Are you the kind of person who is really interested in building out your own personal brand but don’t know where to start? 

In all honesty it is not easy and can take a lot of work upfront to get going. But don’t let that discourage you because There is something you can do to get started that doesn’t require the full investment. 

Many folks in marketing positions like myself are constantly starved for content. If more folks from inside the dealership were able to help produce content, that content would have an already established platform to be shared on. 

This is great news for you because that means you would have an already established and growing  audience that will see your videos, photos or blog posts. 

If I was in your position I would reach out to the folks who manage your channels and let them know you’d like to contribute. 

as part of my job I make sure that our pricing across the World Wide Web is consistent and accurate. 

the problem though is that everyone seems to have their own way of displaying prices. More Specifically,  incentive based pricing. 

Most 3rd parties seemed to just opt out of having that as an option while our websites are pulling and displaying vin specific incentives on every unit.

this leads to price inequity on pretty much all of our inventory across the web. 

The only way to show a discounted price on a unit is to provide the 3rd party with a discounted price or a dealer discount. Which quickly becomes problematic due to not having options to properly disclose where the discount came from. 

If you’re like me and you manage your inventory and pricing from an inventory tool like homenet. Adding a dealer discount means that all of your exports are going to receive that discount including your site which would then be displaying both the discount and incentives. 

I am aware that I can adjust what prices go where in my exports with homenet but creating a complex matrix of sorts isn’t something I’m interested in managing.

Dealership inventory and pricing needs to be more consistent across the web. That means that pricing standards need to expand further than a simple dealer discount. 

I think it’s time for our vendor partners to take the initiative to structure their properties with the ability to display pricing more like dealer sites and include incentive information on the SRP and VDP’s.

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How much price inequity do you have? 

Would you like to see 3rd parties display incentive info in-line with inventory? 

Process is everything in a dealership. without it you can be assured that you are setting yourself up for failure.

This isn't a new concept by any means yet it's a concept that many of us forget as we spend our days shucking and jiving.

If you want to expect a certain level of professionalism from your team. You need to treat them like professionals. That goes far beyond just telling them that they are professionals. 

You have to watch, coach and guide them to the results you want. 

The less structure and confidence you give them the less you should expect them to build their own.

To be effective in their growth you need to guide them. You don't need to hold their hand every step of the way. 

paint the picture of the path and allow yourself to become the backbone of the mission. 

Teams fail all the time and in most cases you can trace back the bottle neck of growth to the leadership of an organization.

Someone once told me; 

"Chris, I know you can do the job. But, can you teach others how to do it just as good?"

That statement has stuck with me over the years because of how much truth it speaks. 

Teaching others how to do the things I know how to do has become a personal mission of mine. Because it's not easy. 

The tactics, tricks and tips I find useful won't always work for others. 

But, Being able to identify their personality type and adjusting my approach to their style. 

That's what sets good leaders apart from bad ones. 

Instagram is arguably the best photo sharing app. Yeah, you read that right – it’s an app. And therefore, some users don’t like this idea of sharing photos from the phone. Those who belong to old schools (read web generation) still like to upload contents using web browsers. Thus, to upload photos to Instagram from Mac or Desktop computer gives them a kick.

How to Upload Photos to Instagram from Safari Browser on Mac

For Safari users on Mac, it is simple to post to Instagram from PC because spoofing the user agent is a built-in feature in browser. Simply enable Developer menu and your job is done.

To enable Developer menu:

Step #1: Launch Safari browser on your Mac.

Step #2: Press Command + Comma key to open Preferences. Alternatively, you can click on Safari and then Preferences from the list.

Step #3: In the following dialog box, click on Advanced button. Then click on the check box: Show Develop menu in menu bar.

Now you can see a new ‘Develop’ option in menu bar.

Spoofing…

• Open www.instagram.com in Safari browser and launch the Develop menu bar.
• Next, select User Agent→ Safari – iOS 10 – iPhone (or iPod touch/iPad).

The Instagram page will reload and you can see a Camera icon in the tool bar.

• Click on the Camera icon and you will be asked to choose images from your Mac.
• Once you select the image, you can see the preview.
• Crop the image here and click on Next button.
• Type in a caption and hit the Share button.

If you want to upload to Instagram using Chrome you can do that too. Check out the full post here. 

Are you waiting on the Adwords Up Bus?

Just like having a team full of sales people standing on the lot, waiting for things to happen, rather then picking up the phone and making things happen. Your Adwords budget is doing the exact same thing for you. Sitting at the point and hoping people are looking for the things your selling instead of going out there and bringing customers in.

Up until the past few years, Adwords was really the only thing we had as digital marketers that allowed us to customize, segment and track conversions from our digital efforts. As digital budgets grow in the dealerships, they are also growing at the OEM, IMA and 3rd party level. Which means that it's getting incrementally more expensive to advertise your products, even on a local level.
 

