Consumer Modeling Case Study

Purpose of the internet.

The internet is a place where consumers go to search for information. In the US, the average consumer spends just $1,800.00 annually on products and services purchased online, a small fraction of the $60,000.00 average annual expenditure overall.

1. In the automotive industry, dealerships have relied on flash sales and “Summer Sales Events” to create urgency and lure more foot traffic to their dealerships.
2. This all changed when platforms like CarGurus and Kelly Blue Book gave car buyers wide spread access to valuations as well as competitor pricing. Instead of trusting a salesperson to give you a good deal it is much easier to spend 5 minuets browsing all available listings from a variety of dealerships in the area.
3. This highlights the informative nature of the internet itself. At Plexlab, we focus on using this nature to create content that establishes that digital trust people are searching for when they research high ticket items.
4. By turning your brand into the source of valuable consumer-driven information, you can solidify a relationship outside of the tradition Buyer & Seller ecosystem, and extend brand awareness & reliability year round to utilize the spare time in between purchases.

Where are your buyers?

Outside of the dealership, there are a variety of places across the web where consumers go to purchase vehicles. These places vary by region, but in this example we will highlight how we optimized Facebook Marketplace to increase the number of Leads Generated from 2, to 100 a week on average.

1. From the very beginning of our campaign we realized that even though the dealers Facebook page had over 5,000 likes, they were only receiving on average 2 messages per week.
2. Many of the individual salespeople employed by this dealership were posting vehicles for sale in Facebook Buy Sell Trade groups as well as on their personal Marketplace profiles.
3. This allowed for many inconsistencies across the board as there was no protocol for how sales people were supposed to format their vehicle posts.
4. This created miscommunication between consumers and sales staff. The same vehicle would end up posted multiple times all with different pricing, creating distrust.
5. Furthermore, the advertisements ran by this dealership were targeted towards Men, age 35-65, but the demographic group with the highest engagement rating, were women, age 35, to 45.

Brainstorming solutions.

We had 3 problems we needed to fix. #1 We needed to increase the number of leads generated. #2 We needed to create consistency in the posting of vehicle on Facebook Marketplace. #3 We needed to develop ad strategies that focused on Women, age 35 to 55 who were more engaged with the dealership content.

1. Increasing lead generation.
   
   • In order to increase the number of leads that were received, handled, and converted, we needed to aggregate the data from Facebook Messenger into the dealerships CRM.
   • By doing so we increased response time ten fold and no lead was left unattended.
2. Create consistency in regards to vehicles listed.
   • Forcing an entire sales staff to let go of their Facebook Marketplace posts was deemed unfair, however, by integrating the full list of inventory from the dealer website into a Facebook catalog, we were able to sync and update units in real time.
3. Marketing to the proper audience.
   • All the ads ran by the dealership had been primarily focused on selling 3/4 pickups. Since we had identified that women were more focused and engaged with our content, we began running ads for SUV’s that included small tidbits in the beginning of the videos about powertrain and mechanical features with the majority of the ad focusing on the convienience of the SUV itself.

Crafting Consumer Models

Today, the dealership Facebook receives on average 100 messages each week. This created a solid base to make minor changes to as the market shifts. We have identified the consumers we need to target, and increased non-paid engagement 200%. Instead of focusing on ads to drive sales, we have focused on content that provides product knowledge. By comparing different vehicles, providing consumers with helpful tips to improve their credit, and shaping content stratagies to mirror the shared content from the most engaged existing Facebook follower, the dealership has become a source of value and consumers frequent the content outside of just looking for new vehicles.