Prevent sitting vehicle inventory with AI-powered prediction

If you could identify exactly which vehicles your dealership has the best chance of selling in the next month, would you change your automotive marketing strategy? 

Most automotive marketing providers recommend doubling down on efforts to promote your most desirable inventory. They point out what’s winning in the current market, identify VINs that have the most “opportunity,” and charge a fee to demonstrate healthy web traffic on those vehicle description pages. Here’s the question every dealer should be asking: What if those vehicles would have sold anyway? 

Anyone can sell cars in a favorable market. When buyers are available, OEM advertising is strong and the set pricing strategy is working, should your digital provider really be duplicating national and regional marketing efforts on popular inventory? Or would your local resources be better spent to market vehicles that will be harder to sell? 

The hardest and easiest vehicles to move 

Dozens of factors play into predicting which vehicles will fly off the lot and which ones will still be sitting months from now. Our automotive marketing software, MarketAI, helps us assess marketability as soon as a vehicle is added to your inventory, so dealers can make data-backed decisions about every VIN up front instead of riding market waves once they’re already in motion.  

Some of the most important factors that affect marketability are: 

• Pricing strategy (including costs, discounts and financing)
• Market availability and allocation 
• Market movement 
• Overall shopping behaviors 

The machine-learning algorithms within MarketAI weigh these factors in real-time, distilling millions of data points into a single source of truth called an Average Inventory Score. The higher the inventory score, the easier (and cheaper) a vehicle is to market and sell. When we compare scores across timeframes and filter the data further by location, segment, model, trim and other metrics, we can identify trends and surprises specific to a dealer’s unique market and inventory.  

Selling VINs that don’t sell themselves 

When a vehicle isn’t turning well, dealers tend to run in the direction of bigger incentives and flashier specials. But cost isn’t the only factor that influences car-buying decisions. 

Choosing a car is like choosing a partner. Most people have slightly different ideas about what makes a good one; some people have very specific or unique criteria. Most important, though: the more prospects you meet, the more likely you are to find a match. 

A lower inventory score in MarketAI tells us a specific vehicle will need to be seen by more people — so, these VINs are precisely where we recommend placing the bulk of your marketing investment.  

Instead of waiting for a vehicle to become “sitting inventory” and then adding discounts to it, we want to proactively add as many eyeballs as possible. We reallocate resources to boost harder-to-match inventory and make it more visible to in-market audiences.  

Let’s look at an example based on nationwide OEM-level data for February 2025: 

• The five nameplates with the lowest Average Inventory Score (more difficult to sell) include Maserati, Alfa Romeo, Wagoneer, Jaguar and Dodge. 
• The list of highest-scoring makes (easier to sell) includes Nissan, along with Toyota, Subaru, Honda and other top-10 mainstays. 

These lists offer dealerships both valuable information and specific problems to solve. Jaguar dealers are used to more expensive marketing, but Dodge is an outlier. So, if you’re a Jeep, Chrysler, Dodge and Ram dealership, maybe you decide to redirect local ad spend from Jeeps toward Dodge models next month. On the other hand, if you sell Nissans and Hyundais, you might decide boosting your already desirable Nissan inventory isn’t a greatest-impact strategy. 

This example uses broad categories and a specific timeframe, but it demonstrates something that’s true about automotive marketing anytime, anywhere: Market opportunity and marketing opportunity aren’t the same thing, and your digital provider should know the difference. 

What if your most difficult inventory holds your greatest marketing opportunities? And what if, with the right provider and the right tools, you could identify these VINs and market them to matched audiences, all backed by intuitively sorted, up-to-the-minute data? 

Beware automotive marketing buzzwords 

Speaking of data, our world has access to more of it than we know what to do with. We’ve all heard hype around cutting-edge-but-immature tools that claim to leverage this data but turn out results that are more lackluster than life-changing.  

When you’re buying digital marketing services, ask your provider exactly what they mean when they use terms like “market data,” “omnichannel,” “VIN-specific,” and even “AI.” These terms don’t have standardized definitions, and tech doesn’t magically become more advanced when you tack a hot buzzword onto its name. 

Visible, actionable data for your market 

So, what should you look for in a digital marketing partner? A valuable digital provider will have both the hard data in front of them and the strategic foresight to offer your dealership marketing recommendations you can’t get anywhere else. They should tell you about the biggest challenges you’re going to face with your inventory in your market. They should provide a strategy for marketing all your inventory, way before it becomes unsellable. And they should offer visibility into how their technology works. 

Our digital expert team at Adpearance can pull up AI-powered ranking scores for your inventory, in your location, in just a few minutes. 

See the data we see (and find out what you can do with it)! Sign up for a free market assessment today.