The Conquest Myth: Stop Chasing Everyone – Focus on Buyers Who Matter

Walk into almost any dealership marketing meeting and odds are you will hear the word conquesting at some point.

“We need more conquest business.”

“We need new customers.”

“We need to take share from the dealer across the street.”

Nothing wrong with any of those sentiments. In fact, conquering other dealers and taking market share is an important part of any retail automotive business and it always will be. The issue with conquest marketing is that dealers set their sights too broadly if they set sights at all. They focus on reaching more people rather than reaching the right people.

In my experience, dealerships across the country are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on conquest marketing with little to show in return. Not because dealers are not spending enough, but because they are focusing on too much on geography, and not customer behaviors.

The “Everyone is a Prospect” Fallacy

Dealers define their conquest markets based on distance criteria. Typically, 20 or 30 miles, depending on how aggressive the dealership is or the size of the DMA.  On paper that makes sense. If your DMA covers 200,000 people, why not attempt to conquest the whole lot of the entire area.  The goal should be conquering the people that are actually in-market, not the entire DMA, unless you have the budget and inventory to go big.

Knowing that someone bought a new car six months ago, has owned a BMW for 12 years, or has tier one credit and history of leases are attributes that matter and move the needle. But dealers are buying millions in media across multiple platforms to talk to all of them with generic ad copy that delivers the same message. 

Think of it like a fishing analogy. Imagine you open a fishing business, and the marketing department decides the best way to increase volume is to cast their nets across an entire ocean. Yes, you will catch some fish, but you’ll spend an incredible amount of time, energy, and money searching in areas that were never likely to produce results. That is conquest marketing in a nutshell.

Conquest marketing is about getting in front of the right consumer with the right message before the competition does. We have to work smarter and leverage the incredible datasets we have to produce better outcomes. 

Market Share Is Not Created Equally

I have seen too many dealerships that function as if every competitor is an equal opportunity. They are not. The goal is not to reach more people. One mistake I frequently see is assuming that every competing dealership represents the same opportunity. They do not. A dealer might be obsessed with taking share from the largest competitor in the market while ignoring several smaller competitors that present much easier opportunities.

If your dealership has 12% market share and the biggest competitor has 25%, it is tempting to focus your energies on them. But if that dealer has fantastic customer retention, a well-trained and tenured sales team, and more repeat customers, is it worth your time to conquest them?

What if another competitor has terrible retention and even worse customer service? That’s an easy mark and if your dealership has a lower prices or fees, you may be able to get in and cut through the noise, especially if provided a better experience. Shoppers will shop prices, but when provide a 5-star experience you build a business that becomes a legacy that feeds itself through loyal customers, repeat purchases, and referrals that no advertising budget can buy.

The biggest opportunities in conquest marketing are not always obvious. The best dealer operators I have worked with understand that. They spend time figuring out where customers are most vulnerable to switching, not just focusing on where the potential customers live. That is the difference between going through the motions and operating at a higher level. Market intelligence matters!

Buying Signals Matter More Than Demographics

Traditional automotive marketing has relied heavily on demographics. Age. Income. Home value. Marital status. All of those are crucial factors in conquest marketing, but they tell you very little about if someone is planning to buy versus when someone is truly in-market. If two households have the exact same buying signal, but one is going to buy a car next month and the other bought a car last week, would you market to them the same way? Absolutely not. Treating them as equal prospects creates enormous waste, yet the norm in our business.

When dealerships begin to factor in ownership data, vehicle age, equity, service behavior, lease maturity, etc., conquest marketing becomes exponentially more effective. Instead of talking to everyone, you can laser in on the few that are actually going to buy a car.

The Most Overlooked Opportunity: Defectors

Let me say it LOUDER for everyone in the back! The most undervalued opportunity is understanding why those clients defected to another dealer. I do not think people give this enough thought. Think about it. How many car dealerships do you know spend more time chasing their leads than trying to understand why their previous customers left?

Before dealerships begin to spend thousands and tens of thousands of dollars on conquering another dealership’s customers, they should look internally and ask themselves why their customers are leaving in the first place. Are you not following up with customers after the sale? Do you have poor or zero retention strategies?

Did they not want the car they bought? A purchase experience that did not meet expectations. There is usually a reason why customers are defecting to other dealerships. Understanding that can unlock a ton of value for dealerships that are not already doing it and reveal opportunities that no conquest campaign can solve.

 Conquest and Retention Are Stronger Together

Conquest and retention are connected. Let me break that down for you. Many dealerships treat retention and conquest as if they are entirely separate initiatives, but they’re not.  Having strong retention strategies leads to better opportunities because if you have a strong customer base, you have a wealth of information and data about those customers, as well as a network of advocates who can refer to friends and family. Satisfied customers become advocates. Advocates create introductions.

Those advocates then become conquest opportunities because they can lead new customers to the dealership. Action creates action! If existing customers are happy and are referred by other existing customers, conquesting becomes much easier. 

I have seen some of the best conquest strategies from dealer groups that did not focus on conquering new customers. That is because they understood that conquest selling should be an outgrowth of outstanding retention strategies, not the other way around. They view it as an outcome of operational excellence. When existing customers are treated well, conquest often follows naturally.

The Dealers Winning Today Think Smaller

This may sound counter intuitive, but the most successful conquest strategies are the ones that emphasize being good at focused initiatives rather than initiatives that try to touch everyone. Rather than conquering everyone within a 30-mile radius, conquest marketing should have a dialed-in approach to attack extremely specific segments. Rather than maximizing impressions, try maximizing relevance.

Rather than trying to conquer everyone, conquer the people most likely to switch. Rather than chasing everyone, concentrate on being better at the people that are chasing you. These are not flashy or exciting strategies, but they tend to get remarkable results for dealerships that really want to level up their game.

Final Thought

Any dealership that is worth its salt wants to conquest more customers. There is nothing wrong with wanting more business. That is the name of the game. The issue is that most dealerships chase quantity over quality when it comes to conquering other dealers.  Successful conquest marketing is about being laser-focused on understanding the customers most likely to change their behavior.

It is about listening to the signals those customers send and doing whatever it takes to capture their business. The most successful dealerships are similar to those most successful people I know, they always seem to listen more than they speak. The dealerships that consistently win market share are rarely the ones shouting the loudest. They are the ones listening most carefully to the signals customers are already giving them. When that happens, conquest stops feeling like a guessing game.

That is when a true strategy emerges, and results accelerate.