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If You’re Going To Do It, Do It Right…

The special time of the year is nearly upon us, again. From September through February: conferences, expos and 20 Groups with the veritable sales crunch of "you have to get this or you'll be left in the dust!" pitches. You can feel dealers' and general managers' certain body parts tightening up now (not that they aren't pitched every day of every week of every month or every year already).

With very little assistance, which is by choice, direction or information, vendors are chosen and deals are signed. Does that mean dealerships make decisions without "data"? Not necessarily. However decisions made with vendors' own calculators (remember when lead estimating in your market at certain NADA website booths was the fix of the day?????), skewed analytics/search results and by recommendations (you know, what works for a dealer with half the competition and market size one of their 20 Group buddies has should work the same for someone else in a major metro with twice the stores and massive gross degradation?).

What generates results are a combination of relevant data, unbiased information, support, updates and consistency. However what we still see dominating today are dealers using:

Websites:

  • Without any SEO (and sometimes even basic optimization), micro-sites/landing pages and SEM with no/poor call-to-action, heavily redundant non-inventory based content (which Google LOVES! right?!) and the like…

CRM:

  • The "take it as it came out of the box" processes and templates that can't get a call back from a desperate buyer, no management notifications set up, and people with access sending out marketing messages to dealerships' database that are not proper, timely or accurate…

Social media:

  • Left up to companies setting up personal profiles on Facebook, Google Plus, Foursquare, etc. for businesses and/or…
  • Duplicating content on hundreds of dealership social networks and/or…
  • Solely following industry people's accounts and them fanning/following back and/or…
  • Simply buying audiences gaining thousands of eyeballs while most of the paid followers are in different countries (or simply spam accounts)…

…and the list just goes on and on and on. 

If you want to sell cars, you have to do it right. Meet and greet, the walk, the drive, the pencil, the close (yes, the road to the sale to many) that can't exist without process, checklists, audits and accountability. Yet most dealerships' entire digital presence has none of those!!

What we need to do is do things right. Businesses are responsible for everything they do. It's 2012. If you don't understand websites and SEO, get someone that does in your store. Don't think social media is right for your point? Ask your customers where they want you to be and then get someone that does it in your store. And get advice before you hire your person/people or bring on the vendor! You must own every part of your marketing today and not turn a blind eye. And no, it's not too much to do or to get someone in the store or close to you to provide reporting that is not from a vendor's proprietary dashboard (read: manipulation) that can't be validated by another unbiased source.

There are no excuses for businesses today to not know how to do things right and expect results. Sending texts from employees phones without permission based marketing and legal/opt-out included? Having a website for a 150+ unit store that has 800 inbound links and no +1's? Promoting a blog that has the same content as every other (fill in your brand) store within a 1,000 mile radius? It's NOT fine. It's NOT ok. Get real.

Act as if you're a customer to your own business! What are the chances you'd return to your own website if the home page never changed? Would you buy concert tickets from a site that never featured your favorite artists? Would you Like United Airlines on Facebook if every other post from them was two sea lions fighting or two mimes fighting with an intro of "caption this"? would you follow Morton's Steakhouse on Twitter if EVERY post was simply a push from their Facebook account and no interaction with diners? Would you continue to read Marriott's blog if all it contained was posts about awards they were winning from magazines rather than updates on their resort locations that you wanted to travel to? Look it's really simple, it's just not easy.

Own your marketing. The pisser is you've been hearing this for over five years now from a number of sources in the industry including this one. Quit cutting corners and believing everything that the large enterprise-level providers are feeding you. How can one provider claim to be the #1 vendor in an industry and charge half of what everyone else does? It doesn't work that way! You know that…

Look at it this way. McDonald's (as good as some of you may think they are) is not number one in hamburgers. They are number one in volume! Do they serve the best burger? No! Their burger is not the best…and neither is your website/CRM/Social Media if you don't know better.

If you're going to do it, do it right!

 

Best Practices: Professional Insight, Powerful Results

Gut Check: What Are We Doing? Oh Yeah, Measuring!

Overstated? Maybe….but likely not. What are we doing? If we go by the numbers, and they're estimated but well known, we've got the second largest employer in the Untied States behind our back. The automotive industry is massive, even if you don't consider the associated businesses it keeps thriving. So, let's say we have a few million directly employed in the car biz (which is likely conservative) and had less than 3,000 in Las Vegas recently for the most important events that actually can move the needle. Pitiful. This week's SEMA show will kill that in attendance. And within the first hour.

What are we doing? So add the OEM eCommerce summits, conferences and events (which represent vendors more typically than push owners and general managers into the uncomfortable zone) and you've got at best a few thousand more that are around the discussions of online marketing, online customers, online retention and online success.

Ignore it at your own willful demise. Attack it like people trying the 72 ounce steak at Big Texan, you might go crazy trying to figure out which end is up. So how do you go down the road somewhere in between the two extremes and still try to maintain that "blocking and tackling" BS mentality that makes ownership and management comfortable? Simple: a plan.

