Dane Saville, the Public Relations and Brand Director of Reunion Marketing, will be speaking at DSES.  His breakout is titled, "Relevance is King: How Your Content Can Save You Money, Build Your Traffic and Convert Your Browsers".  This is a guest blog from Dane on measuring your marketing.

There’s the old cliche that “good things come to those who wait.” I’m hoping that you’ll feel this adage applies to my egregiously late submission for introducing you to my DrivingSales Executive Summit session. Let’s not waste another moment.

First, a little bit about me.

I began my career in automotive marketing with Leith Automotive here in Raleigh, North Carolina. I was hired as a copywriter to craft radio advertisements, television spots, blogs — really, just about everything. One of the first novel concepts I had was to write the Average Joe test drive. What does a casual car shopper really want to know about driving a vehicle? This lead to a lot of dealership visits where I had the opportunity to see how things operate in the showroom and on the lot.

I moved onto an independent agency, where I took the role of chief editor for the automotive team. And, ultimately, coming on board to form Reunion Marketing as the Content Director and, later, Brand and Public Relations Manager.

So what is it that I hope you’ll learn from me at DSES ‘18?

Relevant content can help fulfill the potential of every single marketing dollar you spend.

Take the Guesswork Out of Media Buying

The NADA released a report that “Internet” advertising comprises 55.4% of a dealership’s marketing budget. This means there’s still significant spending in traditional media, such as television and radio. There’s a problem with this …

You’re indexing audiences to target the greatest percentage of people who fit — demographically and geographically — your defined audience with as little waste as possible. After you’ve attempted to limit the scope of who your ads will reach, this manual buying involves a process of negotiating, purchasing, and monitoring. And guess what?

There’s still an incredible waste of spending no matter your market.

That’s because traditional media does not offer the same granular targeting that programmatic media does. Even if you pay the money to be able to drill down your audience with understanding their preferences or personal habits, like exercising regularly, you’re still not matching the power of programmatic channels.

Programmatic media buying (think of Facebook, video pre-roll, and Pandora) eliminates that waste because you can go beyond basic demographics to understand their shopping behaviors and other indicators that help ensure you target people who have a high level of interest in your brand around which you can stimulate interest in your dealership.

This means every marketing dollar is spent on your exact audience and not an estimated percentage of your local market.

]The 3 Pillars of Paid Search

If you get these three pillars right, you’ll save money on every single click.

The Right Ads

You want to have the proper account structure.

You need to focus on being mobile-friendly.

You must maintain a great Quality Score. The QS of your ads directly affects their cost.

The Right Impression Share

You should align your budget with strategic impression share.

For searches that demonstrate an intent to buy, you’ll want to maintain a greater impression share. That’s because you have more opportunity to create ads with greater specificity while generally not competing against third-party sites.

For searchers that are broader, you don’t need a high impression share. There are more strategic ways to attack those searches with a lower share and leveraging a specific Google tool.

The Right Targeted Market

This pillar is the most simple. You have targeting options with your paid search strategy to ensure that you’re not spending outside of your targeted area — the most viable market. This goes beyond just setting a radius.

Website Content

Your landing page content must match the search query intent.

Is your Search Console connected to your Google Analytics account?

You can see the search queries for which you receive the greatest number of impressions. Along with that, you’ll see other information that can help you make smart decisions.

Is your Google Ads account integrated with your Google Analytics account?

You’ll get even more insights on other search queries by understanding that I’ll discuss. Plus, you have the added benefit of potentially increasing your Quality Score by applying this strategy — remember you may be paying more right now because your ads don’t have the right landing page.

It’s all about understanding your local search market.

Conversion Rate Optimization

CRO fulfills the potential of your SEO and SEM efforts.

Conversion Rate Optimization is not just changing a button color or when your chat tool pops up. It’s understanding how people behave on your site and making strategic updates that compel them to do what you want them to.

It means understanding that five homepage banners is not helpful to car shoppers. That’s because 79.09% of all homepage clicks are on the navigation or inventory search widget. I’ll discuss what percentage clicks on homepage banners.

It means utilizing heatmaps to see what elements capture your site browsers’ attention the most. I’ll discuss how to use them and what you can discover.

It means optimizing your content across all devices. Shoppers are as diverse as the vehicles on your lot, so you want to make sure that you’re not neglecting a great experience for all of them.

It means creating and optimizing content that’s relevant to their searches and removing the friction that let’s them convert while engaging with that content I’ll discuss and show some examples that can guide your next strategic updates.

It means knowing that conversions on your site directly affect how you rank in SERPs. It influences the key factors for how Google determines whether or not your site is giving car shoppers what they want. Google rewards that with a better rank. I’ll talk about the ways you can take up this real estate in SERPs and dominate the positions that get nearly 50% of all clicks.

See You at DSES on October 23rd at 9:50 a.m.?

There’s so much more to share, so I hope you’ll join me at the DrivingSales Executive Summit in Las Vegas.