Connected Podcast Episode 169: Creating and Directing Demand

[Music]

Hi, I'm Greg Yulan with Reynolds and Reynolds, and this is Connected. I'm really excited about this conversation; I feel like it's been a long time coming. A returning guest, but it's been a couple of years. I get to sit down with Colin Kerasquilo from uh, Neielson Automotive Group. He's a digital marketing manager there. Neielson's a big group uh, in Jersey, in New Jersey. Uh, 14 stores currently, continuing to to grow. So Colin, thanks so much for joining me.

Greg: Hello. It's been long overdue. I think it was NADA a few years ago. Unfortunately, the team didn't get to make it out to this past NADA with the crazy weather uh, that happened, the once-in-a-lifetime storm, I guess you could call it, down in New Orleans. But uh, it's it's great to be with you today and and talking about some really great stuff on Connected. So thank you.

Absolutely.

Absolutely appreciate it. I love uh, I always love your energy, right? And I feel like I was getting all excited for this this conversation just because I knew that it was going to be high energy. I had to amp myself up. Had an extra cup of coffee this morning, so I'm I'm ready to go. Um, but no, you know, Colin, you uh, you do a lot of content, and that's part of your job obviously, but even outside of that, you know, you've you've been on Connected before. Um, I know you've been on with um, Alana Shape at uh, Full Path on her podcast, Inside Auto. Um, you even did your own podcast; had a little stint there with a few episodes. What, maybe maybe 25 or something, called experimenting?

Is that right? Expera marketing.

But yes, marketing. Listen, it's been a little while, but maybe it's coming back soon. Stay tuned.

All right, I love it. I love it. And you've been doing stuff with CBT as well, right? Marketing Matters.

Yes. Yes. So CBT News. I mean, what a wonderful platform, first and foremost. You know, I put it up there right with you guys. And the fact of the matter is, Marketing Matters has been a great little show uh, that we've been able to put together with them to uh, educate the dealer community. And same thing there, season two, if you want to call it that, coming soon. So it's just about gathering all of the wonderful uh, ideas and content and creators and people with great ideas out there to to put on the show. So uh, yeah, that's it's been really really wonderful.

That's great. That's great. Were you able to get down there to their studio in Atlanta? It looked like you recorded in their studio.

So yes. Yeah. The uh, the first season, if you will, was a a couple-day shoot, and I was down there. I brought all my different change of clothes so it didn't look like I was wearing the same thing for the whole season. I promised I changed and showered and all that. Uh, the fact of the matter is, I was down in the studio, Um, which was really really cool to see the operation and uh, you know what Jim and his wife Bridget have built down there. Uh, it's just not CBT News, you know, they have that incredible studio there, but then they also have a shared kind of um, working space, like a co-op working space for u startup businesses and small businesses down there. And I mean, it's just really really uh, unbelievable what they've been able to to put together. So definitely people uh, that I would try to emulate definitely at some point in life, depending on where uh, the industry and my career, you know, ends up going. But yes, I was fortunate enough to be down there and spend a few days uh, filming. So it was really really fun.

That's excellent. That's excellent. No, you did a great job with us. So looking forward to seeing what you come up with for uh, for season two.

Yeah, me too. But hey, you know, I wanted to dive in. You know, you are somebody that uh, has a great voice in the industry. I would consider you um, a marketing expert, a digital marketing expert certainly in our automotive space. Um, so I wanted to dive in. Something that's been really top of mind for me lately is is how do you really measure success, right? And and thinking about it from a marketing perspective. Um, there's a lot of ways that you can look at it. Sometimes we get bucketed into this, right? How many leads did we generate, or how much traffic did we create? Um, and those are important metrics. Um, but then you have the flip side of okay, how well did those leads convert? Right? At the end of the day, if our sales people aren't getting true at-bats and frankly, those at-bats aren't closing, um, does it even matter? Right? So I'm I'm kind of curious your perspective to start the conversation with um, you know, how do you measure success with what you and your team do from a marketing perspective?

Great question. So first and foremost, I do want to thank you for the the kind words. You know, it started really as me just being a guy that I thought, hey, if I can teach someone something, right? They often say, I guess if you can teach someone something, it shows a sign of true mastery, right? And and I'm not saying I am a master by any means. I'll tell you that, you know, one of the greatest pieces of advice I I uh, received earlier on in my career was that there's always a brighter, redder, faster Ferrari. Now you can kind of take that uh, for really what it is. And and the fact of the matter is that there always is someone, something out there that uh, can do, you know, better than you. And it's not about hey, getting defeated when you learn that. It's about all right, how am I going to surround myself right with those people that are better performers and and always kind of be a forever learner and constantly learning. That's what really motivated kind of this whole content journey, if you will, because you know it's a very unique pu uh, position and perspective for me. I am not a a vendor partner. I don't have anything to sell really. The only thing I have to sell is myself, right? And the fact cars, right? And and and cars, but you know it's myself and what the successes and I guess trials and tribulations that we've had at the Neielson Automotive Group and letting people learn from those experiences uh, our experiences, the direct experiences and hopefully learning something along the way, creating awesome dialogues, you know, meeting folks like yourself and your team uh, who have just so much to add to the industry. Uh, and and like I said, for me to always be learning, you know, from you guys as well. So thank you. Uh, it really just started like I said as me saying, hey, I think this is fun to share, and then it did kind of, you know, snowball effect or snowball into something. Uh, and we'll continue hopefully to snowball in a positive manner. So thank you first and foremost and thank you to all the listeners and to all the people who u have thought what I have had to say is is worthwhile.

