We had another great Presidents Club Online session with industry experts Paul Daly, David Regn and Sarah Throne about advanced brand strategies. 

Defining a dealership’s brand

We kicked things off defining the components of a dealership brand and how your brand is different from your marketing. “Your brand is how you are perceived in the marketplace by your local community and at the customer level, no matter what phase of the buying process your customers are in.” said Sarah Throne of Stream Companies. 

“A brand is what you become over time… it’s multiple experiences.” according to David Regn of Stream Companies. 

Marketing is the strategic deployment of that brand across many channels. Your brand is closely connected to the reputation that your dealership has and the emotion that your customers feel when thinking of your dealership. “We largely are not in control of the feelings that people have about our businesses” said Paul Daly of Congruent. “We can only do our best to define what we think our brand should be”. 

Culture influences brand

It’s important that you create a culture in your dealerships that supports the brand that you are striving to build. You need to have the people in place that reinforce the values that align with your culture and brand. It’s easy to only focus on the visual or technical channels when we consider a brand. However, your people also play a very important role in defining your brand and how your customers view your stores that you shouldn’t overlook.

Use your brand to differentiate your dealership

We also discussed the importance of understanding where our brands fit in the market. What do we offer to our customers that is truly unique and is that offer being communicated in our branding? Dealers should be aware of the competitor brands so they can focus on communicating the value that sets them apart from other stores.

What to focus on today

“We need to be nimble and meet the customers where their needs are. And we need to be able to communicate that.” according to David. We can’t predict the future but COVID-19 could act as a wake up call to dealerships that aren’t providing and communicating an experience that aligns with the needs of their customers and their preferred method of transacting.

We kicked Presidents Club Online off strong today with a great working session about marketing in 2020. Alex Melen and Gail Rubinstein highlighted some of the newest features you should be taking advantage of when advertising on Facebook, Instagram and Google Ads.

Facebook rolling out new Leads Center

Facebook is rolling out the Leads Center which will act as a CRM platform dedicated to your leads on Facebook and Instagram. This allows BDC teams to manage those leads within the Leads Center as well as contact those leads using the Facebook messenger through the Leads Center. This feature is already available to many dealerships in the US and coming soon to Canada. 

Enhanced Machine Learning for Google Ads

AI and machine learning can improve and scale campaigns in a way that has never been done before. Historically, marketers would manually adjust campaigns based on ad performance. Today, dealerships can rely on Google's automation and smart bidding capabilities to automatically manage campaigns much faster and more efficiently than manual methods. Companies utilizing these automation features are seeing a 30% increase in conversion volume from the same ad spend.

New Google Custom Audiences

In the last few months, Google has started offering the Custom Audiences feature to dealerships. Custom Audiences give you the ability to target in-market buyers across the entire Google display network and get cheap clicks. One interesting application of this feature is that dealerships can upload lists of customers currently leasing vehicles and target those customers with new lease offers across the Google display network, which accounts for 75% of the US website traffic. 

Message Consistency

Regardless of the platform or tool, both Gail and Alex emphasized the importance of communicating a consistent message to your audience. These platforms can work side by side to help you accomplish your marketing goals. 

It’s not too late to catch Presidents Club. We will be having more working sessions each day this week that are free to attend. Learn more here.

We sat down with Steve Smythe, CEO at Market Scan, at NADA 2020 to talk about the current state of automotive and where it’s going.

“Dealers are better off when they’re transparent”

The era of your sales manager being the only one that knows truly what a car costs is gone. With everyone being able to look up and compare prices on the internet you have no choice but to be transparent with your customers. The best thing you can do to your customers is to be upfront and be completely transparent on price.

“We’re all spoiled by amazon”

When customers can’t spend time in a dealership, it’s up to the automotive industry to adapt to online retailing. We need to perfect our digital retailing processes in order to sell and deliver vehicles with as little face-to-face contact as possible.

We spent some time Keith Tomatore, Chief Executive Officer at iFrog Digital Marketing, to see where AI is headed in the automotive industry and where you should optimize your marketing strategy.

“AI takes away the data entry of today”

The farther we get with artificial intelligence in the industry, the more we realize how important humans are to the sales process. Where AI will come in handy is automating the simple steps that take humans too much time so we can spend our time selling instead of doing simple and time-consuming tasks.

“We don’t worry about clicks impressions and cost per. What we worry about are business outcomes.”

In marketing, it’s easy to get tunnel vision on all of your individual metrics and data. A lot of the time it’s more important to pay attention to the outcomes of those metrics and tweak processes from there. Don’t let yourself get distracted by dozens of different tiny metrics when they aren’t going to make a huge difference in the end.

