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 Forgive me if you’ve heard this analogy before, but it’s one of my favorites. Let’s say you and I were in business together and we recently opened a Golf Pro Shop. We desperately need to get customers through the doors and make the cash register ring, so we turn our attention to our marketing plan.  

We know that going after everyone utilizing mass media will cost a lot of money and won’t be quantifiable. Therefore, it’s extremely unlikely to generate an ROI on dollars spent, so we stay away from radio, TV and billboards.  This leads us to look at buying a list of prospects to market to. 

The market research we’ve done has shown that the average person who plays golf is a male between the ages of 30 & 55. Playing golf requires some free time, so parents with young kids may not be the best fit. Golf isn’t cheap, so prospects will need to have an annual income that’s over $55,000. We also know they need to live close to the shop, or within 15-miles.  

All of this psychographic and demographic data sounds precise, and this is a list we could purchase and market to. We move forward with our strategy and send out a direct mail piece with a great call-to-action, but it yields zero results. 

Then it hits us, and we recognize one huge flaw. The overwhelming majority of people we were marketing to don’t play golf! Only approximately 8% of Americans play golf, and if a person doesn’t play golf, they won’t buy golf equipment from us. No amount of marketing will change this fact, no matter how good or consistent our ads are. 

We then ask ourselves one of the most important questions before any marketing campaign, “who is most likely to buy from us?” Our answer is amazingly simple… people who play golf. We have a good shot at getting a golfer to respond to our marketing, so we move forward with this strategy. We don’t get mesmerized by all the bright and shiny psychographics and demographics, we decide to get a list of golfers. 

We send out the same direct mail piece with a great call-to-action to our new list, and this time it generates a 5% response rate and an incredible ROI on dollars spent. 

Remember the four fundamentals of marketing?  1. Audience (most likely to buy from you); 2. Media (most likely to reach your chosen audience); 3. Message (tell them what you want them to do); 4. Timing (have an event and implement drip-marketing). It all starts with choosing the right audience. The right media, message and timing to the wrong list will fail every time.

For a powersports dealer, the right audience is powersports enthusiasts. This is a niche industry where only approximately 6% of people ride what we sell (less than the number who play golf). People who don’t ride won’t respond to your marketing or buy anything from you. Doesn’t it just makes sense to spend your limited budget marketing to those who will? 

Powersports enthusiasts fall into three groups:

1. Active Customers – They’ve purchased from you within a 12-month period. 

2. Inactive Customers – Their last purchase was over 12-months ago. You’ve lost them and they need to be reactivated. 

3. Conquest prospects - These are people who live in your backyard, ride what you sell, buy what you sell, but they’ve never purchased anything from you.   

These three groups of people are where the majority of your sales across all departments will come from over the next 12 months. You need to reach out to them every month and invite them into the dealership. Inviting them to the dealership every month will increase their frequency of visits to your dealership (instead of a competitor), which also increases how much they buy from you (increases annual customer value).  

Marketing to this audience will not only increase sales from past and current customers, it’s also the best strategy for generating new customers for your dealership every single month. And it’s 100% quantifiable.

Want to know how many Active Customers, Inactive Customers and Conquest Prospects your dealership has? Call 1-877-242-4472 for a free Data Analysis. 

-Tory