Consumers are immune to most print advertising and revenues are declining for this media.  Other bloggers are predicting a Major Consolidation due to the declines in revenue.  The numbers are all over the board all pointing down in circulation numbers and revenue for print editions while online editions are seeing sharp rises in circulation and ad revenue.  The numbers are still lopsided though as far as the percentage of spend online revenue for online print publications is around 5.4% of their total revenue but closing the gap at an alarming rate.

With the industry pushing to be green in it’s initiatives it is still surprising to see the huge full page ads in print that only reach a very small portion of people who want what we are offering.  Online advertising allows us to prequalify our customers by reaching only those that want we have to offer.  Versus the spaghetti marketing techniques of print advertising and save trees at the same time.

Nathan Scripps offered a great way to look at media spends at Drivingsales.com in their Automotive Strategy Section on how to reach our target market at the time they are looking for us, when they are ready to buy.  Concentrating your advertising dollars that reaches the most people that want what we have to offer versus interrupting the masses that don’t.

Traditional advertising mediums still allows us to build our brand however; if every raw impression that we deliver in these mediums is an in your face pitch it may do more harm than good.  These mediums will allow us to tell our story now we just need to balance our pitch to reach those that want what we have now.

Technorati Tags: automotive stradgies, brand building, online media, print advertising, print vs online

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Three quick questions

1. Do you know what is being said?
2. Are you using the information if you do?
3. How do you deal with it?

Lets try and give you some answers for these questions.

Obviously a few of the review sites are monetizing their site by having you pay to be notified of new reviews of your dealership. Sometimes you can get the chance to reply before it gets posted. This can be advantageous if you can react and correct a problem but trying to be a member of all the possibilities and with more coming on line almost daily it can become expensive.

As long as they are all competing and no true market leader has appeared this probably is not your best resource. There are two free resources that should be used by every dealer.

Google Alerts

Technorati

You can set up an alert for any name or term and Google will email you as soon as their spiders find anything new. This way you will know exactly what is being said about you almost as soon as it hits the net. (Or at least as fast as Google finds it and that can be quite quickly.)

I prefer to set up a separate Gmail account just for alerts as that allows me to keep my research in one place. You can keep track of anything this way including your competitors. Think that can be valuable information?

I have added a good video I found that will show you how to use both Google Alerts and Technorati to keep track of what is being said about you on the web.

Now that you know what is being said what do you do with it? It is great to know what is said but what you do about it is the real key.

If you are seeing complaints about your process look at ways to improve it. This can be in any of your departments. If you are not using the information that customers are adding to the internet about you and your competitors to find portions of your process in both sales, service and follow up to improve you are missing valuable intelligence.

This can be both positive and negative information. Dealing with the negative information is what most people leap on first but…

The positive information can be more valuable as it can help you develop a unique positioning in your market but is often overlooked. These may show you things that should be added into all your promotional efforts and they already have social proof behind them.

You will need to be transparent on line to use the internet effectively. We have earner articles on transparency  and transparency part 2  that you should check out so we won’t cover the same information here.

If there is a problem you need to fix it. Addressing the problem and dealing with it can gain you much more than trying to ignore it. Make sure that you are taking part in the conversations about you in a pro active way.

If you are reacting positively and just as important promptly you can gain much more web credibility with future customers even if it is a problem that you just can’t fix but can address with your side of the story. If you can fix it and do promptly this is the absolute best result.

Ever notice that the customer with a problem that is promptly fixed can become your best evangelist?

Hiding your head in the sand and ignoring it like an ostrich will only make it worse. Go out of your way to create evangelists and ask your satisfied customers to add favorable reviews to the site of your choice.

Don’t try and scam the system though as this will back fire on you and will hurt you in the long run.

Now go get the intelligence that is freely available but more importantly take action on it today and everyday.

It will improve your business.

Technorati Tags: auto review site, google alerts, improve process, technorati

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What is social bookmarking?

If you have ever used the bookmark feature of your browser you should understand the basic concept of using the social bookmarking sites. You save the sites you want to remember but in this case you do it online. You also tag what you save and you share it with other members.

On most bookmarking sites others can also vote as to whether or not what you saved is valuable.

Each of these bookmarks can create an extra listing on the search engines that can help drive traffic to the site you bookmarked. As Google tends to like some of the bigger bookmarking sites quite often your bookmark will rank higher than the page you saved. At least initially.

Using sites like Digg, Propeller, and Stumble can result in quite a bit of additional traffic if you have a popular bookmark.

The important thing to remember is that this is a community. If you are not contributing by bookmarking sites of value that aren’t yours you will be seen as a spammer and the community will not support you.