Fancy Talk

We all know that there is a lot of speak about attribution and tracking going on in the automotive world right now. But, at the end of the day, all the multi-touch attribution models and dynamic phone numbers are just fancy talk. Fancy talk doesn't sell cars. It sells the products that the "fancy-talking" people are trying to sell you. Your agency or vendor partner will disagree with me. After all, it's their job to spend your money. It's always in their best interest to spend the whole budget every time.

If they didn't, you would, more than likely, lower the budget. Simply put, the money they can make off of you is just too easy to pass up in terms of management fees and so on.

I'm not saying that all Adwords spend is wasted. What I am saying is, at a certain point, you hit a ceiling. And it can't be broken by throwing more money at it. There is simply not enough volume in local markets to justify the spends. This is because the majority of your Adwords budgets probably go to dealership or new make model campaigns. Which tells us that our customers are either looking for us by name or by make name and model.

You're bidding on those campaigns but so is your same make competitor.  Not to mention, your LMA or region and your OEM. They are all trying to do the same thing. Drive traffic and track ROI.

That's before we even account for third parties throwing their hat in the ring.

Additionally, our industry is so fast paced. Every month we are doing something different. One month we might be pushing truck month. The next, it's competitive lease conquest. Which means, even if the data last month was solid, you are no more likely to spend future money any wiser because your target market/demo has changed.
 

There is a bright side to all of this.

We live in a time now, when our mobile device has the ability to almost anything. Even make us into professional photographers, movie makers and story tellers. There is no better marketing than telling a good story through platforms like Instagram, YouTube and Facebook. We can speak to our local markets and customers through live digital events or telling amazing stories through words and images. This is stuff that isn't hard to do but requires a little bit of time and creativity.

So when it's time to look at your marketing budgets again, consider this: Are you the kind of person who is hoping you have enough budget to pay the driver of the digital up bus? (If and when he decides to show up.) Or, are you the kind of person who wants to dig in, try something new and make a real difference while having fun.

It's up to you...

Originally Posted on The Next Up Blog

Octane AI, a company that offers tools to create chatbots for Facebook Messenger, has developed a tool that packages a predefined message thread into an individual piece of content. Called Convos, these episodic conversations can be distributed as links outside of Messenger.

In November, Facebook provided a way for people, primarily bot makers, to add referral codes to Messenger links. These referral codes could be used to tell the bot something about where the person on the end of the conversation was coming from or what they were looking for.

Referral links remove the need for any introductory rigamarole, as well as any uncertainty as to why someone might want to converse with a Messenger bot. Instead of all the small talk, the links send them straight into a particular pre-programmed conversation.

Which means we now have context into our customers intentions. By knowing this information we are able to start the conversation exactly where it needs to be started without having to revert back to qualifying questions. Moving a conversation forward and in the direction we want it to go. 

All through automation and expanding or limiting the scope of the questions being presented.

Esentially taking those flow charts and scripts we use to train and turning them into a fully interactive experience.

Chatting up a bot is like carrying a conversation with a Westworld host, albeit one lacking a bicameral mind of course.

Convos can be straightforward: bot sends a message or multiple messages, person clicks on one of the predefined reply buttons that triggers a preset response from the bot, rinse, repeat.

In addition to text, responses can contain photos, photo galleries, videos, audio and buttons that people can click to visit a website.

Or Convos can be more interactive than a color-by-numbers conversation. People can be presented with multiple predefined reply buttons that fork the conversation into different directions. Maybe a convo goes into finding out the best scenic drives outside the city for example.

With the abilities of chatbots now and in the future. How do you see this new technology working in your dealership?

Is it possible that chatbots might be the BDC's of the future?

I’m a huge fan of My buddy Jason Stum's work work and being asked to join him on the newly launched Think Bigger Podcast was a huge honor. 

On Episode 003 of the Think Bigger Podcast, I’m being joined by the Marketing Director for Henderson Chevrolet and Fairway Chevrolet, Chris K. Leslie. Chris and I will talk about his award winning idea for automating his dealership’s email marketing by utilizing his web platform’s RSS feeds, form submissions and a MailChimp account.

Listen to the show

I've learned over the years that the best way to plan is to set big goals. Setting big goals does a few things. It allows you the ability to reach those goals in a way that suits you along with giving you the ability to define objectives and progress targets more effectively. 

The car biz is crazy at times. Who am I kidding. It's crazy all the time. Things seem to move so fast around us but a lot of times it's just things moving in place giving the illusion that real change is happening. When in actuality you're just shuffling papers around. 

It's ok to set goals with no idea of how you're going to reach them. I would argue that's the point of goal setting. Not having a clear path is the exciting part about making impactful change happen. 

So as we come into 2017 here are the 4 goals I've set for myself. I don't have a clear path of how I'm going to do any one of these things. But by setting big goals like this I can ensure that everything I do is going to be something that moves me closer to reaching them. 

