Over the last couple of months, I've been researching reputation management companies in and out of the automotive industry. On one hand, I found a couple of shining stars that stood out from the competition. On the other hand, they were only the best but were still missing the boat when it comes to the true potential of what reputation "management" should be.

I've been told that my posts are too long, particularly when I'm in rant-mode, so I'll keep this as brief as possible. Car dealers deserve better. The industry started getting flooded with reputation management services a few years ago and they all migrated to the same basic premise: solicit reviews through emails. While this in itself isn't a bad thing (and I'd debate anyone who thinks it is a bad thing, including anyone at Yelp), it's only a small piece of the puzzle. For a true reputation management solution to work, it needs to have an holistic understanding of how to utilize the components of online reputation as well as a grasp of how to turn a quality reputation into an amazing marketing tool.

Again, I'll try to keep this brief. It will be challenging.

More than Defensive

We've learned that defense wins championships. However, the concept that reputation management is about keeping your review star-ratings high is like saying that a car is about having a place to sit while you travel. Your reputation can do so much more for you than a star-rating just as a car can do so much more for the owner than just act as a moving seat.

The concept of reputation marketing is completely underutilized at best and butchered by some at worst. The first step, getting your star-ratings higher, is good to keep people from dismissing you altogether when searching for you. That part's fine. However, those who click through to the review sites are most likely looking for dirt. They want to know what you've done wrong. They're scanning beyond the good reviews and going straight to the bad ones.

A strong reputation management solution should go on the offensive. Expose the great reviews. When someone is out there talking about how they just bought their fifth vehicle in the last decade from your dealership, your reputation management company should be getting that out to as many people as possible. No, that doesn't mean an automated feed from the review site to your Facebook page that will end up getting seen by 50 people in their news feed and actually read by somewhere between zero and one of them. It takes more effort than that and I haven't seen anyone doing it properly yet at the vendor level.

The Search Component

How in the world has nearly every reputation management firm in the automotive industry missed the tremendous benefits (and potential pitfalls) of utilizing reputation for search engine optimization? When I was at the SXSW convention last year, Google pretty much declared that online reputation and review sites would play a role in organic rankings as well as PPC exposure, yet I haven't heard a peep about it other than a mention on another site noting that Google had taken down an Adwords account because the dealership had a bad reputation.

The two companies that had the best solution that I reviewed both touched on the benefits of reputation from a search perspective but neither have taken the appropriate actions to put together a working strategy, yet. Hopefully, that will be coming, but most in the industry haven't even made the connection despite the clear message from Google.

Botching Social Media

I'm going to keep this part extremely short because I'll start spitting and foaming at the mouth if I talk about it too long. The absolute butchering of dealership social media pages and profiles by reputation management companies and their 2008 social media strategies makes me insane. I want to grab them by the shoulders and force them to listen to reason.

Just because reputation management and social media have a connection doesn't make a RepMan consultant a social media expert. Cars and planes are similar - they're vehicles that get people from point A to point B - but that doesn't mean that having a driver's license gives you the skills to fly a 747. The potential synergies between social media marketing and reputation management are clear, but so far I've seen nothing that even remotely approaches a cohesive and intelligent plan of attack to make them sing in harmony. It's like they took peanut butter, jelly, and bread, tossed them all in a blender and said, "Look, I made a PBJ!"

(wiping foam from mouth now)

Sorry for the Rant

Okay. I'm done. It's been bugging me since NADA and after seeing what I saw last night I had to get it out there. At the end of the day, it's the responsibility of a dealership to train employees on the art of treating customers well. Those of us who have been on the retail side of the car business know that you'll have customers who will burn you no matter how hard you try to please them, but their frequency can be minimized by an appropriate company culture and a well-trained staff.

That's the onus of the dealer. On the vendor side, I'm making it a personal mission to educate reputation management companies on the proper way to position this potentially powerful marketing tool. We deserve better. You deserve better.

Every year around this time, dealerships find themselves making decisions about how to move forward with their marketing. The NADA Convention is often a starting point for the decision-making process; whether you go or not, the post-NADA whirlwind is a great time to grab the latest and greatest from the various vendors around the industry.

