Mark Kebblewhite

THE pressure on dealers to switch more of their marketing spend from traditional to digital media has been ramped up with an expansion in operations by US-based Search Optics.

Search Optics has appointed experienced automotive executive Mark Kebblewhite as managing director for the Asia-Pacific after what the company has described as “strong growth” in Australia and New Zealand over the past 12 months.

He will be backed up by Matt Lanzarone, who will focus on winning business from car-makers looking to back up their dealers’ efforts.

Mr Kebblewhite said Search Optics was keen to maximise its thrust into the Australasian market based on its history as a pioneer in focusing on the mobile phone as a dealer’s best tool for finding and fostering potential car buyers.

“Search Optics was founded in 1998 and pioneered the ‘mobile first’ platform technology,” he said. This was well suited to Australasia, where 80 per cent of the population has a mobile phone, he added.

“Look at Roy Morgan’s recent report, 2.37 million Australians are in the market to buy a new car within 4 years, and 43 per cent of these customers do most of their research online.”

Search Optics has developed its own in-house website tool, Blueprint, which has been optimised to make the research and purchasing activities of the new-car buyer as simple and seamless as possible.

“That’s where we specialise, from the mobile phone up to the desktop. We design with the mobile in mind leading up to the desktop.”

Catching the consumers before they even set foot in a dealership is critical these days because they do so much of their research online, Mr Kebblewhite said.

“So what we are seeing is the research being done well and truly in advance and once someone is on their mobile phone doing a search, it is up to Search Optics – using its marketing services and its Blueprint platform – to optimise that experience for the client (dealer) and the consumer.

“We want the experience to be clean. We want them to be able to make a phone call to that dealer and we want them to be able to go onto the website and either make a phone call from there or complete a form.”

In order to maximise the number of potential customers, Search Optics backs up its Blueprint platform with programmatic media, which works in conjunction with Google to find likely targets.

This is a fast-growing area of digital marketing, Mr Kebblewhite said, with spending on programmatic marketing jumping 67 per cent in 2017 to $500 million.

The key is to use the dealer’s list of previous clients and profiles of people coming to the dealer’s website to create a “look-alike” target audience.

“Then we go into the marketplace using Google and the other search engines and find people that are like that,” he said.

“What we do then is we feed them content that is specific and targeted. Instead of a shotgun approach, we target on the basis of the attributes we find within your data, your conditioning data, which is very rich with information.”

“What we aim to do is two things. First, programmatics is really good at branding your business and, second, programmatics is really good at delivering retail content.

“What that does is, if you do it right, it introduces a larger audience in a more affordable manner into your sales funnel. At the top end of the funnel are the consumers and, as they start to research more and find out more about the product, they become transactional, ready to purchase the car.”

Search Optics has more than 3000 customers and dealers in 13 countries and is the preferred digital marketing provider in North America for Toyota, Mazda, Buick, GMC, Chevrolet, Cadillac, Lincoln, Jaguar Land Rover, Volkswagen and Ford. It works with 450 Ford dealers in North America.

It is also the exclusive supplier of websites and digital marketing for Fiat Chrysler Automobiles in South America.

Mr Kebblewhite said that, in the US, dealers were now spending 50 per cent of their marketing budget on digital campaigns.

“There are some dealers here that are doing that, but what our job is at Search Optics is to show what a digital transformation strategy looks like.

“When we approach our client, what we first do is get a picture of what their volume aspirations are, what their market share aspirations are, their branding aspirations – all those key elements that make up the business – and we work with them to deliver a very broad strategy to deliver a digital transformation.”

Search Optics’ internal research shows that programmatics increases the likelihood of a purchase.

“From the campaigns we have run over the last couple of years, if people were exposed to a Search Optics display video campaign, which is the programmatic campaign, these people were 43 per cent more likely to buy a car compared to the group that was not fed a programmatic program.

“What we also found was that those people were seven times more likely to visit the dealership than those that were not exposed to a programmatic program. Programmatics is a really good delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.

“We just want to make sure that when we talk digital, we talk about a holistic approach.”

As well as harnessing the benefits of all the different digital ways to communicate with potential car buyers, Search Optics also offers another proprietary product, Uptracs, which can measure the efficiency and effectiveness of a dealer’s digital marketing campaign, allowing the campaign to be modified and tweaked to improve results.

“From a marketing point of view, if you’re spending money … this tool enables you to measure all your marketing spend. You can actually work out your return on investment across all your spend.

“And it’s not limited to just digital. While Uptracs is designed around evaluating the success or failure of a digital campaign, we can also feed in print advertising and radio advertising; we can link activity to those campaigns. We can also measure the success and failure of those campaigns, too.

“If you were spending money on search engine marketing, you could look at Uptracs on a daily basis and it will tell you how many phone calls you are getting from that search engine marketing, it will tell you how many forms on the website have been completed by the customer on the website.

“It will map out the customer journey, where they visited on the website, what pages they went to, how much time they spent on the page, when they left your page. All of this information, from a marketing perspective is really, really powerful in order to make decisions going forward that will improve your return on investment.”

Mr Kebblewhite said dealers want to know where to spend their marketing dollars for the best effect, but they were reluctant to simply omit television advertising, print advertising or any component.

“They generally don’t risk losing any component of that media. What they do is they spread their dollars. What we say is, if you invest in digital and use Uptracs … you will be able to account for every single dollar you invest. If you invest $5000 you are going to be able to assess at the end of the campaign how successful that $5000 investment was.

“That’s a really important point with the Uptracs system.”

By Ian Porter