What does Negative Information Cost You?
I am sure you have heard the stories where dealerships get “flogged” or worse yet somebody takes the time to buy a domain such as yourdealershipsucks.com and creates a disgruntled customer forum, rippoffreport.com entries, my3cents, myspace and the list goes on. Next thing you know when you search your dealership name in Google or Market Area and brand you see that dissatisfied consumers reaction above or below your website.
The best way to combat this is not to let the problem fester. Most people look at problem like this and hopes it will go away. It wont. That information is there for all time for the world to see. Negatives like this will not go away unless you can make the customer happy or you take the necessary steps to dominate the search markets for your Dealership Name and Geographic Location and Brand.
How much does this cost your dealership?
If you are a small store in a non metro area probably not much at all. If you are a high volume store in a large metro, easily over $1,000,000 a year! Yes that is one million dollars or more a year. The numbers broken down to the ridicules don’t lie. Here is a good example.
Let use the famous King of Cars, Josh Towbin and Towbin Dodge as an example and because of his celebrity I will break it down to the incredibly ridiculous.
There are roughly 6100 searches per month for Towbin Dodge per the Yahoo Overture Inventory tool so that tells me that there is roughly 24,000 searches per month for Towbin Dodge across the big three search engines. Now lets discount that number by 75% to take away for his celebrity. Meaning that 75% of the searchers would never buy from Josh they are just curiosity seekers trying to find out more about the King of Cars So 25% of 24,000 = 6000 searches per month by people that would possibly buy from the King of Cars.
Now lets discount that number by 50% just for good measure so now we are down to 3000 potential customer searches. Ok when you Google Towbin Dodge two of the entries above the fold are slams on the King of Cars and “Chopper” negative consumer stuff. Yahoo is not as bad one entry on the front page so I will continue to break it down to the ridicules and discount our 3,000 number to 1500.
Now for the dollars and cents of this and more ridicules minimization, lets say that the negatives only affect 4% of the “real” searchers. Meaning that 4% of the 1500 searches would never buy a car from Towbin Dodge because of all the problems they have from customers. That equates to 60 loss sales per month.
60 sales x $1800 average profit (another ridicules number considering holdback, pack, F&I and doc fees) = $108,000 in lost monthly revenue x 12 months = $1,296,000 a year in lost profit.
This is just at one Towbin Store with one brand on a very narrow search term “Chopped” to the ridiculous. I am sure this affects Towbin Hummer and Prestige Infiniti too. Bet they wonder why Integrity Dodge kicks their ass month in and month out.
I can only assume that “Chopper” does not care because he is either making a ton of money or being in the “Lucky Sperm Club” he just doesn’t care. The sad thing is their are plenty of dealers in this same position and are not doing anything about it and most of them had to work to get where they are and were not born with a silver spoon in their mouth. They just treat it like our pal Josh, do nothing about it and hopes it goes away or really don’t think that the Internet is slowly but surely making newspaper advertising obsolete!
There was an interesting post about dealers being “flogged” over at DealerRefresh.com not as brash as I am about it, but nonetheless some good commentary on how to overcome it in a very positive way. However, if you have so much of it that it would be impossible to correct in a diplomatic way with the affected customer your only choice is to bury it in the SERPS or wait for an Internet Marketer to profit from your folly and monetize your hate traffic and bring the negatives closer to the front.
Somebody is going to own the SERPS in your local search market. Mad Customers, Competing Dealers, Internet marketers or you. Who do you want it to be?
Speaking of Internet marketers (me) you just thought automotive.com was pain compared to what is coming soon to major metro markets across the country. This niche is just to soft not to capitalize on as car dealers really don’t have a clue about marketing online. There are dealers that do it better than others and it has more to do with process that it does with capturing the search engines through SEO and SES. Take an old car manager saying “Hire ‘em in masses, teach ‘em in classes and fire their asses” the same applies to Internet marketing and websites. “Launch ‘em in mass, attack the class and monetize their ass” and the last part, monetization, can either benefit the class or bury it.
Schools is in!!
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Flogging is the #1 reason I think blogging in the dealership world is going to be necessary in the future.
More and more I notice dealerships on Google’s vertical listings with ratings of 1 out of 5 stars and 6 HORRIBLE reviews about their customer service. The sad part is that a majority of the dealerships haven’t ‘Googled’ their name to see what the public sees online.
A simple blog using a free Wordpress or Blogger account with some dealership information is a great way to get customers to contact the dealership directly vs. going to public forums to vent about their sub-par experiences.
Yes but using a free service to accomplish this goal is not the best use of a resource such as blogging for Internet Exposure.
Although it is at a price that car dealer like it takes away from the credibility of the sight in the eyes of any Internet savvy consumer.
I spend tons of money online and research products online. I would not patronize a company or buy a product from a “free” website, if they are serious about using blogging tools to leverage their internet exposure it can be done inexpensively via out sourcing or inhouse.
Paul,
Do you have any suggestions for out-sourced blog vendors? Thanks!
Not really sure what you mean by “free service”. Developing a full fledged Business Blog for your dealership using Wordpress isn’t in my opinion a negative use of resources??
You say that you would not patronize a company or buy a product from a “free website”. Are you equating open source development tools like wordpress as a free website?
As an Internet Sales Manager at a dealership with a web development background i consider leveraging open source web 2.0 tools to be absolutley the most cost effective way to go. Please clarify your use of the word free.
Dealerships need to wrap thier head around the idea that they need to hire web designer’s and developers – and get serious about the online customer. Most internet Manager’s in the industry have no web dev experience. This is the actual drain on resources. If the Internet Sales Manager at a dealership is properly equipped with the right skills the company would not need to outsource.
No what I am equating free resources to is using platforms like blogger, myspace and wordpress.com and not buying their own domains and hosting.
Open source is cool but don’t host your stuff a blogspot.com or wordpress.com.
Do not put a company blog at
mycompany.blogspot.com or
mycompany.wordpress.com
Spend a little bit of money and do it right!
I actually have a service that can install, design, host and/or update content for automobile dealers very cost effectively with great SEO benefit for their main site
Fair enough.
My point, of which i just devoted an entire post too, is that I am not so sure that outsourcing web and online marketing for dealerships is the way to go. It is definatley not the only solution.
You can read my post :here
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[...] your dealership business. Here is a story written by Paul over at ISM in training titled “What does negative information cost you?“. It is no surprise to us in the technical (i.e. internet savvy) aspect of the car business [...]
[...] 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. [...]
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