Um, now to your question, the matter at hand. So how do we measure success, right? So I love it because it's a very subjective question, right? And I think many marketers, dealers, so on and so forth can answer this or approach this from so many different angles, just like you started to, right? As you unpack the question, you know, is it about lead volume? Is it about conversion rates? Is it about overall traffic generated, or is it about overall sales? And I think if I have to be as politically correct as possible, and I don't, but I am going to be in this instance because all those answers are correct answers, right? And so I I don't want to say I'm dodging the question, but what I'm going to say is what I started doing at Neielson, and this was towards the tail end of 2024 and now into 2025. I started looking at everything holistically. Okay. So you had mentioned how marketing gets lumped or we'll call it siloed, okay, into here's your responsibility as a marketer, right? And I think this is what many marketers either then um, put on themselves is like, yes, this is my only role, or this is how dealers or management may understand the marketing function is just generate leads, and the more leads you get, the more at-bats you'll have, and the more vehicles you'll hopefully sell and/or service. And I'm sorry, that's just not the case. It hasn't been the case for for some years. And now I'm telling you it's definitely not the case. And it's not how I'm approaching things. I'm approaching things holistically. Once again, and it's looking at overall growth within the Neielson Automotive Group. Now growth, you can say, well, doesn't that mean you're getting more and more and more, or you're doing more and more and more? And I'm telling you, no, that's actually not the case. Because growth can be looked at from many different angles once again or through many different lenses. It could be growth and profitability. Okay, I could sell less cars this year than I did last year, but I could be more profitable based upon the fact that maybe I have less floor plan, right? So I'm not paying as much interest on the vehicles because we've moved through a lot of the inventory. I'm profitable there, even though I didn't sell more units. I could be more profitable because I've become smarter or more efficient with my advertising expenditures. I'm spending less money, and maybe I'm selling more cars. So overall my expenses are reduced on the advertising side of things, which means I'm more profitable when I sell my units. The fact of the matter is, growth to me is looking at it from a lens of profitability. And I will say this, and I think it's a a great thing for marketers to do with their very own level of comfort. I was I will say this because I could see it as um, maybe they'll think they're overstepping their boundaries at at a specific dealership or or automotive group, but become involved in the operations and really learn about the different nuances and expenses within the operations. Right, so they're usually responsible for an advertising expense. But yeah, if your dealer will let you know or if your manager will let you know, become familiar with floor plan expense and interest that's being paid there, become familiar with personnel expense. Now I'm not saying you're going to learn everyone's salary, but if you have a lump sum, an idea of hey, this is what it costs to run the store. That's actually going to help you as a marketer do your job more effectively. Why? Because now you'll know, okay, I can't necessarily spend X, Y, and Z on all of this as much as I would like to. Or hey, let's really dial in this meaning specific tactic or a budget that's allocated to a specific tactic based upon the inventory that we have and the specific costs or costs that are associated with having that inventory on the ground and how long it sits on the ground and the interest expenses I'm paying on it. So you know, once again, I think just to come full circle, the way that I measure it is now from a holistic perspective or viewpoint, and it's about overall profitability. How do I get there, right? How do I get to profitability? And that to me, if I can make our automotive group more profitable by influencing small things here and there, whether it's through marketing, whether it's through being more efficient with our marketing, whether it's ensuring that the marketing is being well handled and received by sales staff and management. That's going to help. And then also optimizing what we already have, right? Within our digital ecosystem, meaning our first-party data, you know, and all these other things that the automotive group over the 40 plus years that it's been around has has built, right? That brand equity, if we can leverage that better, it all is going to result in, hopefully, fingers crossed, profitability, better profitability, more profitability.

Yeah. So a couple of things to to double-click on there. So the first one on that profitability concept, right? That that is ultimately the overarching goal of the dealership, right? Of the business. Um, so my my question is, how in your experience, what's the best way for teams to get together and have these types of conversations to integrate um, you know, in your in your instance, the the, you know, digital marketing manager into the business strategy? Because that that is a strategy conversation, right? Are we chasing volume? Are we chasing profitability? If if profitability, what does that mean? And then what's our strategy to go execute on profitability? To your point, there's a lot of factors that can go into it. Right? Um, it depends on the inventory on the ground. It depend it's depends on supply, right? It depends on um, you know, obviously demand, but that's going to be there. So there's a lot of factors. It depends on interest rates. It depends on all these different factors. So to be effective, uh, which is what your point was, I believe, what I pulled out at least was, you know, to be to be the most effective possible, you have to know what the goal is, and then you have to be involved in uh, developing or at a minimum understand the strategy for reaching that goal because then you can go execute. Um, so how would you advise, and again, maybe from your experience, teams getting together, whether it's somebody in your role, a GM or a dealer, you know, how do you have that conversation? How do you make sure that everybody is on the same page so you can go execute at a high level?

