Jim McNatt Toyota Honda is an experienced email marketer. They had been successfully communicating with their email database of over 20,000 subscribers for several years. However, like many dealers, they were looking for a way to jumpstart consumer engagement and take the customer interactions to a new level.   The auto group had recently made an innovative change to their website, moving from a standard dealership site to a site built on the Wordpress platform. Wordpress is an open source website/blog platform that is used to power over 25 million sites around the web. Because it is open source, it has a rich developer base and a massive library of plugins to easily extend the functionality of the site. The platform is now being supported by some of the most innovative web companies in the auto industry and the Jim McNatt Auto group saw their traffic jump 40% the first month they switched to the platform. Wordpress, at its core, is a blog...

 
In 1995 I was made the Internet manager at a dealership simply because of my ability to use a computer. The store that I was at saw the potential of the Internet but as so many dealers in the beginning we had very little knowledge of how to implement a process or department. A lot has changed since then, but as the saying goes a lot has stayed the same. I have spent the last 5 years talking to dealerships about Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, web 2.0 and now even the concept of web 3.0. In that time I have found dealerships that are at the leading edge of these subjects and dealerships that are still way behind.
Quite often in my discussions with dealers the topic of how difficult technology is to learn comes up, how they don't have the time to learn, or there just isn't any interest to try.  The Internet is definitely here to stay, and to utilize it's full potential a dealership needs to have an Internet philosophy from the top down.  You can no long...

Taking your Google listing to the next level
My guess is by now you are familiar with what Google's local business directory is. You have already claimed your listing, checked your phone number, verified your address, and added a description of your dealership. Now when you search for your dealership it comes up and looks something like the listing below. The video link at the bottom will walk you through how to claim your listing.

 
How important is Google local business?
What you may not realize is how often people see this and are getting to your site from your listing, or how many people call from your listing without ever going to your website. The numbers would surprise you; just to get an idea look at the keyword referrals from Google in your analytics tool. Do a Google search on the first few that are in the list. One of them will be your dealership name and if you are a franchise dealer one will be something like "make city" or "city make". ...