At 3 Birds, we’re used to hearing questions like this one from dealerships: “Why isn’t my email marketing working?” It’s a good question, but we have a better one (technically two): “How do you know if it’s working—and how can you make it work better?”

We’re not being coy. This question has an answer, and it lies with “marketing effectiveness.” Robert Shaw popularized the term in the 1990s, but the concepts of marketing effectiveness go back much further. In short, it’s all about measuring the results of your marketing, and using those results to deliver more effective messaging and strategy.

Building a lean, mean marketing machine

The big thinkers behind marketing effectiveness analyze marketing’s impact across different dimensions, including corporate (the factors within your company) and exogenous (those outside it). By comparing relevant measurements in regards to these dimensions, businesses can adjust the factors driving marketing effectiveness for more meaningful returns on their advertising dollars.

Many large corporations already embrace the tenets of marketing effectiveness, and its principles are taught at leading institutions. Sound too highbrow for your local dealership? That’s the beauty of marketing effectiveness—it’s a way of thinking that can scale across companies of almost any size to produce amazing results. So why aren’t more dealerships doing it?

The obstacles preventing marketing effectiveness for dealers

Unfortunately, dealerships in the past have lacked the tools and transparency to gauge their overall marketing effectiveness. With some estimates putting the percentage of wasted advertising budgets at 40 percent,¹ that’s tens of thousands of dollars blowing away on the wind each month.

There are a number of common obstacles that have prevented dealerships from embracing marketing effectiveness:

• Lack of integration between systems: Many dealers have run into difficulty integrating outdated CRM systems with a wide variety of products from digital marketing vendors—and with most of these vendors offering one-size-fits-all solutions, customization is rarely simple.
• Lack of time and budget to execute changes: A number of our team members have dealership backgrounds, and we know that finding a free moment is an often mythical endeavor.  No wonder it’s so difficult to implement changes in marketing strategy, especially with the prohibitive costs of hiring a multitude of vendors to manage your digital presence.
• Focus on ROI: When you’re responsible for the bottom line each month, ROI is the golden standard of marketing metrics. But dealers are finding it increasingly difficult to measure the return of new digital strategies like social media (heck, people have written whole books about it). With 61 percent of consumers increasingly having no interaction with the dealership before their first visit, it’s time to find new ways of measuring what’s working and what’s not—and that takes more time that dealers don’t have.

3 Birds ME: a better way

Luckily, you don’t have to suffer in silence any longer. At 3 Birds, we’ve always been focused on giving dealers the tools they need to make smarter decisions about their marketing spend. And we’ve already come a long way—our powerful analytics and reporting provides valuable behavioral data 24/7, and our dedicated account strategists work with our clients on a one-on-one basis to identify the goals and marketing choices that make sense for them. But it’s about to get even better.

3 Birds ME (Marketing Effectiveness), our all-new solution debuting at Digital Dealer 19, ties our most popular products together in a new integrated, content-focused framework that can help your dealership go beyond ROI. Instead, ME is focused on increasing the value of your customer database on a continuous basis—and with our automated, customizable dashboards, it’s easy to see exactly how your marketing effectiveness is increasing.

Digital Dealer 19 will be here before you know it. Luckily, you can make the choice to reserve your appointment today and get ready for a more effective—and more exciting—marketing experience.

1 Jack Neff, “Marketers Are Getting Worse at Directing Their Budgets Wisely,” Advertising Age, 2012

2 Mike Jeffs, “Customer Experience Study Identifies Expectation Gap Between Dealers and Consumers,” Driving Sales, 2015