Dealerships are busy places, and it is common for management to focus their time on customers already in the showroom instead of developing the right marketing plans to reach new ones. This oversight often leads to generic, untailored campaigns that target no one in particular, and this “one size fits all” approach typically reaps minimal benefits. 

Instead, dealers should work with their sales and marketing teams to find the ideal target audience and figure out what they want. This strategy requires developing car buyer personas, which dealers use to understand their target customers’ common characteristics. 

This article discusses the benefits of car buyer personas, and the steps dealers can take to create the best ones. 

What is a Car Buyer Persona? 

A car buyer persona is a fictional character that symbolizes how customers interact with a dealership and what type of vehicles they prefer.  

Dealers can research potential customers (as discussed below) before creating this persona to ensure it correctly represents their target audience. By next personifying this information, dealers can better understand the needs and desires of would-be customers and gain insights into their experiences and habits. 

Why are Cay Buyer Personas Important? 

 
The persona can help dealers better understand their audience. Knowing what potential buyers want is crucial when designing a customer journey, determining what cars to put on the lot, and developing an excellent customer service process that outperforms competitors. 

More specifically, dealers can realistically expect the following results from building personas: 

• Prioritizing specific customer demands 
• Developing a better sense of the customer’s perspective 
• Making better marketing decisions 
• Keeping the dealership brand relevant 
• Preventing common drawbacks after launching a campaign 

Marketing teams can communicate research results to management more effectively using a buyer persona, which is especially helpful to ensure everyone is on the same page when dealing with several groups within the dealership.
 

4 Steps to Creating Car Buyer Personas 

1. Create a Survey with Relevant Questions 

Dealers should ask pertinent questions to help them learn more about their target market. They should draw attention to that audience’s main goals, concerns, and pain points. The survey should also be brief and straightforward – asking too many questions could turn people away.  

These questions help dealers understand what prospective customers are looking for in a new dealership and identify potential deal-breakers. 

2. Post the Survey in a Prominent Place  

A survey that no one fills out serves no purpose. As such, dealers must advertise it where customers can see it to gather the information necessary to create the personas. A great starting point is posting the survey on the dealership’s website and social media page. 

3. Review the Collected Information  

Dealers can use the data in their favor once customers have supplied helpful information about their goals and expectations. Once the dealer collects the responses and ingests them, they can search for and find recurring patterns that lead to the most accurate customer persona. 

4. Create the Persona  

Lastly, dealers can create a detailed persona based on research findings that embody the most common customer responses. Dealers should also mention the essential demographics of their users and their goals, pain points, and pre-purchase barriers. 

Leveraging Your Car Buyer Personas Requires the Marketing Solutions 

OEMs are not the only auto industry participants that use car buyer personas. Developing an archetype of their ideal customer is also helpful for dealers and dealer groups. Personas are one of the most crucial components in product development and marketing strategy.  

Without one, you might run a flawed marketing initiative that addresses an unspecific and biased subset of the target market, and communicating to the wrong audiences results in wasted resources. 

However, your customer personas are only as valuable as your means of reaching the target audience successfully. You need to invest in the industry’s top lead and demand generation solutions that help you find and interact with the customers most likely to buy from your lot. 

Contact us today and learn how Affinitiv’s propriety marketing technologies can help you leverage car buyer personas more effectively and attract high-quality leads to your showroom.