This needs to be something that you do regularly and not just for your sites. Add the little favorite icons to your browser and any time you see an item of value in the course of your normal surfing you can quickly bookmark it.

Bookmarking along with using the long tail of search can bring you great benefits. Check out this article on using the long tail for automotive seo for more ways to drive very targeted traffic.

Technorati Tags: Automotive SEO, bookmarking, Search Engine Saturation, seo, using bookmarking

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There is a great point made there but it needs to go further. The point is that your web site either works or it doesn’t. PERIOD.

Your web site generates people through your front door or it does not. It does not matter how pretty it is, how flashy the graphics. That does not matter. The key is it generates people through your front door or it does not.

That answers the first question but brings us to question number two.

In the online world you soon won’t be able to survive with only one site. Here is why.

For this example you have a Ford dealership called John Smith Ford located in my area (the coal region of Pennsylvania). You rank #1 in Google for John Smith Ford but….

I am a buyer looking for an Expedition (I know there aren’t many of them with gas at $4 + a gallon) and I am going to use the web first to start my shopping. I seriously doubt that the first thing I am going to enter is John Smith Ford.

It is much more likely I am going to search for something like “discounts on Ford Expedition“. See I also know you don’t have many buyers looking for the big SUV’s either. I may have even narrowed it to an area with a term like “discounts on Ford Expedition Central PA“.

Now I have been working on line and looked at numerous web sites fro car dealer’s and other off line merchants. Very few understand and take advantage of the way the web works.

This is the most likely way that people will find you and unless you have multiple pages all optimized for the various permutations that people will be searching for it is unlikely that you are getting the vast majority of people that are in buying mode to a page that you control.

This is why the large vendors like Cars.com and Autotrader.com will show a positive return on investment. They use YOUR inventory which you are paying them to do to cover and own these search terms then monetize it to their advantage with affiliate offers. Don’t believe me check out the white paper at www.Digital20Group.com.

The other reason that you need multiple web properties is that you have to worry about people that are unhappy with you. How much would it cost you if the number 3 listing for your dealer name is YourDealerNameSucks.com. If you want to find out check out this article at ISM In Training.

Using a variety of web platforms like micro sites, Squidoo lenses, blogs and Hub Pages can make it extremely hard for anyone to get on the first page for your name unless they really understand SEO. (That is a person you don’t want to upset .

So check and see if your web site is doing its job and if you haven’t started adding other sites you need to before your competitor does.

Technorati Tags: blog, hub page, lead generation, micro site, seo, squidoo, web site

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Right now the never ending conversation about Autotrader.com going on over at Jeff Kershner’s Blog and their never ending battle to gain market share with a bad business model, for dealers. Here is a report worth reading at www.Digital20Group.com

Dealer Micro Sites seem to be a hot topic inside of a social network set up by Ralph Paglia. This seems to be a self serving topic as most of the participation is by the vendors trying to hawk their wares to the limited number of dealer employee participants. This marketing tools time has passed in it’s current form. (more on this later)

I have discussed CRM/ILM vendors issues at my other blog about being an Internet Sales Manger and their lack of compliance with the CAN SPAM Act and deliverability issues. Read where I talk about problems with the BZ Results BuzzTrak and their non compliance at www.ismintraining.com.

Now for the real killer…….

In steps www.DrivingSales.com, the first automotive social network created by a dealer for dealers, to help the industry get the real deal on the vendors in the automotive marketplace and to share ideas with each other to help better the industry in it marketing efforts.

Dealers and their employees have generally played their cards close to their vest when it comes to sharing ideas with each other. Now the relics who have held on to these old principals will need to step up and get into this century to remain competitive in todays information age. Consumers are empowered with the wealth of knowledge that is available to them. Now dealers have the opportunity to work from a level playing field just as consumers do when it comes time to make decisions and have real feedback on vendors that service them.

It is time to get on board today start by joining www.DrivingSales.com today.

Technorati Tags: Automotive Social Networking, autotrader, dealer micro sites, drivingsales.com

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If you are selling anything anywhere you need to be the focus of your offering, online or off.  The first step in the road to the sale sale is to establish rapport and how you do that online is to be completely transparent and encourage the conversation about you, your business and your offerings.

While Jon’s blog deals mostly with the “make Money Niche” of online marketing the message still applies very much to the automobile industry and our marketing efforts.

Lead with you, then your offerings, cause others to seek you out, become the hunted not the hunter!!

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I have also seen this work the other way around too. A prospect that was worked in our showroom leaves and continues shopping and the internet department winds up with the lead after customer continues to shop online, usually through a third party vendor. To save that customer is a formidable task.

The consumer is placed in a bad position if it is discovered and may even decide to shop elsewhere or completely remove themselves from the market. A bad proposition for all parties concerned.

