How to run marketing for a dealer group.
Run every rooftop to one written standard, let each store advertise its own inventory and offers on its own budget, and keep one readable record of every decision across the group. AUTONOMi runs each store as its own instance — AEGIS for the ads, AXIOM for the rules and the audit trail, ECHO for content and PRISM for customers — on a flat monthly fee per store.
Why is marketing a dealer group so hard to keep consistent?
A dealer group multiplies everything: rooftops, OEM brands, ad accounts, offers, budgets and people. Each manufacturer has its own advertising rules, each store has its own lot and its own market, and the offers that apply in one ZIP code are not the offers in the next. When every store is run by a different agency or coordinator, the standard drifts store by store — and the group finds out from a co-op rejection, a compliance complaint or a month-end overspend instead of from its own records.
How do you run marketing for a dealer group, step by step?
Five steps. The first is a decision the group makes once; the rest are how each rooftop runs to it, every day.
- Step 1AXIOM Week 1
Write one standard for every store and every brand
Agree on the rules every rooftop follows, then store them as data instead of in someone's head. AXIOM applies each manufacturer's brand guardrails to every store of that brand, and each dealership can write its own house rules in plain English ("never quote a monthly payment", "always mention our lifetime powertrain warranty") — your rules, in your words, checked on every piece of copy before it ships. Federal, state and OEM standards are the floor; the group's house rules sit on top.
- Step 2AEGIS Weeks 1–2
Let each rooftop advertise its own inventory and its own offers
A group's ads should never sell one store's car from another store's account. AEGIS reads each rooftop's live inventory from that store's own website and captures the manufacturer's offers for that rooftop's own ZIP code — there is no fallback ZIP, because the same program is priced differently by market. Each store's campaigns are built from those facts, so a Chevrolet store and a Toyota store in the same group are each advertised correctly, side by side.
- Step 3AEGIS Month 1, then monthly
Set a budget per store and let it be managed to that number
Give every rooftop its own approved monthly budget in writing. AEGIS's Strategic Advisor visits each store three times a week, reads the month, the inventory and each campaign's delivery, and sets each campaign's budget with a stated reason; spend pauses when a store reaches its approved monthly. Every store gets a monthly statement per ad platform as a PDF and CSV, so the group's controller can compare rooftops line by line.
- Step 4AXIOM From day one
Keep one auditable record across every rooftop
Every ad and landing-page assertion passes a three-stage compliance review before spend, and every dealer-impacting decision is hash-chained to the store it touched — naming who acted: a person, AEGIS acting for a named person, or the system. Ask AEGIS who changed something and why, and it answers from that store's ledger, word for word. When AEGIS finishes work requested for several stores, it sends one message naming each store's own result and records it on every store's ledger.
- Step 5ECHO Month 1–3
Give each store its own content and its own customer follow-up
Local shoppers search for the store near them, so each rooftop needs its own voice online and its own customer book. ECHO writes and publishes each store's blog and social posts from that store's inventory and offers. PRISM, AUTONOMi's own dealership CRM, keeps one customer record per person per store, follows up on inbound leads and pulls each store's DMS data in — pull-only: it reads from the DMS and doesn't write back.
What should a dealer group measure, store by store?
Spend against the approved monthly, per store
Shows which rooftops will land on budget and which are running short or running out early. The monthly statements per platform make the comparison like for like across stores.
Leads per store, by source
Read each rooftop against its own history and its own market, not against the group average — a rural single-brand store and a metro multi-brand store will never look alike.
Compliance findings and held changes
How often the review stopped or corrected something before it went live, per store and per brand. A store or brand that keeps generating findings is where the written standard needs another rule.
Decisions on the record
Whether every budget move, pause and published page has a name and a reason on the ledger. A change nobody can explain is the first sign the group's standard is being bypassed.
How does AUTONOMi price marketing for a dealer group?
As of October 2026, AUTONOMi charges a flat monthly platform fee per store — $999 (Lite), $1,999 (Platform) or $2,999 (Managed), with Enterprise priced on request — the same regardless of how much each store spends on ads, with discounts for 6- and 12-month commitments. ECHO ($1,799) and PRISM ($2,999) are priced per rooftop per month and added only where a store needs them. Groups with more than 10 rooftops can scope a customized Group Intelligence Layer with AUTONOMi staff.
Does a dealer group still need a marketing director?
Yes. AUTONOMi runs the day-to-day execution at every rooftop; a group marketing lead still owns strategy, brand direction and OEM relationships. What changes is the workload: the director sets the standard and reads the record, instead of chasing each store's agency for what changed.
What mistakes do dealer groups make with multi-store marketing?
One group-wide campaign that advertises every store's inventory from one account and one budget.
Offers copied from a sister store in another market, where the manufacturer prices the program differently.
Brand and compliance rules that live in an agency's head and leave when the agency does.
Budgets set once for the whole group and reconciled only at month end.
One shared blog for every rooftop, so no store becomes the local answer for its own market.
Dealer group marketing, answered
How do you run marketing for a dealer group?
Write one standard every rooftop follows, let each store advertise its own inventory and offers on its own approved budget, keep an auditable record of every decision, and give each store its own content and customer follow-up. AUTONOMi runs each store as its own instance under that standard, on a flat fee per store.
Can AUTONOMi run several OEM brands in one group?
Yes. Each store's campaigns run under that brand's own guardrails and from that store's own inventory, and manufacturer offers are captured for each rooftop's own ZIP code, so different franchises in one group are advertised correctly, side by side.
How does the group see what happened at each store?
AXIOM hash-chains every dealer-impacting decision to the store it touched and names who acted. The dealership can read that record, AEGIS answers "who changed this and why" from it, and each store receives a monthly statement per ad platform as a PDF and CSV.
Does each rooftop need its own budget?
Yes. Each store has its own approved monthly budget, set in writing by the dealer. AEGIS sizes each campaign against it, and spend pauses when a store reaches its approved monthly and resumes when the dealer raises it or the new month starts.
Does AUTONOMi work with the group's DMS and CRM?
PRISM, AUTONOMi's own dealership CRM, keeps one customer record per person per store and can replace a store's current CRM; during a switch it can keep handing leads to the old CRM by ADF. Each store keeps its DMS: PRISM pulls the DMS data in and doesn't write back.
Can a group run its own group website alongside the stores?
Yes, for measurement. On request AUTONOMi provisions a Google Analytics 4 property and a Tag Manager container for the group's own site, linked to each store's Google Ads account, so a conversion on the group site is credited to the store whose ad drove it. The group's web team installs the snippets.
Recommended reading
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