• Become #1 and #2 Chevy stores in Las Vegas area. 

• Increase customer visibility and satisfaction by measurable means.

• Remove internal barriers between sales/BDC 

• Create New media shows. Podcasts, video etc. 

What are some of your big plans for the new year? Post them in  the comments below. 

If I'm reading this correctly and if you still have varied versions of your site. They are now going to be looked at differently by google. So content on your main site may suffer if it isn't also on your mobile site. Also, depending on how many variations of your site there are because of screen size. You would need to submit different sitemaps for each for them to really count. 

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/11/mobile-first-indexing.html

Today, most people are searching on Google using a mobile device. However, our ranking systems still typically look at the desktop version of a page’s content to evaluate its relevance to the user. This can cause issues when the mobile page has less content than the desktop page because our algorithms are not evaluating the actual page that is seen by a mobile searcher.

To make our results more useful, we’ve begun experiments to make our index mobile-first. Although our search index will continue to be a single index of websites and apps, our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results. Of course, while our index will be built from mobile documents, we're going to continue to build a great search experience for all users, whether they come from mobile or desktop devices.

We understand this is an important shift in our indexing and it’s one we take seriously. We’ll continue to carefully experiment over the coming months on a small scale and we’ll ramp up this change when we’re confident that we have a great user experience. Though we’re only beginning this process, here are a few recommendations to help webmasters prepare as we move towards a more mobile-focused index.

• If you have a responsive site or a dynamic serving site where the primary content and markup is equivalent across mobile and desktop, you shouldn’t have to change anything.
• If you have a site configuration where the primary content and markup is different across mobile and desktop, you should consider making some changes to your site.
  • Make sure to serve structured markup for both the desktop and mobile version.
    
    Sites can verify the equivalence of their structured markup across desktop and mobile by typing the URLs of both versions into the Structured Data Testing Tool and comparing the output. 
    
    When adding structured data to a mobile site, avoid adding large amounts of markup that isn’t relevant to the specific information content of each document.
  • Use the robots.txt testing tool to verify that your mobile version is accessible to Googlebot. 
  • Sites do not have to make changes to their canonical links; we’ll continue to use these links as guides to serve the appropriate results to a user searching on desktop or mobile.
• If you are a site owner who has only verified their desktop site in Search Console, please add and verify your mobile version.
• If you only have a desktop site, we'll continue to index your desktop site just fine, even if we're using a mobile user agent to view your site.
  
  If you are building a mobile version of your site, keep in mind that a functional desktop-oriented site can be better than a broken or incomplete mobile version of the site. It's better for you to build up your mobile site and launch it when ready.  

 

There is a tendency for us automotive digital marketers to allow others the ability to dictate and demand our time. I’m not talking so much about our bosses or co-workers. I’m talking about our vendors and potential partners.

The phone rings all day, your inbox looks like a twitter stream. I get it. It sucks.

So, how are you ever going to get anything done if you’re just running to the next meeting our joining the next webex?

Well, its simple really. You need to create some breathing room.

It isn’t hard and not only are you going to feel more liberated. I’ve found that our current partners appreciate the productive meetings we have as well as the potential partners get a chance to have their voice heard.

I know many folks who just brush off these potential partners. But I would argue there is a lot we can learn from the people we haven’t talked to yet.

So what I do is this.

For our current partners and vendors I keep a standing monthly meeting. Typically the 2nd or 3rd friday of the month. I like Friday’s because it allows me time over the weekend to think about the things we’ve discussed and if it’s something I want to do I can start on it when I am back Monday.

I always ask our vendors the same 3 questions and ask them to have this prepared before arriving for our meeting.

Question 1 — What’s Working?

Ive noticed that a lot of times the things that are working get discussed way less than the things that are working. Not only is it a downer to only talk about the things that suck. It also sets the tone for the rest of the conversation. So if you start of by talking about the positives then the rest of your meeting can keep that up beat tone.

Question 2 — What’s Not Working?

I set the expectation clearly up front that if something isn’t working. Lets either decide that it just isn’t a good fit for our business or it needs some adjusting to get it back working to where we think it should be. Not all products are for everyone. I know many vendors hate talking about this but they know I do this our of respect for them and their product. Both I and they would rather drop a feature or something added vs. dropping the vendor all together.

Question 3 — What small thing can we tweak that will have a measurable impact?

If you aren’t turning the dials you aren’t engaged with the product. If you are going to pay for something you need to always test its boundaries. Otherwise everything you ever do with anyone is going to be nothing but mediocre. This also gives your rep the opportunity to bring you the newest thing they saw someone else doing that is easy ti implement. Doesn’t cost any money and when your boss asks you how things are going with X. You are able to show that you are actively involved in managing the product and making it better to suite your store.

These 3 simple questions really do help keep meetings short, concise and engaging on both ends. It’s a simple standard that i had to create for myself to keep my insanity and make sure that my meetings were staying productive.