CARY, N.C. -

Driving down the road. Watching television commercials. Reading the newspaper. Checking the mail. Surfing the Web. Consumers are inundated by advertisements and marketing campaigns from every imaginable angle by a seemingly innumerable and constantly growing number of companies. 

While it may seem simpler to take a “carpet bombing” or blanket approach for your advertisement efforts, you can save yourself a lot of money and your customers a lot of grief if you target your advertisements for when they are not only more likely to read them, but also when they need them. So let’s focus on the medium most invested in by franchised dealerships in 2014: the Internet. 

According to the NADA Data 2014 report issued by the National Automobile Dealers Association, the total dealership advertising expenditure for the more than 16,000 franchised dealers in the United States bordered on roughly $8 billion last year. 

Franchised dealers invested, on average, 26.3 percent of their total advertising funds into the online market, more than any other area of advertisement. Other areas of advertising expenditure, according to NADA, include television (23.1 percent), radio (15.8 percent), newspaper (14.9 percent), direct mail (10.7 percent) and other mediums (9.2 percent). 

And this doesn’t take into account the numerous independent dealers.

So not only is the playground huge, but there are also a ton of players involved. Much like has been the case for advertising in the past, the location of an advertisement is just as important as the quality of its message. 

In the past, when you thought about advertising, you had to plan where it was physically printed. Billboards. Newspapers. Magazines. Then came TV spots and, now, the freshest medium is online.

What Are Customers Using to Shop?

According to Autotrader’s Car Buyer of the Future Study presented in New York in March, as technology changes, customers are changing, and what they’re using to research and shop for vehicles continues to move away from more traditional mediums, like print and radio, toward the web.

One of the findings of the study fleshes out a key statistic: 42 percent of new and used shoppers are now using multiple devices, a combination of items such as their desktops, laptops, tablets and cell phones. This is a trend that has increased from 23 percent of shoppers in 2013 and 32 percent of shoppers in 2014. Autotrader predicts this multi-device usage will be as high as 80 percent by 2020.

Among multi-device users, those that use their mobile devices use them 64 percent of the time, further enforcing that the ways dealers connect with customers need to be compatible with multiple devices, especially mobile phones.

“While there is good work going on right now to adapt decades-old sales processes, consumers are telling us that we as an industry are not moving fast enough,” said Jared Rowe, Autotrader’s president. “By recognizing — and embracing — the need for change, we have a tremendous opportunity to surprise and delight our consumers.”

Check back with Auto Remarketing tomorrow for Part 2 of the series, where we will delve further into what sources consumers find the most influential.