Automotive Digital Marketing Adoption Slow

The PCG Digital Marketing started collecting data for our Automotive Digital Marketing Awareness and Budgeting Survey after the start of the New Year.   Today we wanted to share with our readers preliminary data from three survey questions.

We hope to increase the number of dealerships participating in the survey with your help.  Pass this survey link to dealer staff within your organization, in your 20 groups and friends in the business to grow the number of dealers involved.

If you have not yet participated in the survey, take a minute to do so. We will be posting the results of the full study prior to NADA.

Take The Survey

Participate in the survey by clicking on this link:  http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/automotive-digital-marketing

Adoption of Digital Marketing Strategies

The chart shown above is from 130 dealers to date.  Some of the responses may jump out to you like they did for us. For example, if you add the “not using” and the “ready to start” columns, you can see that in many area of digital marketing 30-40% of dealers have not yet engaged in their use.

This great digital divide will allow early adopters to gain a significant advantage on their peers.

Automotive retailers who redirect more of their marketing dollars to online spending in 2010 will be rewarded with increased market share.

Our data is skewed slightly because the survey is being done online. That means that the dealers participating in the survey are already engage in online discussion and communities. So, the numbers of dealers “not using” or “ready to start” is actually higher.

Internet Marketing Training

Thirty-four percent of car dealers surveyed are not budgeting for their staff to attend Internet marketing seminars or training. This is a discouraging fact. Regardless of a dealers’ level of engagement with digital marketing, they should at least understand the value of collecting best practices from their peers and face to face events are often a place for accelerated learning.

Dealers who do not budget for Internet Marketing skills development in 2010 will not be rewarded by many proven engagement strategies discussed on this forum. With NADA coming up in 30 days as well as the Automotive Marketing Boot Camp the prior day in Orlando, dealers would be best served to send their key marketing and sales staff for the latest strategies that can improve their 2010 results.

Digital Marketing Spending Still Small

With 39% of  car dealers surveyed having less than 20% of their overall marketing budget focused to digital marketing, dealers need to wake up and educate themselves on how to move that needle closer to 50% in 2010. Making decisions in a vacuum doesn’t work.

We Can Help

If you need assistance mapping out your 2010 Internet Marketing budgets and strategies, give us a call at 732-450-8200.

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Tags: automotive marketing survey, digital marketing suvey for car dealers, irm, sem, SEO, social media