This transcript was generated with the help of AI and may contain some errors.

Bennett Clark [00:00:00]:

Set aside a little bit of money in three months and look at your lead gen, your lead quality and then ultimately units sold that come from that channel. It’s a, it can be a pretty low risk bet when it comes to making sure that you as a dealer or as an OEM are showing up where your customers are shopping for your product outside of just your website, your dealer site or paid ads or email or things like that.

 

Joe Mills [00:00:25]:

Welcome to The Inventory, the show designed to give OEMs and dealers like you, actionable insight on channel marketing. From co-op programs to product portfolio design, we’ll arm you with the information you need to excel to enter new markets successfully, to build lasting OEM dealer relationships, and ultimately, to move more inventory. Let’s get started. Hey everyone. On this episode of The Inventory, we are joined by Bennett Clark, Senior Paid Media Manager here at Element Three and we are going to talk all about marketplace advertising. We’re going to run through what marketplace advertising is, how to think about it within your customer journey, the use case for it at an OEM and a dealer level, and how to actually start doing it. Hope you enjoy.

 

Joe Mills [00:01:06]:

Bennett, thanks for coming on the show, man.

 

Bennett Clark [00:01:08]:

Absolutely, thanks for having me.

 

Joe Mills [00:01:09]:

So today we are going to talk about marketplace advertising and just to set the ground for us, what is marketplace advertising?

 

Bennett Clark [00:01:19]:

Yeah Joe, it’s a great question. So marketplace advertising is essentially this idea. There’s all these different third-party platforms that sit out in the market, whether you’re in RV, marine, power, sports, automotive, pretty much anything with wheels or requires a driver. And there’s marketplaces where people are buying both new and used specific units for these that take up a ton of search traffic inside of these industries. And so it’s really just a place to house inventory, to move inventory and promote inventory to individuals actively shopping for them.

 

Joe Mills [00:01:49]:

Cool. So you said actively shopping at the end. That says to me that this is pretty far down in the customer’s buying journey. Is that accurate or how do you think about where marketplace advertising fits into a traditional customer journey?

 

Bennett Clark [00:02:02]:

Yeah, that’s a great question. We reference the Google Car Buying Study all the time around here and as we look at that we see marketplaces really starting to emerge. 2019, 2020 and really is a huge part of how individuals were shopping, particularly in these tangential industries outside of automotive, which is typically pretty ahead of the curve. And really what we see here is that individuals are coming to these like, last moment prior to going to a dealership. The reason for that is in a lot of these industries where it’s difficult to house inventory on a website. Or at times it can be kind of a clunky digital experience. These marketplaces really kind of emerge as the source of inventory for a lot of these OEMs and at times dealers as well, for individuals to consider what’s out there and then decide the dealer that they want to go to based off the inventory they can see on these individual sites.

 

Joe Mills [00:02:50]:

So instead of being like, I want to go to the Chevy dealer that’s next to my house, I might say, well, the Chevy dealer that’s 10 miles away has a unit that I actually want and it now drives which dealer I’m going to.

 

Bennett Clark [00:03:04]:

Absolutely. I mean, I think about your own car buying experience. You didn’t look up and go through your OEM’s website to buy your truck. You looked for a truck that you wanted, you found the truck that you wanted, and then you went to the dealer that had the truck that you wanted. Yep. All that happens really within a marketplace specific in these third party ecosystems that can happen agnostic to OEM or dealer as well.

 

Joe Mills [00:03:27]:

Got it. So I think to help further define the marketplace, then, like Carvana is not a marketplace.

 

Bennett Clark [00:03:31]:

Yeah. So if we look at like a cars.com, autotrader, things like that. Places where both dealers and OEMs, primarily dealers though, are housing inventory and trying to list inventory. So as individuals are looking for those, it just gives dealers another place to promote their product, another place to house their product so they can start to move more individuals as leads from these marketplaces into their dealership ecosystem.

 

Joe Mills [00:03:55]:

Got it. So at the end of the day, the point though is to still drive the foot traffic and drive even like a unit sale.

 

Bennett Clark [00:04:02]:

Yeah.

 

Joe Mills [00:04:02]:

So pretty far down the funnel, great. That makes a bunch of sense. Imagine I’m a, I’m an OEM. Imagine I’m a dealer. Let’s do it for each of them.

 

Bennett Clark [00:04:10]:

Yeah.

 

Joe Mills [00:04:11]:

What’s the case for an OEM to support marketplace advertising and what’s the case for a dealer to support it?

