The biggest mistake dealerships make when it comes to advertising is to SPRAY and PRAY. That is, they spread their ad budget around numerous media options—covering all the bases—and do a little here and a little there, then pray that something works. This has actually become the de facto standard for media budget allocation over the years.
The contrarian approach, and the approach that results in a tremendous amount of traffic being driven from advertising, is to dominate a single media first, before moving on to a second or third media.
Why does this work? Because most advertising media require an advertiser to reach a certain threshold or critical mass before they start to be really effective. Most local advertising absolutely fails to ever reach this threshold, so it absolutely fails to be effective. Also present in every media is a sweet spot—where the return on investment is at its highest—and a point of diminishing marginal returns—where the return on investment starts to drop. The goal should be to determine the sweet spot in any media and invest up to, but not beyond, that point in order to maximize the traffic that results from that advertising—before adding any other media.
You’ll know this is working when people tell you they hear or see your ads everywhere. When you hit critical mass in any given media, your message becomes ubiquitous and omni-present, and there’s no escape!