It's not just for those who attend. Every dealership in the country has an opportunity in the days and weeks following NADA to take advantage of deals, new developments, and fancy enhancements. It can be a smorgasbord of automotive marketing awesomeness, but in many ways it's also a trap.

Years on both sides of the ball (retail and vendor) have helped me to see some of the best and worst out there. As you start making decisions about the future of your dealership, it's incredibly important to prioritize. This list is incomplete - there's really no such thing as a complete list - but it should give you some insight about the things to look into and the things that can be put on the backburner. Hopefully the fact that the products that my company offers are not at the top of the list is a good indicator that I'm compiling this from an unbiased perspective. There's no way to make any recommendations without at least a hint of bias, but I have tried to make it as pure as possible.

1. Training and Personnel

The easiest way for any dealership to move the needle in 2014 is to have the right people doing the right things at the right time. You can increase leads by 20% but if your team can't handle them properly it's a waste. You can have tons of buyers at your dealership at any given time, but if your sales team doesn't have a solid process to get them to sign on the line that is dotted, sales won't increase as much as they should.

If you do nothing else in the next few weeks, commit to improve the skill levels of your team. You may need to hire and fire as a result. An interesting quote I saw on social media the other day in reference to the objection that there's too much churn in our industry and training is a waste of time that can help competitors when your staff leaves, a wise person responded, "Would you rather train people and have them potentially leave or not train people and have them stay?"

2. CRM with Perfect Training and Support

I've taken very few pitches on CRMs over the years. It's never been something that I needed to know about. However, I have talked to hundreds of dealers about the good and bad aspects of the CRM world and if there's one thing that is universal, it's that the biggest complaint about CRM tools is that the staff doesn't know how (or is unwilling) to use them.

CRM makes deals. It saves deals. It revives deals. However, it can do nothing if it's not used properly. That's not to say that it's not on the dealership leadership to make the staff use it properly, but having the right ongoing training and product support is extremely helpful. I would rather have a decent CRM that everyone knows how to use and that is properly supported by the company than the best CRM with poor support.

3. A Marketable Website

Let's cut to the chase on this one. The vast majority of services I've seen associated with websites have been sub-par. It's a strange paradox - the website providers that have great designs and conversion tools are often the worst at marketing their websites, while the ones that are great at marketing them seem to have the ugliest sites in the world. That's not to generalize as I do know of a couple that do both well, but the most important attribute to me is the ease and ability of a website platform to be marketed by the dealership.

Easy-to-build pages, clean code, responsive customer support, proper integration with outside marketing tools - these are the things that aggressive dealers need. If you're not aggressive (and by aggressive, I mean willing to either perform strong marketing techniques on your website or willing to hire a marketing firm to do it for you), then the set-it-and-forget-it website vendors are all you need. If you want more, get a website provider that plays well with you and your marketing firms.

4. Inventory Marketing and Advertising

It's all about VDPs. It's ALL about VDPs! I'm not going to use this as a forum to rip on the inventory aggregation sites out there as they play an important role, but your top priority once you have all of the other three items covered is to get more buyers in front of your inventory on your website.

There are tons of amazing products and services to make this happen (and no, I'm not going to go into specifics here in order to keep this unbiased). Once you can handle the leads (training), organize the leads (CRM), and properly turn visitors into leads (website), it's time to open the floodgates and point them directly at your vehicle details pages.

5. Search and Social Marketing

The fact that nearly every vendor treats SEO, PPC, and social media marketing as three separate marketing techniques is offensive to me. In 2014 and beyond, it's so important to see the writing on the wall that search and social are coming together as complementary components of a holistic content marketing strategy. The right hand must talk to the left hand for modern marketing practices to work their magic. It's that simple.

Many of the bulk vendors are coming out with their own variation of search and social packages. For PPC, this is actually okay since it's really a software play in that arena. For SEO and social media, a "scalable" solution is a worthless one. It can't be done. A vendor that believes it can properly optimize thousands of websites is delusional while a vendor that believes it can run social media for thousands of dealerships does not understand the game.

