How Dealerships Can Reach an In-Market Shopper Audience

The Simple Way to Reach In-Market Shoppers

Reaching a specific audience is harder than ever before. Plain and simple. 

Consumers are becoming increasingly aware of their privacy rights and major platforms continue to lock down and limit tracking mechanisms across apps and websites. 

Still, today’s digital media landscape has endless ways to share your message. Just think, you can run commercials on Connected TV, share alluring brand imagery on social media or keep top of mind with a high frequency of display advertising…   

... but none of that matters if you don’t reach the right consumers for your vehicle inventory. 

The Budget-Breaking Difference Between Regular & In-Market Shopper Audiences 

There’s a big difference between someone who is interested in buying a vehicle and someone who just looks like they are. Knowing where to draw that line is challenging but essential. 

You can spend your money to reach users dubbed as “in the market” for a Subaru Impreza simply because they liked a recent Red Bull Rallycross video or you can put your ad spend toward users who have declared recent intent to actually buy an Impreza. The choice should be simple because it could make or break your sales month. 

Most consumers only come into the market for a new vehicle every few years. And their shopping window is brief. The real “in-market shoppers” are ready to buy their new vehicle right now. 

In the Subaru Impreza example, focusing your marketing on the true In-Market Shopper audience could help you turn your inventory and move valuable units. The inverse is wasting spend on Rallycross enthusiasts and a slower turn rate than your competition. Losing your hard-fought market share will show the repercussions on an even greater scale.   

How to Reach an In-Market Shopper Audience 

Take Advantage of Proprietary Audiences 

Start with a partner that owns their own data. As ad platforms continue putting up walls and fighting with one another, their 3rd party data will become increasingly generic and inefficient. You need a partner that collects and maintains their own audiences based on impactful datasets and consistent, technologically advanced processes.  

How does access to 4,000,000 In-Market shoppers sound?

That’s where ZeroSum’s MarketAI platform comes into play. MarketAI combines the largest database of on-the-market VINs in the world and identifies shoppers on shopping sites, VDPs, and search platforms. Those shoppers are matched to millions of others taking the same, purchase-related actions on vehicles.

The platform focuses on low-funnel activity to identify consumers that are serious about the buying process. Through machine learning and proprietary algorithms, the platform refreshes In-Market Shopper Audiences continuously.  

That means that MarketAI only targets consumers who are actively showing intent to buy a vehicle. 

Deliver Dynamic Ads 

There is no point in serving impressions on vehicles that are no longer in your inventory and dynamic ads solve that problem. 

MarketAI uses dynamic, inventory-based ads to automatically change ad creative as soon as a vehicle is out of stock. That means you will never waste another dime advertising a car or truck that you don't have on the ground.

Dynamic, inventory-driven creative ends up being a 1:1 marketing plan for individual vehicles on the lot. Serving exact matches of inventory to in-market shoppers across platforms.

Own Your Traffic 

Your ad dollars should drive users directly to your site - not some landing page that displays your inventory alongside the competition. Send in-market shoppers directly to your VDPs and SRPs to keep them engaged, keep them on your site, and in front of your vehicles.

You should also make sure that your vendor includes those shoppers in your campaigns moving forward. They’ve shown active interest in your specific inventory and are your best chance for sales. Both pillars of how MarketAI executes digital marketing for dealerships. 

An Optimized Ad Spend 

By following the above steps, you can ensure you’re making the best use of your ad spend. While the competition chases their tails and burns precious budgets on the same generic audiences, you will have a unique competitive advantage: Every Ad Dollar Will Be Aimed at an In-Market Shopper. 

Want to get a view from behind the wheel of MarketAI?