 

Bennett Clark [00:04:17]:

Yeah. Let’s start on the OEM front. So kind of the carrot for a dealer. Right. Is if I’m an OEM, I’m sitting in my headquarters and I have zero locations that I can tie a Google merchant center back to to actually like list inventory inside of Google shopping feed. And if I’m in RV and Marine, Google won’t even let me list that inventory inside of its shopping fee to begin with. So the only way for people to actually see my products that are sitting on lots is if I have an inventory tool on my website, which is usually at least a few clicks away, or for me to promote existing inventory that my dealers are already listing on these marketplaces. So a place we’ve seen an RV really effectively is that a tool called RV Trader.

 

Bennett Clark [00:04:59]:

Great little marketplace that drives a ton of search traffic in that industry. A lot of these OEMs really struggle to have inventory on their website or it’s just a more difficult digital experience. But all of their dealers are already listing all of their inventory on RV Trader. And so the OEM can really come behind and then start to supercharge those promotions by promoting individual dealer listings, particularly in areas of high inventory concentration or when the days on lot gets really high for particular model types, which allows that OEM to then really start to promote that inventory to help kind of supercharged dealer efforts in a way that’s agnostic of the digital experience that the OEM may or may not have.

 

Joe Mills [00:05:39]:

Do you see any like seasonality to that? Like, do you see OEMs pushing harder when they’re going to get close to a model year term?

 

Bennett Clark [00:05:46]:

Yeah, yeah, it’s a great question. We’ve not seen it in terms of like a model year term, but we have seen it in terms of actual seasons. So particularly with like these outdoor toy-specific industries where things get really interesting with that as we start to think about people aren’t buying as many boats or RVs in the winter makes sense. Where we typically see that like web traffic would be seasonal on a website. And it’s kind of a more gentle curve in terms of seasonality. What we see in these marketplaces is they are extremely finicky when it comes to seasonality. So it’s really a strike while the iron’s hot type of situation. Again, people buy these things year-round.

 

Bennett Clark [00:06:19]:

But as we think about seasonality and the impact of that, promoting a bunch of RV units in December, kind of a tough market. Whereas if we do it in May or June, as the season’s picking up, all of a sudden there, those units are moving really, really quickly off of both marketplaces and the dealer lot as well. Cool.

 

Joe Mills [00:06:36]:

So it makes a lot of sense from the OEM side. I’m helping my dealers move inventory, which is ultimately the currency with dealers. If I’m a dealer, why don’t I just let the OEM do it? Is there a reason for me to be bought into this too?

 

Bennett Clark [00:06:48]:

There’s a few. So the first is really if we think about kind of the way in which dealers are receiving leads and are Accepting help from the OEM. It makes a lot of sense for a dealer to have, like, a really strong market presence for what is available in their area. So again, if boats, heavy equipment, commercial vehicles, or even RV as well, like, the dealer really needs to make sure that their inventory is listed in their area so that all of these marketplaces that individuals are using as a part of their customer journey, that the dealer is showing up inside of that. So our classic Bucky’s RGB example, if Bucky’s RV is based out of Oklahoma, it makes a ton of sense for Bucky to make sure that all of his inventory is listed on RV Trader that he’s trying to move. Because if it’s not, how are people going to know that it’s there? It may be embedded on his website somewhere, but that requires Bucky to spend a ton of money on paid search to be competitive in that area or have really strong organic content, which is also expensive to try and move up the search rankings. So having inventory inside of a tool like an RV Trader, an RVT, GoRollick, allows Bucky to then come in to this ecosystem and have just a third place to start to accept leads who are inquiring on units that are actually on his lot.

 

Joe Mills [00:08:02]:

So what it sounds like in super layman’s terms is just skip the line.

 

Bennett Clark [00:08:08]:

Absolutely.

 

Joe Mills [00:08:09]:

You don’t have to do all the work to have strong SEO, and you don’t need to create all this expensive organic content. You don’t need to run your own SEM to get to the top of the list. Just get on the marketplaces, GoRollick, RV Trader, et cetera, and boom, you’re there.

 

Bennett Clark [00:08:22]:

Yeah. These companies spend millions of dollars promoting their. Their marketplaces. So we look at like RV trader or CTT or Commercial Truck Trader, things like that. These companies are spending millions of dollars on paid search and other advertising mediums to take traffic both from OEMs and dealers in these industries. So at this point, it really makes a ton of sense, like for dealers to. Yes, you should do localized paid search, you should do localized SEO. And also you should take advantage of the beast that is.