6. Reputation

Notice that I did not say, "reputation management". It's more than that now. It's no longer an email and a prayer. It's no longer a card that your team may or may not hand out to customers in hopes that they'll run home and leave a good review. It's not even simply about getting positive reviews. Reputation is starting to play a major role in search, social, and general online marketing. This must start at the dealership level and permeate into a company culture of perfection in customer service.

We all know that you can get burned by someone who was treated properly. Bad reviews happen. Keeping them to a minimum and building rabid fans of the dealership and the way you do business is the best way to improve your reputation. It's not the easiest way, but it is the best way. Lastly (and this is something that is close to my heart since we've been working on it for some time), reputation isn't just about getting good reviews. It's also about getting those reviews in front of people that may be considering you or your competitors. This is a key that nobody is really doing right... for now.

7. The "Cool" Stuff

This has to be included, even if it's at the "bottom" of the list. Keep in mind, there are dozens of other marketing segments that could easily be discussed here. There are hundred of products and services that are not included at all. Being at the bottom of this list doesn't mean that it's not important.

The "cool stuff" out there sounds ambiguous, but this is where a savvy dealer needs to trust good ol' fashioned instinct. If you have an opportunity to offer something or reach people in ways that your competitors do not, that's what I consider to be the "cool stuff". Every competitor has a website. Every competitor is doing something on search and social. Every competitor has a reputation whether they do good things with it or not. Those marketing practices, products, and services that are unique to your dealership - those are cool and should be considered. This isn't a license to go chasing shiny, bouncing balls around, but some of these shiny balls have profits and sales attached to them.

In Conclusion

In the weeks after NADA, make an effort to get the information that you need to make strong decisions. Ask yourself the hard questions. You may hope that your team is properly trained, but test them to find out if they are. You may believe that your website is rocking and rolling, but get an independent view to see if there are flaws you're not seeing. The majority of dealers out there are on digital marketing autopilot. Don't be one of them. Take control and make 2014 a year for the record books.

Thanks to social media, the leaders of companies are often much more exposed than ever before. Not everybody uses social media regularly, especially business leaders who are too busy, too out of touch, or both. Those who are active on social media while running a company need to be sure their profile picture portrays the proper image.

Originally, I was going to continue this post as if it were really important, but thought the satire might be lost for being too subtle. The reality is that it doesn't make a huge difference, but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be said. There is, of course, the standard professional business shot (with or without the fist on the chin with the contemplative look), but if you want to be a little cooler than that, here are some options.

1. The Pompous Speaker

What It Is: A candid picture of you on stage talking to people, preferably with a smile or other jolly look. Serious looks work as well, but they must be really, really serious. This is serious business, after all.

What It Says: "Look at me speaking! I'm a speaker! People pay to hear my words!"

Who Uses It: People who want to get speaking engagements or who want to appear more important than most realize.

2. The Casual Unplanned Shot

What It Is: Usually a selfie, but done in a way that makes it look like someone else took the picture. Always look away. ALWAYS look away. Black and white optional.

What It Says: "Even when I'm not posing for pictures, I still look cool. I'm a serious business person, naturally."

Who Uses It: Too many people.

3. Hard at Work

What It Is: At the computer or fiddling with a product. Often includes other people pointing at something apparently important on a screen. Should not be looking at camera - I messed up on this one.

What It Says: "I am way too busy and important to pose for pictures, so if you want to get a photo of me you better keep up and grab me while I'm working."

Who Uses It: Those who want to look like they don't have enough time to pose for a picture. Ironically, getting the pose just right often make these the longest photo shoots to get just right.

4. Getting Interviewed

What It Is: An interview. You know. With a mic and someone asking questions.

What It Says: "Look at me getting interviewed! I'm an interviewee! People beg to hear my words!"

Who Uses It: People who want to get interviewed or who want to appear more important than most realize.

5. The Standard Selfie

What It Is: A selfie. Just a normal selfie.

What It Says: "I'm just like everyone else. My butler puts my pants on me one leg at a time."

Who Uses It: People who want to appear to be the everyman. Sort of. Great for those who really are that important.