Yeah. Listen, um, this was actually advice from my my current uh, you know, manager, who I admire greatly. You know, I I view him as a a second father, right? My work dad. Uh, Bill Snoffer, general manager of the Neielson Automotive Group. Ultimately, you know, one of the things that he said to me when I first started was, you don't get unless you ask. So I think as simple as it is, right? And not to um, kind of boil it down to something so arbitrary as that, you know, you say, "How do you do it?" uh, you have to ask for it, right? And then from there, if they give you resistance, which they really shouldn't, right? Because I think any savvy dealer at this point in time understands that the marketing uh, is truly the lifeblood of the operation. Right? Without opportunities uh, for sales and/or for service, your business will crumble. It won't do as well as it's normally going to do. And of course, there's things that go into that um, that aren't even the true marketing side of it, but websites and all of your digital properties. So you know, your Google business listings and your social outlets and all these different things that go into your dealership's digital presence, right? That's usually overseen by someone in marketing, a marketing manager. And so reality check is, hey, these are fundamentals that are really really crucial to the business, your business in general. And if I was in a position where I was a dealer, I would want to know every single thing that that marketing guy was doing then and all of the nuances of marketing as far as all the digital properties we have, how they work in our digital ecosystem, all of the analytics that are going on behind the scenes, how he's he or she, for that matter, is leveraging uh, analytics right and and utilizing it to inform business decisions and optimize campaigns and ultimately positively impact my my bottom line, which goes back to profitability. So when all is said and done, you know, ask for it. You have to put together a structure. I would say these things. It's not a one-and-one, you know, hey, let's have our meeting, and then great, we have a direction. This is how we're going to achieve it, and then never talk about it again. No, I would think that these are things that, you know, at a minimum, you should do on a quarterly basis, right? Everyone should get together, whether it's uh uh, key stakeholders or you end up bringing managers in from different dealerships. The things that I would recommend would be, have all the budgets and everything, you know, ready to go. Be transparent as possible with your own teammates. I mean, listen, if you can't do that, then you should probably reconsider what you're doing in the in the role at least, right? So have every have all the budgets together. Usually have a CFO or or a sales manager or general sales manager, whatever it is, have together all of the um, sales numbers, right? Vehicles sold, so on and so forth. We at Neielson haven't gotten um, as granular as including service, which I think is an opportunity for us, but we're looking at it strictly from a a sales perspective. Um, so ultimately, someone who has all the sales numbers, right? The advertising budget, so all the advertising numbers, your expenses, right? What does that all look like as far as, hey, here's the nut at the dealership. This is what we need to do to break even. And then you know, this is how we can talk about uh, attacking the profitability conversation. And then your your management team, you know, in our instance, we have one general manager who oversees all 14 stores, and then our dealer, you know, Mr. Eric Nielsen. But the the fact of the matter is, depending on your structure at the dealership out there for whoever is listening, you know, have those key stakeholders involved because ultimately at the end of the day, it's their wallet that's being impacted, you know, and so um, once again, you don't get unless you ask. So ask and say, "Here's why," because I guarantee you, you know, and this is if I'm role-playing as this person at this dealership, we're missing opportunities uh, to enhance our volume as far as sales uh, the number of vehicles that we service. We're probably missing opportunities or or you know, with leads or just generated ideas or opportunities that are out there; we're not converting them to the rate that we'd be looking for. We're probably spending too much money at some of the dealerships, right? And can that dealership uh, actually bear the that cost, right? Or is there a smarter way, perhaps if we're looking at it from a group perspective, to have a group buy in place where all dealerships can benefit, and then this store which can't bear the the brunt of this expense actually can indirectly benefit. Uh, and and that's how we're kind of approaching it. But how do you do it? Just ask, guys. I mean, the worst thing you can do is sit there and think that hey, everything's okay. You know, I'm not going to talk about it because it doesn't matter to them. Well, it should, you know? And so the way that you get it to matter to them is you ask and you say, here's something I'm thinking about which I believe can benefit your business.

So no, that's great. That's that's a great perspective and just kind of forcing the conversation, inserting yourself in the conversation if it's not coming to you, right? So somebody's got to initiate it, um, you know, maybe it's uh, the dealer, the GM, the sales manager, and maybe it's you, right? But you need to um, need to have the conversation. That's that's a great a great perspective. I definitely appreciate it.

Um, you know, another topic I I want to get your your thoughts on. It's something that I honestly personally think about uh, pretty frequently is the concept of creating demand versus capturing demand, right? And um, in my opinion, uh, you know, you need both, right? And one one of my favorite examples um, in in the automotive retail world, um, and this is going back, it's been quite a few years, but it's a great example that I loved, and it was somebody from Facebook was actually talking to a group that I was a part of, and they were they were sharing this example about how, you know, they were presenting to a group of dealers, and they were showing how their performance was on Facebook using advertising there, and the the dealers were pushing back saying, well, we didn't get like, look, there's no leads coming from Facebook; they're just we we're getting nothing. No traffic, no leads. It's just we're spending a bunch of money and not seeing anything. So he had this chart, right? And he had this graph, and it showed pretty flat um, activity. Uh, it showed spend kind of, you know, ticking up a little bit, and and he's like, "Okay, well, let me layer over this other chart." And so he puts another line on there, and it's leads that come from the traffic source of of Google, right? So he he shows organic search traffic, and it's through the roof, right? So then as you spend more on one platform, right? In Facebook, then you're you're basically creating the demand there, and then you know, people go to Google to interact and find information. So then you're capturing the demand there. Um, so it's really two parts, but um, I think that's a pretty simple example of of how to execute on that. But how do you think about that that idea of creating demand versus capturing demand from somebody who's been doing digital marketing for a long time in this space?

