $125 a month. After buying a couple of radio spots and a few keywords online — that $125 is more than gone. But if you ran tests on each of those ads (even if it was the same ad all year), do you think some ads perform better than others. That is to say, regardless of advertising, do you have stronger months and weaker months as far as sales go?
Of course you do!
So why are you putting a chunk of your already small budget into non-performing months like November, December, January or February? Aside from dealers in states like California or Hawaii, no amount of advertising is going to boost sales during the winter. There is nothing keeping you from stopping all advertising this time of year. Not advertising for four months, effectively increases your annual marketing budget by 30%
$1500/12 months = $125/month
$1500/ 8 months = $188/month
Sure that’s only a $65 dollar increase, but let’s say that you started the year buying from two television channels, two radio stations and purchasing 12 agricultural keywords online. After some testing you find out that one of the television stations, both of the radio stations and four of the keywords weren’t worth the investment.
Year One – Twelve-Month Purchase – $125/Month
| TV 1 | TV 2 | Radio 1 | Radio 2 | Keywords |
| $25/month | $25/month | $25/month | $25/month | $25/month |
| 15% ROI | 35% ROI | 7% ROI | 42% ROI | 25% ROI |
| $45 ROI/year | $105 ROI/year | $21 ROI/year | $126 ROI/year | $75 ROI/year |
Overall ROI – 24.8%
Year Two – Eight Month Purchase – $188/Month
| TV 2 | Radio 2 | Keywords |
| $63/month | $63/month | $63/month |
| 35% ROI | 42% ROI | 25% ROI |
| $176 ROI/year | $212 ROI/year | $126 ROI/year |
Overall ROI – 35%
So you can see, simply by discriminating and advertising only in high performing channels, and choosing to advertise only during key months we increased the return on the same advertising budget by more than 10%!