TK Carsites

I was reading an article recently about some of the differences in the ways the two campaigns operated during this past election and some things really jumped out at me.

From their first meeting in early 2007, the Obama team faced an uphill challenge. They had almost no money and were facing a primary opponent who had a lot of money and a well-established organization. But, they decided to make the Internet the core of their strategy. As a result, they were able to get more local volunteers on the ground in key states than their opponent, which was especially important in smaller states and caucus states.

Next, in the general election, they decided to actively compete in 18 states that no one thought they could win. Instead of focusing on the same blue states that democrats had always focused on, they would use the Internet to raise money and spread their message in those 18 states. No one took their strategy seriously, including the McCain camp.

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One of the biggest misconceptions in the automotive website business is that the more pages you have, the more leads your website will produce.  There are arguments in both directions, but one thing is definitely true:

The more QUALITY, LEAD-GENERATING pages you have, the more leads you’re going to get.

This is not an entry into the debate over indexing inventory versus not.  That’s an entire other post.  Today, let’s explore the power and effectiveness of landing pages both as part of your website as well as outside of your website.

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Technorati Tags: automotive landing pages

As our company grows, I am able to get out into the field and talk face to face with clients and prospective clients more so than ever in our history.  In my travels, I have noticed a change in the mindset that many car dealers are using when it comes to their Internet department and their dealership as a whole.

It used to be that the Internet Sales Manager or BDC Manager was a salesperson or sales manager who had the strongest knowledge of the Internet.  This person would coordinate the leads, work with Internet vendors, and fix internal and external problems related to the web.

Now, we are seeing more and more dealers hire people from other industries, including IT, finance, and marketing, to come in and work with the technical side of automotive Internet marketing.  Other dealers are taking their current ISMs and getting them the training they need to be ahead of the curve.

Regardless of the way that dealers go, most are heading in the same direction: towards having an Internet department run by people who know more than just how to run Outlook and their ILM/CRM.  In this tough economy, it is so important to either have the right people in the right position or to enable those in the position to gain the proper knowledge necessary to effectively lead their departments from every angle.

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Technorati Tags: automotive technology, bdc, ism

When I was selling cars, I noticed something that was consistent at all of my dealerships.  When the Internet first started taking hold, car dealers were reluctant to spend money on it.  The scale was off for some reason.  They would cut corners and pinch pennies when it came to spending thousands of dollars on their website, marketing, online classified sites, and third-party lead providers.  While they were figuring out ways to spend less on the Internet, I was spending more… and smiling all the way to the bank.

For years, car dealers had no problem with dropping tens of thousands of dollars on television, radio, and newspaper, yet there was a stigma about marketing on the Internet, their virtual dealership, a marketing platform that people trusted that would draw more traffic in a day than their physical dealership could get in a week, even a month.  I always had the advantage over my competitors because I believed in 3 letters: SGS.

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Technorati Tags: automotive websites