Yeah. Uh, simple yet effective um, example. So that's a really good one to share. And I think that is something now, and you know, I will die on this hill um, talking about this. I think as we went into, you know, Q4 of 2024, I was tasked with um, finding efficiencies. Let's just call it that from an advertising perspective and going through some pretty heavy budget cuts because the business was just not shaping up to be, you know, what it had been two years ago, you know, and and what they say about the auto industry, right? Is when it's good, it's really good. When it's bad, oh boy, you know, hang on tight. And um, so you know, we had this uh, this kind of shift, right? To dichotomy or they the dichotomy there. We did really well two years ago. Last year wasn't so great. And now we're like, hey, how do we kind of, you know, fix the situation or write the ship? And right now it's a really really big ship. So it does take time to to steer and turn. So the fact of the matter is, though, at the end of 2024, when we went through a lot of these uh, budget cuts to find the efficiencies, you know, one of the things that I reflected on was what can we do better, meaning the automotive group and and myself, to leverage the messaging created on a tier one and tier two level from the brands that we represent, right? So from the OEM perspective, how do we mitigate or eliminate, for that matter, the expenditure that our respective dealerships would have been spending to essentially create the same demand that the OEM should have? Now I'm not saying it it it happened in all instances because some OEMs have very little or very weak uh, tier one and tier two strategies; others have very robust strategies, and then you hope that you can of course leverage that and capture the the demand. So setting the table there or setting the scene, what I am a big advocate of now at this point in time is uh, really unless it's the Neielson automotive group, meaning a Neielson automotive group tier two regional message, and we have the luxury of doing that as as a automotive group with all locations in New Jersey, uh, 12 different brands, you know, representing different price points, different shoppers, all uh, basically in a a consolidated or or singular market, if you will. I have started leveraging tier two Neielen Automotive Group messaging, right? Promoting that message. This coincided with a whole group rebrand that we did. This was another big project of mine, um, you know, basically started back in 2023. Now it's finally come to fruition. So group uniformity, um, the Neielson Automotive Group umbrella, right? And having all those respective brands underneath that, and there's some fun stuff we're doing there, but a lot of the messaging, right? We've found efficiencies at the individual child level. We've saved money at the individual child dealership level. We've reallocated a little bit of that money to now have a group buy for Neielen Automotive Group, creating Neielen Automotive Group intent, right? People that are shopping for specific vehicles now thinking, "Hey, I need a car; I need to service a car." That becomes synonymous with Neielson, right? I need to go with Neielen. The fact of the matter is, because we've found those efficiencies and reinvested on the group level, we're seeing better results, believe it or not, uh, with less money in the specific market. So that is something that we've done where it's creating demand or capturing, I guess a little bit of both, I should say, right? It's capturing demand that's generated from an OEM level, meaning tier one and whatever tier two regional advertising or or you know, advertising OEM may be doing. We have our own regional advertising.

Going on because we learned at the end of 2024, and as much as I hate to say it, that you necessarily, you can't rely on the OEM. I think you had a lot of OEMs that pulled back on their advertising. Uh, there weren't rebates and incentives that were attractive for a consumer out in the market. So it was like, hey, how do we take this narrative and and and make our own right? Like how do we take this and run with it? Um, so that's one of the things. So but when all is said and done, and I've said this on some other um, you know, speaking occasions that I've been, you know, blessed to be on, but marketers need to understand the swim lanes. And I hate that word; I mean, it's it's I think kind of antiquated. A lot of people have always said swim lanes, and it's the only thing I can think of right now. But let tier one, let tier two generate the intent. Okay, and you as a dealer, if you really want to get the most bang for your buck, okay, what I implore you to focus on at this point in time are two very low-funnel, kind of high-intent uh, metric or avenues.

Okay, if an OEM is now ramping up, which we see a lot of them do, and a lot of them are focusing on conquest, okay, instead of focusing on their customers that they've had from the past, all of a sudden, you know, especially given the tariff conversation and all these things, OEMs decided to all of a sudden start conquesting the absolute living out of the competitors, right? So I shouldn't be spending money to go and conquest competitors because it's just going to be an inefficient or or unwise spend of mine, the dealer spend. So what I'm going to do though is I'm going to throttle up my SEM. Okay, I'm going to throttle up my SEO. And ultimately, what that will allow me to do is capture any and all intent that's created from the OEM on that tier tier one tier two level, as well as dominate search results on Google, on Bing, you know, even now leveraging AI on ChatGPT and some of these other places that people are going to ultimately look for information, right? I call becoming a digital land baron. The fact of the matter is with Neielson, and this is how we're approaching it, I have 14 dealerships, meaning 14 digital web properties that I, if I if done right, can have show up when someone searches for a query. What that does in my world is it makes Neielson a winner. Why? Because it's the only option that a person has to click on when they're on Google, right, if they're looking in our market. So for me, this is why, once again, when we talk about it holistically, it's more so yes, we still need to answer the the customer's query by giving them the most relevant search result, but it's also about quantity, right? And if people are searching because there's intent created from tier one and tier two, our job just needs to be to capture that intent. It's going to be the best spend or the best use of your money that you can ever do as a marketer, as a dealer. And then it's about how do you push the competition to oblivion, and the point is, as as uh, cynical as it may sound, my goal is to be that digital land baron and to push all of my competitors off of page one. And if I push them all off of page one, guess what? They will get no traffic to their websites because people don't interact with anything that's not on page one of Google, for that matter, as well as other search engines.