6. The Non-Standard Selfie

What It Is: It's a selfie gone wrong.

What It Says: "Keep sharp objects and flammables away from me."

Who Uses It: Nobody but me.

When I first started in digital marketing back in 2006, I had a dream of helping people take over the internet realm for their particular niche. At the time, I had 4 automotive clients and with the thought that content and links were so powerful for SEO while social media was the future, I pictured a product where my clients were blogging several times a week and posting them on several different blogs that fit in with particular topics.

There was a huge flaw in this mini-dream. Who has time to blog? Sure, a business can be expected to put up 3 or 4 good blog posts a month, but 20? 25? As someone who blogs daily, it's easy for me to sit here and say, "oh, it's so easy, you just have to schedule 15-45 minutes a day to do it, and then..."

Easier said than done, right? There's a reason that I haven't watched a television show since the series finale of Lost and I now realize that most people aren't wanting to add an additional hour or so to their daily workload. I get it. I rearranged that particular vision and decided to start offering the service rather than training people how to do it.

Then, I came across a dealership blog that blew my mind. They have been blogging for a long time and have accumulated nearly 700 blog posts. I was blown away. I knew of four other dealers that had put this sort of effort into their blog presence, and in all of those cases they had an individual or team behind it. This was different.

As I started reading through the blog, I realized that it was still using an older strategy. They were using it for SEO, which is fine, but at a certain point inbound links from the same blog to the same websites loses its juice. I realized that my vision of 2006 was finally finding an opportunity to be realized in 2014. Some dealers are blogging a lot and they could finally use my strategy.

One Verses Many

The only question that needs to be answered when deciding whether or not to focus on a single blog or multiple ones from a business perspective is bandwidth. The only thing worse than not having a blog is to have some that are ignored. If you can't put up a blog post every week, there's just no reason to have a standalone blog. If you're blogging lightly, bury it somewhere on your website and use it strictly for additional content every now and then. It's not a blogging strategy. It's just more content.

Keypoint #1: If you're once or twice a month, you don't have a blogging strategy

However, for those who can put up a lot of blog posts - double digits per month - and stick with it, you have the opportunity to branch out and have more than one blog. Then, a choice must be made...

Should You or Shouldn't You?

Blogs have multiple purposes for business. They can be SEO tools. They can be PR tools. They can be traffic drivers. They can be social hubs. They can be more than one of those at a time if you're great at it. However, do not fall into the trap of trying to do everything at once.

One very strong, well-maintained, well-followed blog is amazing if it's on the domain for SEO purposes. If it's off the domain or on a subdomain, the effectiveness as an SEO tool wanes over time.

Key Point #2: On-domain blogs are great for SEO, off-domain or subdomain blogs are not if used by themselves

If you're blogging often, you have a choice to make.

1. You can put everything on one blog, build up a following and traffic, and use it as either a strong content pull if your blog is on your domain or as a separate searchable entity if it's on another domain or subdomain.
2. You can split it up into more than one blog and focus on multiple niches. You won't be able to build as strong of a following on any one of them, but you may be able to get an overall stronger following on the whole network. This can be a bit more beneficial from an SEO perspective for links and social signals, but that is a minor play and should not be a big consideration.

Most in the search and social arena love the concept of consolidation. Some definitely promote diversity, but usually for different reasons. This is a complex question and the real answer lies in an analysis of goals, assets, and integration with other strategies.

Key Point #3: There is not a set, agreed-upon strategy with how to handle blogging - everyone is in a different situation

If you have the luxury of being able to blog often or can hire someone who can, then it's important to analyze everything you have going in order to select the right strategy. Rather than go too in-depth on the possibilities (that would be a 4000 word blog post itself), I'll open it up for questions here. If you have a specific situation you want analyzed, comment here or reach out to me.

I would love to tell you that this is breaking information, the type of news that you absolutely must hear in order to succeed in 2014, and that if you don't heed my advice your dealership will probably crumble in the earthquake of financial ruin by mid-March, but I just can't say that. This is a subtle post. It's a reminder of things that you should know, but just in case, we better go over them one more time.

