As a dealership, you are constantly pulled in different directions regarding your customer experience – from your regional marketing association, corporate brand, or your internal marketing teams. If you’re also working with a marketing agency (or agencies), things can get complicated.

Your OEM provides you with sales and marketing materials that help you succeed, all with the expectation that they can maintain some control over what’s sent to the end customer. But ultimately your dealership owns the customer relationship (and the lists!). How do you balance your dealership’s needs with the demands from your OEM so that everyone wins?

There are many reasons to defer to your OEM’s influence – they provide messaging that’s consistent with brand image, they coordinate offers between the national and local level, and they exert quality control in marketing and advertising. However, in the end, the OEM can only win if you, as a dealership, are successful in making a sale.

A new class of customer engagement tools is emerging, and they’re designed specifically to address the problems you’re already all too familiar with. They can enable your dealership and your brand to work cooperatively on marketing campaigns.

For example, your OEM might provide templates that show your leading sedan both driving in the snow AND driving on the beach, which allows you as a dealership to select the imagery most appropriate to your location and your customers’ preferences. If you’re located in Florida, you probably don’t want to send your customers and prospects an offer on snow tires or winter wiper blades.

The modern customer engagement platform also helps you maintain control over your customer lists. You’ve worked hard to attract shoppers, assemble and nurture your prospects, and retain your owner base – you don’t want to share those names with the competing dealerships under your OEM.

With this new kind of tool, you can control your customer, lead, and response data, and your OEM’s marketing team can provide you with creative content and the latest brand-sponsored offers without having access to your database.

When done right, customer engagement tools provide the best of both worlds for you and your OEM.