So I think it's a long-winded way to ultimately say my idea or what we've been doing at Neielen, unless it's Neielson specific, is just purely leverage whatever OEM marketing is out there and just capture any of the intent that may be created from that high-level marketing through low-funnel, high-intent initiatives. And it's primarily search engine marketing, throttling those budgets up, pulling from other avenues that you may have uh, relied upon in the past. And then a fundamental and SEO, just yes, it costs some money and it's not necessarily a uh, immediate right return or immediate gratification for all the millennials out there, but it's something that now is is a fundamental that you see as consumer shopping behavior changes, as artificial intelligence uh, evolves and becomes more relevant and prevalent in the consumer journey. These are really the two things you need to win, in my opinion. Yeah. Well, and that that leads to, you know, this other kind of concept around demand that I think of it as like damning the demand, right? So there's this demand, there's a river, right, and it's flowing, and there's all these customers that are interested in something. And in our example, there's usually about five outlets that they can go to, right? If they want to buy a a Jeep Wrangler, right, they can they can come to you or one of your stores, right? They can go, there's probably a couple other places they can they can go to. So there's all this demand. There's this river, and maybe they're a little higher funnel. Maybe they don't know it's a Wrangler, right? But in most cases, by the time they get to your site, they have an idea of what vehicle they're looking for. So there's this river, and you know, you have this dam, and there's five outlets. So how do you block off the other four outlets, right? How do you make sure that all that demand starts coming to you? Um, or you know, if you need to change the direction, and I think you guys are in a great spot, and there's a lot of other dealers out there like you that have multiple brands, right? So I think about this, and especially you mentioned the tariffs, and it kind of popped into my head where, you know, as we start to move forward into the year, and we'll see when all this impact really hits, if it does, but you know, as we start to move forward into the year, um, there's still going to be demand for vehicles, right? People are going to want and need to buy cars. Um, now there's there's potentially an opportunity to kind of divert that demand to some of maybe your models, right? And whether that's, you know, the original demand was for manufacturers that you sell or not. Um, you know, you have a set of manufacturers. So how do you take maybe some vehicles that are are going to end up being more expensive to the consumer and take the demand for those and and divert them to you? Um, I think it's an interesting concept as we think about, you know, these tariffs that have gone into effect, and and you know, again, it's it's going to be a little time before we start to see any impacts, but curious what your thoughts are there on kind of damning that demand and diverting it to you.

Yeah. Uh, damned if you do, damned if you don't. No, I'm just saying, you know, I I I like it. I I like the thought process there because I do believe that's what dealers will have to do, right? But we're not necessarily going to be calling it uh, conquesting because if you call it conquesting, all of a sudden it's a, you know, high-expense, low-return, you know, kind of initiative. So what that means uh, when all is said and done, Greg, is that you know, this this kind of goes back to uh, what we had just discussed with the two things that I think dealers need to really focus on. Right. So it's it's low-funnel, high-intent. Uh, one of them you can be way more aggressive with, which is the SEM side of things. You know, the whole idea is, right, when people are searching, okay, their search usually starts with things that are relevant to their lifestyle or a stage in their life that they're in, right? You may have mothers who are looking for, you know, what are the best SUVs for families in XYZ state. You may have people who are looking for what are the best deals on trucks in, you know, New Jersey. Let's just use, you know, my my state as an example here. You know, in order to divert or damn the demand, you actually need to go a little further upstream. And and I didn't actually mean to use that right, that analogy upstream, but but that's the case. And that's why then when you switch to the SEO side of things, it's really a time now for dealers to one, better understand the consumer journey and the questions that consumers are asking. Now, this is all readily available information. And all dealers have to do is they can leverage, you know, Google and and simply type in, you know, what are the top 10 asked questions about X Y and Z brand or the car buying process or, you know, you can use any sort of of um, query there to learn what consumers are truly interested in. You then need to provide the answers to those consumers. And then from there, once you have uh uh, you're a little further upstream, you've you've identified your plot of land that you're going to start building this dam and then your own little reservoir and how you're going to, you know, kind of manipulate that there. Then you can start having it where you'll start having those little offshoots that then maintain those people that you've now gotten into your little reservoir or damned area to your respective brands or, you know, your your dealership websites, so on and so forth.

So I think when all is said and done, it's about once again, you know, I've mentioned holistically a lot of times, I've looked at holistically or mentioned holistically from how we're looking at things at the Neielson Automotive Group, meaning uh, overall profitability and what growth looks like, right? But I think from a marketing perspective, you also need to look at that holistically. We are always vying, meaning marketers, dealers, we're always vying for that lowest funnel, you know, highest-intent shopper. And I don't know the new numbers. I think it used to be at any point in time, like out of the whole entire population, it was maybe 2 or 3% of people are actually in the market for a vehicle at any given point in time. That was the entire population. Okay, imagine now you dissect that down to the people that are in the market in your specific geography for your specific brand. We're all probably competing for like 0.02% of people, and we're throwing all of this money at that to try to capture that one person, you know, at any given point in time. And and if you look at it from that perspective, is that the smartest way to spend our money? No. I think the smartest way to spend our money right now is is those two initiatives I discussed where you can uh, take advantage of intent created by an OEM from tier one or tier 2, SEO, start building a strong foundation, start building your dam a little further upstream, right, from the civilization, and the fact of the matter is utilizing your first-party data, you know, and and already leveraging what you have as a dealer uh, to kind of, you know, expand, grow, or expound found upon that, you know what I mean? It's uh, it's one of those things where we have probably hundreds of thousands of people in our database, and granted, given the size of a dealership and how long it's been in operation, so on and so forth. But you know, if you you really kind of reflected on it, are we optimizing that data to the best of our ability? And I mean, even I would say I think we're doing a pretty good job, but no. To the best of my ability, no. I think I can always do better. So that's that's how I would answer that question. So it's just think a little different about it. Think think outside the box. Start a little higher upstream. Yeah. No, that's great. So So talk to me more. Okay. You mentioned first-party data, right, and how you're leveraging it. Um, it it's I don't know. I hear there's certain words that you hear, and it's like, oh, I've heard that 17 million times. Right. But when when you say first-party data and you say leveraging first-party data, tell me more about what you mean. Right. And and to your point, you have 14 stores, you have a lot of you have large customer database, you have a lot of data points um, from a lot of different places, right? You have your DMS, you have your CRM, you have your websites, you have all these different places that you you have data potentially siloed for some dealers. You know, I think you guys do a good job consolidating a lot of it. Um, but but talk more about what you what you mean by first-party data and then how you leverage it.