Regardless of which of the 4,739 blogs posts you read about the trends in social media for 2014, there was likely a mention of the three things below. I don't like to post poorly designed infographics even if the content is great just as I don't like to post well-designed infographics if the content is poor, but this one was simple enough to allow it to pass muster.

One last caveat before getting to the data - this is about social by name, but the reality is that these three little tidbits affect social media marketing, search engine optimization, and content marketing equally. To say that it's all about social would not be correct.

With that out of the way (and thank you for listening to my disclaimers) let's discuss the three important and universally-accepted trends for 2014 that you should keep in mind when following through with your marketing strategy:

1. Google+ is a Must - It's been called a ghost town in the past. It's been ridiculed for not being very social for a social media site. It has been attacked for being forced onto users of YouTube, Gmail, Adwords, and just about everything else that is associated with Google. At the end of the day, Google is going to make Google+ work and have an effect on digital marketing whether we like it or not, so you had better start embracing it now. This is a long-term play. It's not something that you want to be coming in late on only when it's absolutely necessary. Today, it's absolutely necessary.
2. Social is Pay-to-Play - There's a reason that I stopped allowing my last and current company to offer any Facebook services without advertising attached to it all the way back in 2012. We saw the direction that social media was going and knew that a social media strategy without advertising is like a car without gas. I don't care how strong your content is, how many hundreds of thousands of fans you have, or how awesome your cat pictures are, you cannot be truly successful on social media without paying for it. With that said, the only thing worse than not running social media advertising is to run it poorly, so before you go and start throwing dollars at Facebook, learn the strategies or reach out to an expert first.
3. Pictures and Videos are (Almost) Everything - There is no doubt that video and image marketing play a huge role in search, social, and content marketing. There's a small addendum that must be mentioned before everyone abandons their links. Google+, Twitter, and Facebook have all hinted at a resurgence in high quality linking on their sites, so don't abandon them just yet. A diverse strategy for content is best in this case.

The infographic below comes from Boot Camp Digital via Automotive Social Media and highlights some of the stats behind these three trends. Again, I do not endorse the design of the graphic. Infographics should be clean, stunning, or both, and this is neither. Still, the data is good.

Enjoy.

One of the most amazing parts of my job is spending time reading, watching, and testing the practices of others. It's conceivable that the true secret to my success over the years has less to do with creativity and more to do with listening and deciphering. You have to listen to the channels like Google and Facebook. You have to listen to your customers. You have to listen to your customers' customers (if you're an agency like me).

The annoying part of my job is sifting through the recycled techniques and reinvented terminology that surrounds so many marketing practices. In most cases, it's the same old things repackaged into a different form or applied from a different angle. Those are valuable, but not gamechanging. Still, it's important to go through them all in order to find the hidden or not-so-hidden gems that arise. The best practices I've found over the years haven't been on the pages of Mashable, Search Engine Watch, or Social Media Today. The real winners have come from some of the least likely sources.

With all of that out of the way, let's get to the point. There are three types of marketing. Despite all of the various names - push and pull marketing, social media marketing, gravitational marketing, search marketing, influence marketing, content marketing - the easiest and arguably most pure way of looking at it is to tackle everything from a perspective of venue and intent. Where are the people going and what are they doing when they get there? It's important for me as well as business owners to look at it from this perspective because the collision of the various marketing types is forcing a holistic marketing model to outperform niche marketing techniques or specialized strategies.

In other words, if you look at venue and intent, you can craft your overall marketing strategy much more easily. We look at it as following the quest - what are they doing, why are thy doing it, and how can we be there to help them choose our clients. When people buy your products, they are fulfilling a quest. No, they're not slaying an actual dragon, but if they're on a quest to buy a car, then your dealership selling them a car is the culmination of that particular quest.

Here are the three types of marketing for 2014 (well, early 2014 at least - it changes so quickly) that we like to tackle:

Fulfilling the Quest

This is the easiest to understand and often the hardest to achieve because of the simplicity of purpose. Everyone knows that if someone is interested in buying a car, they're probably going to go to Google, Bing, or one of the various classified sites to start looking. They might go to review sites and OEM sites as well, but for the most part they're ready to seek the fulfillment of their quest, they're going to try to look for cars.