We spoke to Brandon Nixon, National Sales Director at Update Promise, to talk about implementing new tools in Fixed Ops and how your personnel can build trust with customers.

“I don’t care what vendor you go with, what tools you go out there with. They’re exactly that, they’re tools.”

New tools and processes won’t automatically solve all of the problems in your dealership, as a manager you have to drive implementation and keep everyone accountable to the new product. If you can keep everyone accountable, including yourself, you can use almost any tool and succeed.

“You’re about five times more likely to get an approval when you have a photo or video attached.”

Most customers don’t understand what you’re talking about when you contact them about potential service, having visual examples can build trust with your customers. If your advisors and technicians turn the camera on themselves that can help develop a personal connection with your customers and build trust even more.

We sat down with David Steinberg, CEO and founder of Foureyes, to discuss where automotive is headed and what we can do to improve in 2020. “The name of 2020 is going to be efficiency”, he said.

There is a set amount of people interested in purchasing a vehicle, which means there is a set amount of leads that can exist. The way you are going to make more money in 2020 is through optimizing how your salespeople respond to leads and increase your close rate, not just getting more leads to your salespeople.

“Every great movie is three great moments, and no bad moments.” The premiere way for you to improve the closing rate and make your dealership more efficient is by improving your processes to improve your customer experience.

Just like great films “every great process is three great moments and no bad moments”.

At Nada 2020 Kate Colacelli, Senior Director of Marketing at Dealer FX, told us how to manage every step of your service process and how personalized marketing will help you capture service customers by developing trust. If a customer declines specific services you can then market the same service to them for their next time appointment. Creating an option for your customers to text and email to schedule and check-in into service will make it easier for the customer to choose you over competitors. Consolidating different service touchpoints into one tool will help you streamline processes and keep your service department busy.

We spoke with Alexi Venneri, CEO and Founder of Digital Air Strike, at NADA 2020 about how automating steps for the dealership can be overwhelming with all of the products you have in place. Centralizing the experience by automating digital processes will create a better satisfaction score for your employees and for your customers. Creating efficiency by automating steps will decrease time spent on the system giving you more time and less overhead.

At NADA 2020 we sat down with Owen Moon, CEO & Cofounder of Fixed Ops Digital, to talk about what you can do to improve your service department. Recalls are a great way to keep your service drive busy. If customers are aware of a recall and they do their own searching online then you might lose a sale. Make sure that marketing recalls is something you are doing or you will lose service visits to competitors. Having services done at the dealership is the best way to build your brand and provide value to your customers. With cars becoming more technologically advanced it is your job to market to customers the value of your store. Third parties are less likely to have the training required for newer vehicles. When someone has a service problem they want it fixed immediately. Learn how you can be there to help by watching the video. 

Every sport has weekly Power Rankings so fans know who is currently the best in the league. They are also a great way for people to know who is improving and who isn’t. DrivingSales is bringing you Power Rankings in the form of quarterly updates. See what the most essential tools for your dealership are and stay ahead of the competition.

How It’s Calculated - 

Each product category is ranked in real-time. As new ratings come in they are ranked based upon the number of reviews, star ranking, percent recommended, as well as the sample size, to create a statistically accurate result. The rankings use an equation that takes into account the frequency, volume, timeliness, and star rating of every review. For example, if a product has great reviews, but hasn’t had a review in the last couple of weeks it will impact its ranking. This incentivizes vendors to get reviews from their customers. After all, people will willingly leave bad reviews but need to be pushed to leave good ones.

We have a team that verifies each review, so if a vendor is reviewing their own product it will be removed. We personally call every review, after doing research to ensure that they are indeed a real person at a real dealership. 

Without further adieu, here are the Power Rankings for the Vendor Ratings Categories for Q4 - 2019

2019 Q4 Power Rankings

Inventory Merchandising

Properly managing inventory will help you save time and money. Elead Inventory took the top spot. One salesperson said it: "makes my job easier." Another said: "the inventory system works so perfectly so we can search without going to our website."

Owner Marketing

Owner marketing is the best way to keep customers. These tools make it easy for you to determine who is about to buy a new vehicle. Elead currently owns the top two spots. Salespeople have said that it allows them to "target specific customers" and that it is "easy to understand and use."

Used Car Advertising

What would you do without used car advertising? These tools make it so easy to add inventory for customers to see.

CarGurus was rated the best with one owner saying that they: "Make a lot of sales through them. Leads are predictable and reliable."

Websites

Your website is the first thing that most of your customers see. These are the best automotive website vendors for Q4 2019. Dealer Car Search took home the top spot for with one GM saying: "Great customer support, fast setup; nice product and professional."