Yeah, so ultimately, first-party data just being dealership data. It's data that we own. To your point, data in our CRM and data in our DMS could be sales customers, could be service customers, could be service customers who never bought from us, it could be sales customers who never served a service with us. The fact of the matter is there's there's like you said, hundreds of thousands of data points there, and and let's just say for, you know, maybe a beginner-level dealer out there, you know, uh, a person, a customer record, a prospect is a data point in your CRM or DMS that would be constituted or or considered as your first-party data. It's data that you you own. Um, that obviously can grow over time, right? As you get more prospects through your your marketing efforts and people come onto your website and convert, they're then put into that bucket uh, and ultimately they become now your your first-party data. So leveraging it, you know, I think it was it was probably and and uh, correct me on on the exact timeline, but I ultimately I believe 2024 kind of became a really big year for um, that focus where it was everyone was talking about first-party data. Uh, cleanliness of said data, right? If your data is not um, clean, meaning if you have incomplete customer records or if you have bad phone numbers or bad addresses, bad email addresses, um, incomplete customer uh, profile information, meaning like you you have a vehicle in the system that they sold, you know, however many eons ago, or a person's deceased. Um, it's all about cleanliness of of the data because that's going to help you activate your marketing to a higher or more efficient and stronger level. And why I mentioned that as far as first-party data, cleanliness of data, and then how you were activating it or could activate it is because at that point in time, the the corporations that we rely on to advertise such as Alphabet with Google and YouTube and Meta with Instagram and Facebook, a lot of that became you had to upload your own customer lists because of of privacy issues and all of the things that they were navigating, they no longer enabled you to to see, you know, essentially the consumer that they were marketing to on your behalf or who that customer was. So it was, hey, let's upload our consumer lists and then trust them and their algorithms to go out and find like consumers, right? People who are showing uh, similar propensity or similar patterns as far as engagement and that might have a higher propensity to purchase in the next 30, 60, 90 days and kind of let them build out the campaigns and trust that then that they were marketing to those people. So uh, that's first-party data, and from there it more so became, okay, now that we understand it better, now that we know it's clean, right? We we have processes in place to clean the data, how are we better going to activate it? And I think to your point, you know, you say some dealers um, have that data siloed, some have it consolidated, um, you know, others have it a little bit of of both that it's, you know, one might be in a silo and one's consolidated, and they want to kind of mold it and or mesh it all together. Um, then I think that's where the next buzzword kind of came into play, which was uh, you know, customer data platforms uh, CDP, and ultimately what that did uh, was give dealers the opportunity to finally see everything, right? All in in one place. Um, and I think I'm going to stop there because I don't know if there's more questions around that. But that's essentially what what came out of that was was CDP and and um, you know, how you can leverage that better because that has everything in one spot. So yeah.

