Recently I had the opportunity to attend and speak at the 2016 DrivingSales Presidents club in Miami, Florida. The event was packed with top-level thought starters and leaders in the industry and offered many different discussions to help attack the automotive business as it is today. Since then I have a few of you within the community reach out to me and ask for a quick recap of my discussion.

Fine Tune Fixed Ops Digital Performance

With the average profit margin on new car sales rapidly decreasing, the importance of customer retention being much more than an industry buzzword, the 310 billion dollar service and parts opportunity of which we are capturing less than thirty percent and the average age of the vehicle on the road today increasing to over eleven and a half years  your fixed operations team needs the help and support to create a presence within the digital space to help capture and direct the seventy million monthly repair searches to your dealerships front door.

Here are a few things to review and implement in your current digital strategy.

High awareness and low familiarity – your customer is aware of your name and service center but has very low familiarity with you other than your name. More customers are researching online to become more informed of their service needs and service facilities. We need to do everything possible to help them find our store with updated and relevant information packed with rich content.

Going mobile - The increase year over year of those that do this on the go with their mobile smartphone co-pilot shows that our online information needs to be optimized for their viewing pleasure.

Clean and Easy to Navigate – make sure your digital hand raiser has an easy time to navigate your site and find the information they are looking for with little resistance.

Video is still king – If you really want to drive results and views utilize the power of video. More and more customers are looking for “how to” videos to familiarize themselves. Customers are more likely to watch a quick video than read a page to get that information as well.

Online scheduling – Review your online scheduling tool and make it easy for your customer. Are you using the most up to date tool that will help you capture the business by making it easy and with very few steps. Regardless if they are new or an existing customer they should have the same simple process. Can your customer book an appointment into your service department in less than 5 steps?

Up to date content – This is one of the areas that require the most attention. Make sure your coupons are seasonally correct and not expired. During my search I found a large amount of specials that were out of date and expired, I found fall specials even though we are past spring and heading into summer. More importantly make sure your content pages are up to date with the latest recall and service related information. An easy way to identify some of the content you should have on your site is to review all your inbound calls, what questions are being asked and see if those questions can be answered on your website. Review the Google ad words preview tool for your area and make sure you have all those boxes checked as well.

When I performed a quick study of those that have most of these basic tools in place and seem to have a grasp of their digital relevancy, I found a couple of commonalities that allow them to make their presence felt.

Budget – To accomplish the required footprint in this space you will need to shift some of your traditional marketing spend to digital. In addition to this know and understand that you will exhaust your budget rather quickly under the traditional (and antiquated) guidelines. Those that provide that presence understand that this is an area where they will simply be higher than the average but are willing to spend more to help drive more to their store.

Support – To deliver on some of these tactics the service manager or service director is going to need some help. Those that do really well with this have a dedicated fixed operations digital content specialist, in some cases before jumping into the expense deep end the store simply used more of the already in place digital marketing manager time allocated to fixed operations to a fifty-fifty split.

The search volume continues to grow and we have a lot of work to do to reduce the gap between our aftermarket competitors. This is something that is going to require a lot of time, resources and energy but will be rewarding when reviewing some of the conversion rates.