HOW TO USE AAAA CAR PARC TO POWER YOUR ADVERTISING Data. It sounds boring, right? But what if that data could help you save a fortune on your advertising bill, by allowing you to target exactly the right potential customers with exactly the right message to get them through your workshop door? Suddenly, data is a much more interesting idea. It’s something that has the potential to transform the efficiency of your advertising and boost your turnover. What if we told you it was also very easy to do? And that many Capricorn Members were already using this data and reaping the benefits? You’d think about it, right? In this article we’ll explain exactly how those Capricorn Members are using Australian Automotive Aftermarket Association (AAAA) Car Parc tool to target their advertising in an incredibly efficient way, and how you can do it, too.
H o w Ca r Pa rc w o r k s a n d t h e d ata av a i l a b l e
AAAA’s Car Parc is an interactive tool that generates a customized report to help you find out what vehicles are the most popular in your area. You can use that data to help with all kinds of business planning — not just advertising, but even things like which spare parts to keep in stock and which training to invest in for your team. It uses actual statewide and national demographic data. At a click of a button you can get detailed information about the cars being used in any local government area in the country. It’s also stunningly simple to use. You simply choose a postcode and Car Parc generates a series of graphical reports with incredibly useful data. Let’s look at an example of the data available, using the postcode for Darren and Cathy’s workshop — 3165.
Meet Cathy from Bentleigh Automotive Services Darren and Cathy Shaw operate Bentleigh Automotive Services, a Bosch Service centre, in Bentleigh East, in Victoria. They’re no strangers to the industry, having previously owned Malvern Auto Electrical.
Darren had expanded the Malvern business to include mechanical servicing and when the Bentleigh auto electrical business joined the Bosch network, Bosch asked him to do the same at his new workshop. “Because we started a business without any servicing work, and that’s what we were concentrating on, we used the Car Parc tool to look up the most popular cars in our area and target all our marketing and advertising,” Cathy said. “Using Car Parc we can look up our council area, see the most popular cars and see how that’s changed over the past five years. “The most popular cars are Toyotas and Mazdas but now because we’re a Bosch workshop and we’d like to concentrate on European servicing — and Mercedes and BMWs are the ninth and tenth most popular cars in our council area in the Car Parc data. “But the tool also shows us that in a nearby council, which we’re also targeting, Mercedes is number four and BMW is higher up. So, we look at that and we know we can get a lot of work from that council area, because we’re quite close to the boundary.” That little piece of information — that the council next door has a lot more European cars than their local area — helps Darren and Cathy decide where to spend their hard-earned advertising dollars. They know they’ll get much more bang for their buck by targeting potential customers on the other side of the council boundary.
8 CAPRICORN IGNITION APRIL 2021
As Cathy said, most vehicles in the local area are Toyotas and Mazdas. There is a good number of VWs and a handful of Mercedes and BMWs. But this simple slide tells you a lot more than that. By comparing the 2014 and 2019 figures, you can also see the trends. The number of Toyotas and Mazdas are growing, while the number of Holdens is shrinking. In some good news for Darren and Cathy, the trends show the number of European cars is also rising.