Yeah. So let's take that to the next level if you don't mind, cuz you know, then so you have all the data, right? You have it clean, you have it in one place, you have it um, kind of all consolidated, but then to do something with it, right? To make it actionable, to give somebody like you you know, tools to actually take all that and do something. I mean, there's there's really, I think, and maybe you have a different perspective, three kind of steps, right? You have targeting, so creating an audience, right? Um, you have messaging, so what do I need to say to that person or that group of people? And then I think you also have uh, sales tools. Right. So how do you connect the marketing message to basically the intore experience, right? How do you how do you provide tools to the salesperson to educate them on what's already been said to the customer and help them close the deal faster? Um, so with those three things, targeting, messaging, and sales, um, I I think that that's that's sort of the next big leap, at least from my perspective, and I'm curious what your your perspective is because to actually act on that data is different than having the data. Yeah. No, I I think uh, actionability or making your data actionable is key. You know, I think there's a lot of players out in the space who um, whether you know, on their iteration or new iteration of their CDP or whatever they're calling it, you know, at one point in time and the the vendor will remain uh, unnamed because I don't need to do that. But you know, it was uh, one of the NADAs uh, someone was very excited to show me uh, their version of a CDP uh, and I sat down and very impressive. But the question I said to them was, well, how do I make it actionable? You know, how do I take all this and then build out campaigns and, you know, why not this this and this? And I will tell you the person was perplexed. And this person was much smarter than I I can tell you that because they were a chief technology officer or whatever, you know, someone who can build things uh, unbelievable things, but you know, that was foreign to them. And so I think the the key with CDPs now uh, is that you need to make them actionable, and you need to make them actionable through the three avenues uh, that you had so beautifully outlined because I would agree with you there. I think first and foremost, it's better understanding the um, data you have. So once again, your first-party data, better understanding your consumer profiles, right? You can gleam a lot of that through uh, leveraging a CDP. You can understand a consumer's journey much better, you can understand the consumer much better, right? And this can help inform other marketing decisions and and kind of avenues that you may also look into for advertising. You can look at everything in a CDP and say, "Yeah, I that either confirms my thought process that I'm going to do X Y and Z or no, you know what? This actually proves a perfect kind of point uh, or you know, why I wouldn't want to invest in in this this this and this because I'm seeing that in the CDP that's not relevant to our consumer." And that varies by OEM, that varies by geography, that varies by seasonality. I mean, it's really quite incredible what you can glean from that. So you know, I think that ties back to your targeting because it's one it's a better understanding of the data in general. Okay. Targeting and segmenting, I'll call those the same. It's it's funny, I have my my list here as well. Um, you know, and that was one of the things that I said our CDP um, allows us to do is is segment audiences better. From the segmenting, you then get better targeting, right? So it means that when you segment properly, you have uh, clean data, the targeting is going to be more precise, the targeting is going to be spot-on. Okay. As far as your messaging, I I couldn't agree with you more there because once you have the proper audience segmented and now targeted, it gives you the ability to better craft the message that goes out to that consumer. And this is not a all like one-size-fits-all. You can segment, I mean, just think about dissecting as much or as little as you want out of your DMS and CRM and then building out custom messaging to go to that specific consumer, right? So it's, you know, it's the right person at the right place at the right time on the right device with the right message, you know, right? And so the fact of the matter is the the messaging uh, becomes much more uh, effective because you once again have better understand the consumer where they're at in the purchase life cycle or in their ownership life cycle, whatever it may be. Uh, and then from there, you've already segmented them and targeted them correctly. So now you're going to send them the most relevant message, and you're going to do so on the platforms or outlets that would resonate with them, you know, it could be through the email, it could be through SMS text messaging, it could be through just targeting them on Google, you know, remarketing, it could be through leveraging YouTube and different videos, it could be on social channels. Essentially what you've done is you've just pulled this really enhanced, you know, list, right? This consumer list that's on steroids, and now you're you're better able to um, activate it. And then the last bit, sales tools. Okay. And this is something we leverage here. Um, and I'm gonna actually add one more after sales tools. Yeah. If you find it interesting, yes, please write it down. But so sales tools, what this enables us to do once you pull all of that information. Okay. Right. So now we've segmented, we've targeted, we have the message, and we deployed. Okay. What you're able to get is a list of all those consumers. Okay, you have all their contact information, so on and so forth. So what we should do as marketers is we should first and foremost make the sales staff, management, BDC, whoever it is, aware that these are the campaigns that we're launching. Okay. Now from there, you can take it a step further, and you can say, here are the consumers that this campaign is going out to, right? And and boom, here's the list. Now this is all digital. So you could email it to them, and you could say in 2 days, 3 days, 4 days, whatever it may be, if we don't see any engagement, okay, or if we do see engagement for that matter, because you'd be able to see all of these interactions in in your CDP, and that's how crazy it gets. It's not just if they click on an email or respond to a text message. I mean, you can then see uh, engagements out in the Alphabet ecosystem. So on Google and, you know, on the Meta ecosystem that they clicked on a Facebook ad or an Instagram ad or so on and so forth, you could see all these touch points, which really can educate how a salesperson at this point now can can follow up with a consumer, right? And so that's where the sales tools I think become really um, effective is not only can you give them that physical list, I mean, you could print out a list, you could give it to them, you could also email it to them, you could email it to management for accountability purposes, which is the last thing I'm going to touch on. But then you could also have a a um, email set up, just this daily tickler emails, if you will, where it would show that hey, so and so, which is part of your campaign, okay, submitted a lead, let's say a month ago, didn't convert, has been back on your website in the past 24 hours. And then you have a concise list of who that person or those people are that you can send directly to the salesperson who was assigned to handle those customers. Now every morning they can come in, and they can say, all right, yeah, let me make sure I call, you know, Jane Doe or John Smith because hey, they had shown engagement, they're back on my website, and then it's up to us to create, you know, kind of those talk tracks. I think you're going to...

Ask me some specific questions about a very powerful tool. I know that you guys have it at your, uh, your disposal now that we have at our disposal. But you know, even that tool, uh, provides talk tracks, you know, leveraging AI, uh, that make it the most relevant, once again, messaging for for the consumer.

Um, and then so the last bit I touched on that I apologize just for for speaking so long, but um, accountability. I think this is a massive, massive thing that not many people think about. I think it's something that I had discussed, uh, earlier on when we started the pilot, uh, for your curator product. But the fact of the matter is, um, accountability is big in our industry. And I find an opportunity for Nielsen to improve is holding our teams more accountable, holding myself more accountable, holding our managers more accountable, managers holding their salespeople more accountable, and and all the way down, you know, the hierarchy. The the fact of the matter is this tool enables you, like I said, through some of those daily activities like daily, let's call them tickler emails or or coffee reports or whatever we want to call them. If that goes to a manager now, a manager can say, "All right, at 11:00 a.m., I'm going to go walk over to, you know, one of our salespeople's desks and say, "Here are the five consumers that you had, uh, assigned to you that have been back on our website." What happened, you know, what happened with these consumers? Did you reach out to them? You know, did you call them? Did you text them? Did you email them? How many of them did you get into contact with? Did you set any appointments? What were some of the, uh, you know, points of of, uh, pain points? What were some of the, you know, push-back points? So on and so forth. It just enables you to build a better culture, which is an accountability culture, and from that you can create that, uh, or create from accountability learning opportunities, training opportunities, show that you actually care that you're going to sit down every day with a consumer or or a salesperson, excuse me, or a PDC manager or even sales manager and want to teach them, you know, what you you know about the industry and perhaps maybe to come full circle, you'll learn something in the process, right? And so I think that's another key thing. So if we could open it up to four: targeting, messaging, sales tools, accountability.

Yep. No, I love accountability. And I think you can even take it to, uh, just one step further. You know, your example of a sales manager walking over and talking to a salesperson is a great one. Uh, but then also you can leverage the CRM, right? So okay, here were the five activities in the CRM. You closed out two of them, but I didn't see an email in there. Like, what, help me understand what happened, right? Or, you know, maybe it was a call and it was a voicemail and we have that voicemail recorded, uh, in the CRM and I can review that and it was a pretty lame message, right? So then that's another coaching opportunity. So having that tie-in where and then then you're reinforcing that behavior too, right? Where it's like, hey, yep, you know what you need to use the CRM, um, and and you have those conversations and and it's a twofold conversation. You're you're reinforcing use of the CRM and tracking, Uh, but then also it's it's the coaching opportunity that you're talking about.