 

Bennett Clark [00:08:49]:

Yeah. That is these marketplaces, and make sure that individuals have access to your inventory as they’re actively shopping.

 

Joe Mills [00:08:54]:

Yeah, jump on those coattails, baby.

 

Bennett Clark [00:08:56]:

Absolutely.

 

Joe Mills [00:08:57]:

Okay, cool. I’m. I’m bought in as an OEM. I’m bought in as a dealer. How do I actually actualize this? How do I get it into my system?

 

Bennett Clark [00:09:05]:

Yeah, absolutely. So there’s kind of, again, we’ll split into the two branches there, right. So from an OEM standpoint, just take an inventory. What, which of your dealers are listing inventory, what are they listing and how long has it been sitting there? Those inputs give you a lot of options when it comes to do you want to promote that inventory? Specifically, do you want to start thinking about a rebate program to move individual pieces of inventory that have been on these tools for, you know, greater than 150 days or things like that. So those are like two really tactical options from an OEM standpoint. And then looking over at the dealer standpoint, just making sure that that inventory is listing. 

 

Bennett Clark [00:09:39]:

Typically the, this is a pretty cheap way for dealers to house inventory. It functions a very like software as a service type model. And so dealers can list inventory pretty inexpensively and then can choose to either promote models inside of that, so kind of create like a Yelp-like experience where you know, you have the promoted restaurant at the top of the feed or you can just house it in and of itself and individuals will find it as they’re searching for, you know, a 25-foot pontoon boat that’s brand new and able to shop that against competitor OEMs and additionally competitor dealers based off of the zip code or current location.

 

Joe Mills [00:10:16]:

Great. If I’m doing this for the first time, so I don’t know how it’s going to work for, for me in my instance, how do you balance that risk? Or do you have recommendations on how I would balance that or like dip my toe without, you know, putting 20% of my advertising budget into this channel? Like how would I do that safely?

 

Bennett Clark [00:10:33]:

Yeah, no, it’s a great question. We, we love the world of pilots here at Element Three and I think that this is a perfect example of set aside a little bit of money, set aside three months and try it as a pilot. Your buying cycle is typically going to be longer if you’re selling something that needs to be driven. So set aside a little bit of money in three months and look at your lead gen, your lead quality and then ultimately units sold that come from that channel. It’s a, it can be a pretty low risk bet when it comes to making sure that you as a dealer or as an OEM or showing up where your customers are shopping for your product outside of just your website, your dealer site, or paid ads or email or things like that.

 

Joe Mills [00:11:12]:

You hear a lot from marketers like, oh, you know, it’s hard to tie marketing back to a sale. You just mentioned in the pilot that ultimately units sold is a good metric. Because it’s so far down in the journey. Do you feel like if you’re the marketer for that, that account that you are, you’re cool tying your performance back to a sale on this one?

 

Bennett Clark [00:11:30]:

Yeah, yeah. It’s the beauty of these marketplaces because it is so low funnel and individuals are literally kicking tires or whatever on these units. The thing that gets really fun is you get to kind of tie sales back in two ways, both from a lead attribution standpoint. So both the OEM and the dealer can look at the individual lead. So, you know, seeing Joe, you coming through as a lead on a 15 foot travel trailer, we can say, great, okay, Joe wants this travel trailer. This is great. Well, the OEM will see that if their tech set up properly through warranty registration or some sort of sales right back. And then the dealer sees that too.

 

Bennett Clark [00:12:05]:

They see, hey, Joe came through from RV Trader and bought this travel trailer. That’s awesome. And so both of those things help validate that program on the dealer standpoint too. You also can look at like just the VIN numbers you’re promoting and the sales coming from those. So there’s kind of like a little bit of yin and yang that work really well together from a sales attribution standpoint.

 

Joe Mills [00:12:26]:

Awesome. Well, Bennett, thanks so much for the rundown on marketplace advertising. Anything else you want to say before we go?

 

Bennett Clark [00:12:31]:

Yeah, I think that’s great. Again, just want to reiterate how prominent these platforms are inside of a customer journey. And so as we start to think about marketing deployment, making sure that that deployment is aligned with customer journey is kind of paramount focus to driving business impact from marketing efforts.

 

Joe Mills [00:12:49]:

Right on. Thanks, man.

 

Bennett Clark [00:12:50]:

Yeah, thanks guys.

 

Joe Mills [00:12:51]:

Element Three is a full-service marketing agency that bridges the gap between OEMs and their dealers. For more insights on how to go to market well in the dealer model, head to elementthree.com.