If your marketing efforts are focused on car buyers who have already narrowed down their options, you're missing valuable opportunities. Here's how to get your make and model on a car buyer's short list of candidates.

You're at the grocery store and as you finish checking out, you walk by the magazine rack. Odd, why not put it before the checkout counter? According to many marketers today, you're not guaranteed to be a shopper until you demonstrate a true shopping behavior. Sure, you put stuff in your cart earlier on, but you could've put it all back. We need to see you're serious about spending money!

There are all sorts of new-fangled purchase funnels. The reality is that while consumers have altered their behavior to accommodate using new media, there are still basic pillars and mental checkpoints that occur within the purchase process. A consumer must be aware of a product, consider buying that product, intend to buy that product and then buy that product. Unfortunately, retailers have recently moved toward a model where "awareness" and "purchase" are the only two stages that get attention. Forget the middle, we don't have time! That's like drinking the last drop of a milkshake and demanding a bigger straw be built rather than realizing it's time to go make more milkshakes. It's a long, expensive route to build a bigger straw to just get one more drop of milkshake when the same expense could be used to make a completely new glassful -- and be sipped with the same straw. Note to straw manufacturers, BT is not your thing.

One of the verticals in which this is most commonly demonstrated is automotive, where there used to be three "tiers." Heart, head, wallet. Tier I, or the OEM made the consumer fall in love with the product. Tier II, or the regional dealer associations educated the consumer on the features and the benefits and Tier III, or the local dealer, told the consumer to "buy here, buy now!" Now, the media is bought as either "brand" or "in-market." So, lots of awareness spending is done at Tier I, while Tiers II and III exclusively go after active car shoppers using tactics like BT or third-party auto sites. It's also a creative issue, where "wallet" has taken over Tiers II and III. This leaves the majority of car shoppers knowing there are really great deals -- on cars they don't necessarily care about. BT has its place and absolutely should be part of marketers' plans. It's just not everything. So, what should marketers do?

Reinstate a real mid-funnel media plan
Crashing your high-school girlfriend's wedding and holding up a 300x250 banner from the audience as she walks down the aisle (walking down the aisle is an in-market marrying behavior, marketers would say) is not the way to persuade her to marry you instead of the guy at the altar. It's not the way to get a car shopper either. Being there in the consideration process before the big event is key!

On the flip side, only 28 percent of all cars sold each year are new cars. So, hitting 85 percent of the online population at the mid-funnel is unnecessary. Hitting 30-40 percent (it's never perfect), making sure those are likely new car buyers at some point is probably a much better strategy. 

Know who likely buyers at some point are
Since someone who is likely a future car buyer has not demonstrated any shopping actions yet, automotive BT won't necessarily work. Demographics alone are too broad. Psychographic statements are only reliable if matched with panel responses, which are small samples to begin with. What is reliable, though, is knowing where these likely shoppers hang out online. New(er, anyway) services from folks like Compete, Quantcast and Hitwise enable marketers to see into current shoppers' clickstreams to understand the lifestyle patterns of these shoppers online. (Full disclosure, Beep! Automotive is operated by Goodway Group, and is partnered with Compete for data purposes.)

Look beyond on-site buying-oriented actions
For buy here/buy now advertising, measuring these actions is great. But JD Power's 2007 autoshopper.com study shows that automotive internet users who visit an OEM first, rather than later in the purchase process, are approximately three times more likely to buy their product. And, chances are good that the first visit to an OEM's site doesn't involve submitting a lead or locating a dealer. Mid-funnel marketers could look at growing first-in-clickstream shoppers, gallery views, brochure downloads and the like, and then measure this to increased lower-funnel activity conversions later on. 

A guess is that agency people will secretly applaud this article while OEM folks wonder what got into my pancakes. To make sure there is no miscommunication, the following should all still be part of any good lower-funnel marketing plan:

1. BT
2. Endemic sites
3. Buy here/buy now messaging

But making these tactics constitute the entire plan reduces the chance for a brand and its retailers to succeed. And that's not the goal for anyone. Cheers, to the under-appreciated but valuable mid-funnel!

Jay Friedman is president of Goodway 2.0 and the Beep! Automotive Network.