Absolutely. No, and that's I think that's key. I think, you know, I can't speak for every dealer, and I think there's some dealers out there and dealerships who have a process just so dialed in, Uh, and and you know, I love that for them. It's something like I said that's an opportunity for us. And I think a lot of it, once again, you know, I love to to kind of, uh, come full circle on a lot of these things. It's why you need to look at things holistically. You know, marketing often gets their feet held to the fire when sales are down or opportunities or leads are down. And I don't think people want to necessarily reflect on, well, actually we have the same number of opportunities that we had month over month or year over year. But what happened? Oh, we got a new salesperson who we didn't train on our process or, you know, is not properly trained on how to do follow-up with consumers or yeah, there was that one day where that BDC manager got really pissed off and just walked out and never came back. You know, it's like I don't think we put two and two together when we really should. And to your point and it's beautiful that you had mentioned the activities and kind of the workflow and the CRM, um, because yeah, I mean, there are even alerts that can go out that say so and so didn't complete this and now it definitely becomes the, uh, you know, the the conversation, right? And and make it productive. Make it productive. And for the dealers that have that process dialed in, you know, I kudos to you guys and I applaud that. Um, but for those that don't, no, this can definitely, definitely help out.

For sure. For sure. Yeah. No, it's great. Um, well, Colin, I could talk to you probably all day. Um, I mentioned a lot of fun. It is. I love picking your brain and hearing your thoughts on things. U but I do want to be respectful of your time. Um, you know what haven't we talked about that, uh, that we should? Anything you want to touch on that we didn't have an opportunity to yet? Uh, I mean, ultimately, no, I think 2025 should be a year for dealers to, um, really peel back everything, look at everything, you know, with a fine-tooth comb and, um, look at it from an expensive side of thing with your advertising. Really dig into, uh, whatever vendor partners you may be working with, uh, and seeing truly what is getting you results and what's not. There's enough information out there and enough tools out there that can let you know what is working and what's not working and try some things, right? I mean, listen, the third-party providers or you know, people are probably not going to appreciate this, but the fact of the matter is, peel back some of that. You know, peel back some of the expenditure on some of these platforms and see if it hurts. You know, if it doesn't hurt you, then the fact of the matter is you've been spending the money inefficiently, uh, all along, and you can either save that and, uh, you know, put it in the coffers and and get a little more money in the kitty or, you know, reinvest in other avenues and then just look at the fundamentals once again. So peel back, try to find efficiencies and look at the fundamentals. You know, look where you've been deficient. Is your SEO strategy one that's capable, uh, of surviving in 2025 and beyond? I think a lot of us need to continue to kind of look into that and reflect on that and how AI is going to play into that. Um, and then ultimately with search, you know, those are the two things I'll come back to that that I would seriously focus on. You know, here, uh, we have notoriously, um, I shouldn't say notoriously, I guess it's notoriously. We have we have always been and and it's I guess how I've operated and like I said it's not always correct, right? We have run very, very lean, um, with our marketing. It's one of the things that I've always tried to pride, you know, or prided myself on is is trying to get the most for the most efficient spend, right? So I guess the most for as little as we can. We navigated some really great years where that philosophy worked. Okay, I think like I said last year was a year where we said that's not really working anymore. You know, we need to throttle up X, Y, and Z. And on the Nielsen front, it was our search engine marketing. We realized that our lunch was getting eaten by a lot of our competitors. And it's just because we did not have the visibility that we once had given the overall budgets that were were out in the market, right? Out in the ether of the internet. So that's when I started doing the self-reflection and I said, you know, I'm going to look at all of our sources. I'm going to see if there's overlap, right? What that overlap is. Can I remove one of these to prevent the overlap? Uh, I'm going to see if I can get more out of this expenditure by changing the philosophy. Instead of an individual store, I'm going to focus on group messaging and drive traffic to a group site and then kind of understand that we'll let the traffic, uh, trickle down or flow out as it may, but then I've still realized savings at the individual dealerships. And then ultimately from there we we were also able to reallocate some of the monies while still realizing a savings. And this is what I'm saying to dealers: I believe you can do this too, uh, in those more aggressive, you know, kind of low-funnel, high-intent initiatives. So SEM, throttle up the SEM budgets, capture more of the intent that's out there now that the OEMs are putting more messaging out in the market, and that should be a pretty good recipe, uh, for success when you're hitting it from all fronts. So finding efficiencies, generating more opportunities in the process, Uh, what dealer wouldn't like that? And then ultimately, you know, impacting their positive, uh, bottom line, excuse me, in a positive, uh, manner.

So thank you. Awesome stuff. Awesome. No, thank you, Colin. Colin, uh, Carlo, digital marketing manager at Nielsen Automotive Group. You're the man. I appreciate everything and and the conversation.

Right back at you, Greg. Thank you. All right. We'll talk again soon. Wow, what a great conversation. It was a long one. I hope you held on till the end because because Colin had some great stuff throughout. I always appreciate talking with him. He's a bright guy, lots of great ideas. Um, so I hope you got a lot of great takeaways from that as well. Before we hop off, don't forget you can watch or listen to all episodes of Connected on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify podcasts. And make sure to hit subscribe so you're notified every other week when new episodes are released. Thanks so much, and we'll see you in two weeks. [Music]