LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. — In an automotive climate where dealer profits are shrinking and vehicle advertising costs remain high, Black Book announced a new solution that's designed to reel in advertising campaign costs while improving dealer profitability.  

On Monday, Black Book announced the release of Bullseye Prospecting, an all-in-one solution designed to help dealers and their marketing agency partners automate customer campaigns. Initial tests of the solution, according to Black Book, have shown that the solution reduced costs per car sold by 30%.  

“With Bullseye Prospecting, dealers and their marketing agencies can leverage true economies of scale by pulling from either template campaigns or customer builds if they choose,” said Jared Kalfus, senior vice president of sales for Black Book. “Bullseye Prospecting is designed to level the playing field for dealers of all sizes and geographies, with the power to drastically reduce costs and improve the bottom line.”

According to a recent Henderson, Hutcherson and McCullough’s auto dealer economic outlook, dealer gross profit has fallen from 13.5% to 13.3%. At the same time, the research firm Statista has found that the advertising cost per vehicle still remains high. It also found that as the size of a dealership goes down, the cost per vehicle goes up. Average-size dealerships selling between 150-399 vehicles annually spend $616 per vehicle, while a smaller dealership selling 1-149 vehicles annually spends $862.

The company states that Bullseye Prospecting will reduce campaign costs by reducing the amount of vendors and marketing partners a dealership needs to interact with. Each vendor a dealership works with has their own markup that increases the overall cost of production, according to Black Book. By circumventing more of these vendors, production costs go down and, with these savings, profits should go up.