Creating an effective marketing budget with an optimal ROI can be difficult to say the least. Join Brian Pasch this week on Auto Marketing Now as he goes in the lab to share his recommended budgeting spreadsheet.

This intuitive spreadsheet allows dealers to enter how many vehicles they sell per month and how much they are willing to spend on marketing per vehicle to find out the most effective marketing allocations for their budget. The spreadsheet, which is divided into 3 tiers followed by an experimental section, can be requested by emailing Brian@pcgmailer.com.

Tier One:

The first tier is your non-negotiables. Dealers must take their online presence seriously and ensure that they are properly merchandising their online showroom.

One of the biggest mistakes dealers make is failing to add new, relevant content to their websites each month, and one of the greatest missed opportunities for new content lies within the fixed ops department. With a plethora of services offered, the average dealership only has four pages on their fixed ops services!

Other practices in place such as a fixed video strategy, a managed chat platform, and lead engagement software are non-negotaibles in your marketing budget. Below is the full list of tier one aspects of your marketing budget.

Tier Two:

Tier two of your marketing budget can be flexible depending on the market. This category takes a closer look into the way you go about interacting with market shoppers online, and includes tools such as Google AdWords and social media advertising. A full list of the tier two marketing tools can be found below.

Tier Three:

Tier three of the spreadsheet consists of other support tools including SEO, reputation management, email marketing, and third party leads as shown below. This is the most flexible tier, and should be adjusted to compliment your tier one and tier two marketing efforts.

The experimental section includes strategies such as Pandora radio and pop-up website offers.

Proceeding this is an allocation for offline media including radio, TV, and newspaper at a budget of  $100 per vehicle. Finally, dealers are able to easily view their projected budget, followed by their available balance (shown below) which could be used to increase certain campaign efforts.

One thing we urge dealers to realize is that spending more doesn’t mean you’ll get more. Too often, dealers spend money on third party leads when they are not optimizing the leads they already have. When increasing budgets, be weary of programmatic displays that swarmed by bots. Instead, consider investing more in a robust social media effort.

Remember, all aspects of the spreadsheet automatically change based on the amount per vehicle you wish to spend. For for your own copy of this spreadsheet, email Brian at Brian@pcgmailer.com.

Email Grab Bag Question:

“My website platform doesn’t have heat mapping software, which third party platform should I use?”

We recommend using www.crazyegg.com to get an idea where your consumers are clicking. Many times, web pages become cluttered with too many buttons and calls to action.

Analyzing what your consumers are and aren’t engaging with can help you optimize your web pages for not only your budget, but for design as well.

Maximizing your marketing budget can be extremely difficult. For more information, watch the full episode of Auto Marketing Now with Brian Pasch.

About the Author

PCG Digital Marketing is an award winning digital agency headquartered in Eatontown, NJ. We help our clients get found online through innovative search, social and online advertising campaigns.