In this year's DrivingSales Most Valuable Insight Competition, we showcased four of the best dealership insights to give automotive professionals a competitive advantage.

Watch this recording to see these invaluable insights:

• - There is No Average Buyer Journey | Amol Waishampayan, Stream Companies
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• - Give Car Buyers What They Really Want | Mike Burgiss, DealerPolicy
• - Discover How COVID Influences Buyer Behavior in your Market | Amy Hughes, Experian Automotive
• - Leverage Your Human Capital To Drive Better Results | Steve Roessler, DriveCentric
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We had a great discussion with Dane Saville and Dave Spannhake from Reunion Marketing. They laid out a roadmap for optimizing your dealership's presence by first leveraging intent channels -- website, SEO, PPC -- and building out to stimulus channels -- programmatic media, including Facebook and its syndicated network. 

Watch this webinar recording to learn how to properly allocate your digital marketing investment, including the tactics, strategies, and expectations that come with it.

So much has changed in the world during the past few months. Many dealerships have been making the decision whether or not to close their doors temporarily and when to reopen. There’s an increased urgency now to take every opportunity to increase online leads and interact with customers amidst all the uncertainty. This is requiring an unprecedented strategy and creativity. 

We had a great discussion with Thomas Clawson, and Jordan Reid from Podium on this topic. Watch this recording to learn how your dealership can manage your customer journeys—from initial search to final sale—digitally.

Key Takeaways:

    1. Optimizing to increase online lead flow

    2. Communicating with customers in their preferred channels

    3. Nurturing leads through messaging

    4. Collecting payments via text

Due to COVID-19, there is societal anxiety like we’ve never had before. Overlay that with the anxiety of buying a car. No digital retailing tool alone will solve that. We don’t know where the market is headed but we do know that Customer Experience will win out. Are the changes you've made to your online retailing experience shortsighted adjustments to comply with social distancing limitations or are you truly evolving to meet customer demand now and in the future? 

Your customers may be willing to tolerate a tepid experience because of COVID-19, but when the market rebounds those expectations will be raised. Your goal is to build a process that leads to permanent success.  

Don't miss this live discussion with Peter Cooper, President & CEO of Lexus of Lehigh Valley to discuss how you should approach online retailing and gain insight on delivering what is right for the consumer instead of what the government mandates. We’ll be chatting about how Lexus of Lehigh Valley is transforming to meet the evolving customer expectations today and post-COVID-19. Join us as Peter shares his thoughts on what the future holds.

We sat down with Tim Cox, Co-Founder of CarNow, to talk about the future of your dealer website and where AI applies to the automotive industry.

Will Your Dealer Website Fade Away?

As Google prioritizes Google my Business and Facebook becomes a larger influence on car buyers, that may be your customer’s go-to place to search for car buyers in the future. If you can get ahead of this curve, that could mean you smashing your competition in the future.

AI in Automotive

People love vehicles, but they don't love the process of purchasing a vehicle. If you can streamline that process as much as possible by implementing AI to help salespeople handle a customer’s information more efficiently, you can improve their experience by a massive amount. The future of AI is in handling the manual tasks that destroy efficiency in dealerships everywhere.

We had the opportunity to chat with Scott Eisenfelder, at Affinitiv, about omnichannel and your fixed ops department.

“Communication doesn’t stop at the mailbox, or the email box”

In order for omnichannel to work properly, you need to be consistent with your messaging and your offers throughout the entire process. Not being able to carry over your promotions and offers to when your customers schedule an appointment can seriously harm their experience and prevent you from gaining a repeat customer.

“All of the communications we do today are what I call highly segmented”

When you communicate with your customers these days, it needs to be highly customized and specific to each customer. Knowing when to contact a customer and what channel they would most likely prefer can get you in front of a customer’s eyes more effectively. 

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 had a great discussion about improving the efficiency of your fixed operations at the online Presidents Club. We were joined by industry experts Keith Baker and Kevin Flounders.

Keith talked about the importance of building and maintaining relationships with your customers and getting the most out of every customer interaction.

Build relationships with your customers

“The dealers that are able to establish and maintain the strongest relationships with their clients are the ones that are going to win”. Mass texting campaigns are a great method to build relationships with your fixed ops customer today. These are pre-scheduled campaigns that dealers are able to send out to their entire customer base. These texting campaigns can be used in a variety of different ways and are effective in increasing retention and engagement.

Elements of a good fixed ops customer experience

With so much communication happening today, it’s important that your fixed ops messaging cut through the noise that your customers experience. Keith taught the four core elements that must be included in your CX to resonate with your customers. 

Personalization - To be treated like a human, not a number

Immediacy - Highly-responsive service

Consistency - A seamless experience across all departments

Anticipation - Ability to effectively predict and prescribe action customers

Fixed cost reduction

Kevin Flounders focused on creative ways that dealerships should be reducing fixed expenses and how this practice is a profit boost when times are good and a necessity for uncertain ones. Kevin compared fixed cost reduction to going on a diet. It’s not just about losing the weight, it’s about keeping the weight off. You should be reducing expenses in the long term, not just taking temporary reductions.

Kevin mentioned several specific expenses that your dealership should be evaluating. 

Cutting you fixed expenses is not a one-time project. You should continually focus on how you can make the most of your budget. Be persistent in following up with your vendors when negotiating your rates AND FEES. They are counting on you giving up. Now is a great time to get these expenses down. Vendors are very open to negotiation today and dealers should be taking advantage of this opportunity.

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 had another great Presidents Club working session, Optimizing Digital Retailing. We were joined by Matt Weinberg, Michael Cavanaugh and Michelle Denogean to discuss what dealerships should be doing today to leverage the power of digital retailing.

A common theme from the discussion was that automotive retail is in a period of disruption. The unique challenges we face today have forced dealers to embrace digital retailing solutions in order to serve their customers. 

This is the time to evaluate and re-invent our sales processes 

As challenging as this situation is, dealerships are in a good position to take a critical look at their structure and processes and decide what changes should be made to improve operations going forward. Now is the perfect time to evaluate the structure and processes of your dealership. Does it make sense for your store to move away from separate sales, BDC and F&I teams and work towards a one-person model? Ask yourself what goals you are trying to accomplish and what foundation should be in place to accomplish this. 

Mike Cavanaugh recommends dealerships focus on reviews. “Invest in getting good reviews right now. Do your comp plans reinforce this? This is great low cost marketing.” 

With that vision in mind, you can make the needed adjustments to your processes and evaluate your talent to make sure you have the people in place to deliver that experience.

Begin with your culture

Do you have the culture in place to accomplish this?

A common thread in all of the comments was the importance of a strong dealership culture.  You can’t just drop in a digital retailing tool and expect it to work.  Your online and offline processes need to be aligned,

Too many dealerships make the mistake of looking for a technology to solve their problems.  Optimizing digital retailing requires you to build a culture around digital retailing and then find a tool that supports your culture and strategy.

Make sure you have the right people in place

Dealerships today are relying on their people to wear more hats than ever. Having a wide skill set and being able to accomplish a variety of processes is becoming increasingly valuable as dealerships embrace these digital retailing solutions. 

You need to make sure that you have the personnel in place that you can trust to perform these processes. “Define your structure before you can move forward with training and personnel, said Michelle Denogean, “Empower salespeople to do more. Are your sales people flexible enough to do the various tasks required?” Empowering your people to have more responsibility and relying on tools and technology allows you to streamline your operations and improve your team’s efficiency.

“Find the balance of control between dealer and customer,” said Matt Weinberg.  “Focus on the 4 T’s. Trust,Transform, Time, Transparency”

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 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.