This year I have encountered a significant increase in the amount of companies fighting for the “new” advertising expense dollars of search engine optimization (seo) and search engine marketing (sem).
Two years ago, even a year …
Some dealerships are redirecting the marketing spends while others are just holing up trying to survive. One of the dealers I work with shared their strategy with me and it was what dealers in this tough market are doing today.
We’re a 50 car per month Chevrolet point in North Carolina between two bigger markets. In early 2007, we began losing confidence in/and pulling our traditional media campaigns (tv, tadio, newpaper etc). The last straw would have been our ad agency recommending we make a TV commercial branding our website (which they built), and trying to drive wesbite hits to it. This makes me laugh now! We’ve used the same CRM since 2001, and multiple enhancements made it possible to better track Internet leads, advertising sources, and sales performance. Stats showed we were selling internet customers and our growth opportunities were outside our market (towns population 12,000).We’ve now developed our advertising strategy to only include internet advertising. If 90% of customer shop online, why advertise anywhere else? I’d admit we spent some internet dollars foolishly, but would expect this as our learning curve increases. Shifts in traditional mindset were necessary to achieve our results. One big one would be profit margin for used vehicle. Consider them commodities, and your small losses on used are better than big profits. The used car market is efficient with aid of internet - meaning buyers have just as much information as sellers. To survive we must operate more efficiently than our competitors. Or store has not laid off or cut employees pay. In fact, we had a profitable 2008 and Q1 2009. My outlook is confident this year as I know I can track my ad dollars and better allocate Internet spending to profitable vendors.
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Dealers are being forced to compete not only with each other online but also lead generation sites, affiliate sites, Tier II Regional Marketing and Tier I OEM marketing. This creates a virtual battle field for them to navigate especially when they are forced to make decisions about things they do not understand such as search engine optimization.
Automotive SEO can be perplexing for many and there are many conflicting opinions on what are the most important aspects. Some weight links as the most important aspect and other claim content is what wins at the end of the day. Very rarely is site structure discussed and that may be because no one is really doing that well other than on site link optimization.
Online chat for customer interaction has huge potential especially when it has to deal with a service issue. But the chat above shows why you should not outsource this part of your business.
I recently opened …
Search engine marketing via pay per click can provide tremendous benefit for your dealership if you understand it’s real value, implement it intelligently and understand it’s limits. If used in correlation with effective search …
A good friend of mine forwarded me a letter that he received from Autotrader.com’s attorney, Benjamin Karpf T: 202-776-2641 C: Redacted Upon Request (bkarpf@dowlohnes.com), a take down notice for unauthorized use and unfair competition and …
Car dealers understand that they need to use the Internet to market themselves, some are doing a very good job, others are getting their wings and some will buy just about anything, because they have …
Double standards exist all around us in both personal and business situations. The car business sure has it’s share of them. The industry has a long way to go in getting in sync …
Automotive social networking still has ages to go as far as recognizing how things work in social settings. Right now we have two very large extremes going, one has strict guidelines and the other tolerates …
In my last post here I gave 10 Car Dealer Website Myths and received positive and negative feedback via email. One email I received was from a dealer who is changing website providers and heard …
Car dealers realize that they need websites and just a handful really understand web marketing. Many vendors in the niche use education as a sales tool for their platform, but how much of that education …
You can have the best trained certified staff, excellent process, the ideal inventory and all the lenders in the world, a high converting website and barely move metal because you rely solely on antiquated media …
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Dealers are being forced to compete not only with each other online but also lead generation sites, affiliate sites, Tier II Regional Marketing and Tier I OEM marketing. This creates a virtual battle field for them to navigate especially when they are forced to make decisions about things they do not understand such as search engine optimization.
