CDK Global Upgrades Marketing Platform with Audience Targeting and Personalization

CDK Global has announced its new Audience Management tool, a digital marketing package that utilizes sophisticated targeting technologies to provide automotive dealers and dealer groups with personalized marketing abilities.

Personalized web experiences were first developed by major consumer shopping portals such as Amazon, Macy’s and Zappos as a way to increase sales by anticipating shopper needs and presenting content likely to aligned with those needs. This technology has been late to come to automotive shopping because much of the shopper behavior needed to feed these personalization engines occurs not on the dealer site but on OEM and third party sites. CDK claims to have cracked this problem with data sharing relationships with OEMs and 3rd parties that allows them to dynamically change what a consumer sees on a dealer website based upon what they have shopped elsewhere.

CDK states the Audience Management solution provides a personalized, individual experience for each shopper, thereby acting as a robust targeting tool to be used by automotive dealers and marketers. It’s become clear that targeted marketing is a superior choice for all types of businesses, as it provides consumers with a shopping experience that is catered to their specific interests, lifestyle and purchasing style. Now, with this new tool, automotive digital marketers will be able to benefit from its ability to track individual shopper behavior both on and off dealership sites. The Audience Management tool will learn from this behavior and subsequently deliver personalized content to dealership visitors, on any device. Marketers’ advertising endeavors will react with consumers’ behaviors in real-time to deliver the most appropriate information, which can dramatically increase the effectiveness of a marketers’ messaging objectives.

“Personalization is a good thing,” explained Scott Mathews, President of CDK Digital Marketing. “If you’ve visited a website like Amazon and been offered a recommendation of what they think you’d like, that’s personalization. Customers get the content they want to see, making for a better shopping experience, and dealerships get to cater to an audience of one. It’s becoming a standard practice that customers expect, and it’s time to apply this to the automotive retail space.”

By using this technology, the potential is for dealers to target and engage their most profitable audiences with a digital showroom that is updated in real-time and is customized specifically for each consumer, based on the vehicles that they are most interested in purchasing. To take full advantage of this technology dealers will need to invest to decide which audiences they want to target and what content and offers they think are going to be most effective.

In other sectors of retail, consumer come to expect personalization whether they realize it or not. People experience personalized marketing when they visit websites such as Amazon, Netflix and Google and these vendors report increases in purchase value per visit of up to 20 percent when personalization is enabled. As a new technology in Automotive, the impact on sales conversion is not yet known, but it is an innovative new approach to service increasingly demanding consumers.