While they are in fact out there, the count of dealers who have a written-down, approved, executable monthly strategy for doing and increasing amount of activities to promote success is likely somewhere around the chance of us having a space program in 2011 that lands us back on the moon. It's on the radar, they're might even be some dollars against it but I will venture a strong guess that it won't happen. That's not quite as disappointing as a dealer that is a few months from increasing their results and market share significantly, and does nothing about it.

Folks, the information is out here. And don't be afraid to ask. Yes, you might have to do some digging through the typical crap: an article on one of the popular automotive communities that doesn't answer your question but does have the "expert's" contact information. Or one of our recent favorites: white papers that will confuse the &^@# out of dealers that also end with a signature block that looks more like a proclamation. (Hint: generally speaking, automotive communities are not the place for white papers. Link to your website from the community website. Better yet, if it's a white paper done in conjunction with a company OUTSIDE of the industry, definitely publish it but keep your post on the communities to the synopsis. Please. Tip: not only that, you get back-links!!!!!!)

There have been fantastic pointers and forecasts about what will happen in the digital/online space for the past two years. Over 95% of the dealers missed or ignored them. Maybe it's time to have 2011 be "The Year Of Great Automotive Listening" (do that will your Movie-Guy voice). No matter what, this is the year of honest measurement, in our opinion.

So here's a few places to go to get your feet wet (or immersed) in measurement:

  1. Google.com (Analytics, Trends, Insights, Alerts, Webmaster tools, etc)
    A. If you've never used the above, start with going to Google and entering "links:www.YOURDEALERSHIPWEBSITE.com" or "site:www.YOURDEALERSHIPWEBSITE.com" and see what Google sees!
  2. Hubspot.com (Website grader, Facebook grader, Twitter grader, PR grader, etc)
    A. If you attended DrivingSales Executive Summit, you got more than you need!
  3. SEOmoz.org, Yahoo Site Explorer, etc (Linking and content tools)
  4. Twitalyzer, TwitterCounter, Untweeps, TwitterAnalyzer, etc (amazing tools if you're on Twitter)
  5. FourScore (found this recently for your FourSquare ranking/effectiveness)
  6. Compete, Alexa, etc (even though many dealership sites won't rank, be creative!)

There are so many other great FREE tools available for you to do more than just count on others, like your website company, and actually improve while holding people accountable but too many to list.

It's time for a gut check. How much further can you go down the road mostly (or absolutely) blind to what is essential to grow your business and be able to talk to the main points….without fudging it anymore.

Here's to doing things with more tools than just passion. Here's to knowing what we're doing!

Best Practices: Professional Insight, Powerful Results

Floor Traffic Down? Invite Them In! (Including 5 Ideas That Work If You Do)

Reading a number of great posts recently (while trying to ignore the blatant self-promotion via a popularity contest glorified by a number of industry members last week), all focused on getting dealers to make the shift to digital or social media, it hit me once again what we're all trying to do: get people in the door.

While a number of dealers (maybe 5% in the country) are seeing growth many are seeing flat or declining numbers. Others are experiencing unit lifts while dealing with large drop in gross or back end. And everyone is dealing with selling fewer vehicles in the past 18 months than in the previous 4-6 years.

So in this online world, what aside from actually selling a vehicle to a customer or servicing their car drives traffic? One thing that can be looked at, especially in a world of smaller budgets, staffs and sales is events. With rare exception over the past two years, the factories (and therefore the dealers) have spent less and less on driving valuable traffic via new-owner events, clinics, ride-and-drives, sponsorships, meet-and-greets and the like. While the quantity of tire kickers may be down, real purchase intention is down significantly less (we'll leave the statistics and "pent up demand" gibberish talk to others).

Fewer and fewer dealers are doing what it takes to being people in: WIIFM. Yes, the most popular radio station in the world. What's In It For Me! More and more consumers are out there, looking for answers on how to program their seat memory, sync their bluetooth, update their navigation system, find out the difference in maintaining their car at the dealership versus aftermarket besides price and a whole lot more. So…they're left with going to a discussion group/blog/forum/portal, relying on word of mouth or not knowing at all. And you believe you 'had them at hello' when you sold the car.

So no new owner clinics. No barbecues. No comparison drives. No meet the staff days. No fundraisers (let alone getting a link from the event website to your website with all of the traffic they're receiving. What's that? What's a link? What does that do?). Boy, that will work! Then tell yourself that the drop in floor traffic is fine since 70-90% of the same-brand stores in your PMA are also down rather than kicking ass. Forget about building a brand, or answering the questions that many customers won't ask you over the phone, or stopping that brand new owner from driving into (fill-in-the-blank)-Lube, let alone even retaining the customers you have and that WANT to come back for a good reason or two.

No. Maybe this whole thing is wrong. The factory is supposed to do and promote events. The factory is supposed to drive floor traffic. The factory is supposed to give you all of the handraisers in the area. The factory has to do all of the advertising so you can copy the ad and put it on your (mediocre) website. The factory is supposed to give you all of the pitter-patter of footsteps so you can just kick back, put your feet up (or in the golf cart), make money and retire in 20 years.

DING, DING, DING. Wake Up!!! (that was your floor traffic meter just hitting zero)

Best Practices: Professional Insight, Powerful Results