What does that have to do with “Transparency”?

Everything and nothing.

Almost daily the used car manager will request that I change prices on a car on the website or even delete it if the consumer has completed a transaction, which is done by default via the nightly DMS updates. Their is usually a huge disparity in the pricing online and those offered by the “lot lizards”.

Can this have long term effects on your business. Probably not!! It can have short term moments of panic for those the most affected by it. Long term it will push more consumers to the interwebs. Oh, that is already happening!

Not listing a price on an inventory item online, not giving the price of your service upfront and not worrying about others online conversation about you in your every interaction with a customer or potential customer is as antiquated as hiding behind “handles”, sending unsolicited emails and cloaked SEO tactics.

Eventually it all becomes known, so why doesn’t everybody get on the same page and become completely open in their dealings? The move is in that direction what are you doing to become more transparent at every level?

Technorati Tags: moving forward, online dealing, transparency

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Read an interesting article today over at Ward’s Dealer Business called
“Send In the Data Crunchers“.

The discussion was on tracking your results from your internet marketing efforts. You can with the right scripts or services track everything you are doing on line. Should you? Absolutely.

The thing that I read that really resonated with me was something that I have seen numerous times. You need to actually take action on the results.

Let’s take leads as an example. Tracking is easy on the web side but..

Do you have any tracking you are doing once the lead comes in whether it was free or purchased? Who got the lead? Did they actually follow up? Did the lead convert?

It is extremely hard to know whether your lead source is working and if you sales force are actually working what you give them if you aren’t tracking them. This part of tracking is probably the least done and the most important.

Following the 80/20 rule I would bet that 20% of your sales people get 80% of the sales from these leads. If you aren’t tracking you won’t know will you?

Tracking these will allow you to find out which lead sources are working and which salesperson/s actually work their leads promptly.

No matter what your lead source (self generated are always best) if they are not contacted promptly it can be of the best quality and quickly become worthless. How fast are you receiving your leads and how soon do they hear from someone?

What are your thoughts and do you actually track these items? Let me know.

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A few points in this article really resonated with me. Specifically as it applies to using the web. Quality is much more important than quantity.

Yes everyone wants more numbers but I know that there are certain posts I do that don’t get huge numbers of visitors but the visitors that do show up are highly targeted and very responsive.

Getting a hundred visitors a day that don’t have an interest in what you are discussing will not sell anymore products. You are lucky in a case like that to get 0.5% to take the action you are looking for or maybe one action for every 200 visitors.

Consider if you get 10 targeted visitors but 30% respond to what you are offering you would now have 3 times the results with 5% of the traffic.

The other item that really stands out is about how hard networking is. It isn’t if you will listen first. Good listeners are always welcomed and considered friends.

Now how do you do this online? A blog can be a good start. You can tell me exactly what you think of this article by leaving a comment. It allows me to not only get information out but to listen to you and respond to YOUR concerns.

Think if you have a question and I supply an answer through this interactive media you are not more likely to do business with me down the line?

Are you using any of the interactive web media for conversing with your prospects. Forums, Q and A blogs, Squidoo lenses, Hub Pages - all of these allow people to interact with you online.

How many of these are you using to reach your potential customer?

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Why is this? What do they do that the others don’t?

Now some of this may just be a better work ethic. Making the follow up calls, working leads the minute they get them rather than standing out in the smoking area complaining about how slow it is and how the dealership needs to do more advertising and lead generation.

Much more likely it is that the top sales people run their own business. After all commission sales people have their own business. Make sales - Get Paid.

Now you don’t have the overhead and have to worry about the taxes etc. but if you think of your job as a business that you control instead of a job where you put in time you may start doing the little things that will make a big difference.

What are you doing to advertise and brand you for you?

Do you have any kind of web presence?

What organizations do you network at?

Here are just a few ways you can increase others awareness of you.

If you have children are you active in any of their organizations? Having been involved in various things like Little League, Girl’s Softball and Band Boosters when my children were younger I generated and did business with those that I interacted with there and supported my children at the same time.

Anyone can get a free blog and post helpful tips about the car buying process and get exposure. A great way to start getting your name known.

There are a variety of free interactive web services like Squidoo, Hub Pages and Face Book to name a few that can increase your exposure.

And…

The best part about the exposure you generate for you is that it is portable. Yep, you change dealerships and it all points to you not the dealership.

Think about this - if you spend time discovering how to do and use things like this and they sell an extra car or two a month for 2 hours effort a month what is your return on the time work out to hourly.

Discover how to do this the right way and you can increase your sales by more than just one or two sales per month and the more you do it it grows exponentially.

So are you an employee or do you have a business?

Leave your comments and let us know.

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