Search engine marketing of all types, whether it's SEO or PPC, gives you the opportunity to drive them to your website so they may fulfill their quest. They aren't searching for Honda dealers to have fun. They have a purpose. They're in buying mode. This is where you have to be in order to help them fulfill their quest.

Renewing the Quest

More businesses are starting to do this. Many of them tried to do it in 2009-2012 and failed miserably. Part of it was because the venues such as Facebook, banner advertisements, retargeting, and other forms of "passive" marketing arenas weren't developed to the point that they are today.

Now, the goals have come full-circle thanks to the overall availability of the internet. Mobile devices have made checking social media sites and reading websites the common activity when there are no activities to do. As people ride a bus, wait in line at the bank, or even perform other mundane activities like watching television, they are also surfing the internet. They aren't going to Facebook to buy things, but they're open to the concept. They're open to having their quest renewed.

When they go to Fox News to see what's going on and the retargeting ad pops up in front of them, they are reminded that they are still on a quest even if they aren't actively on it at that point. When the business they visited last week pops up on their Facebook news feed, they get that reiteration that they still need to buy something. It might take a dozen instances of seeing a brand and its message before they actually click through, but the statistics are showing that it's working. Not every sale is made through Google. In fact, some of the most important and actionable clicks come through other venues when they're not in active buying mode.

Creating the Quest

Of the three, this is the one that's ignored the most. It's the hardest to do and the least rewarding when not done right. However, it can be the most rewarding when companies are able to make it sing. This is one that we focus on in particular because in our industry, nobody is doing it right.

In many ways it's like good old fashioned advertising. No, it's not like the commercials that we see on television today. Think along the lines of the early days of television when brands were built by establishing a problem that people will see in the normal course of their day and then having that problem solved either in the middle of the initial marketing effort or after further research.

The reason that it's so hard today is because of attention span. We have seconds instead of minutes to get the message out through most advertising and marketing venues. There's no longer time to tell a story...

...or is there?

The art of creating the quest is about putting the right content on the right venues that will reach people and establish a need whether they're in the market right now or not. With this particular article already breaking the 1,000-word mark, there's not enough time to go into it in detail. We'll do that next time. Instead, watch the following video that shows two commercials that worked well in their day. Today, having a minute-long television commercial isn't practical for most businesses, but taking advantage of the various channels online to accomplish the same goal and better is something that we know will move the needle. It's hard. That's the point. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.

More on that next time. For now, here's the video:

Let’s keep this one short and sweet. If you run a business, you fall into one of four categories:

1. Those who are using social media and seeing mixed or minimal results
2. Those who have used social media in the past and stopped because they saw mixed or minimal results
3. Those who have never really bought into social media
4. Those who are killing it on social media

It’s easy for me to say that the last option is the one that just about every business should be striving towards, but the reality is that if everyone was in category four, it would actually mean that everyone was in category one. Despite the vast nature of social media, there is still a finite amount of room on news feeds, Twitter streams, and other visible portions of social media for businesses. It’s for this reason that I am glad most fall into the first three categories – it makes my job for clients much easier.

With that said, there definitely needs to be more in the last category and the likely reason that there aren’t is because so many fall into the second category. Whether on your own or through a vendor/guru hack, you’ve lost faith in social media. That was actually okay in 2012. It became less okay in 2013. In 2014, successful businesses will make it into category four or they’ll find it harder to keep their status as a “successful business”. Everything is migrating to include social as a major component. If you rely on organic search to drive traffic to your site, for example, you may will soon find that your traffic is dropping if it isn’t already. Google and Bing are betting high on social and they’re leaning towards social signals and page/profile quality as major components of their algorithm.

Search is just the start. This is the part that amazes me the most. There are local businesses that are spending thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars on digital advertising every month but they can’t seem to justify a couple thousand dollars to dedicate to a killer social media presence and integrated search engine optimization components. It’s the most trackable, tangible form of digital advertising and marketing – the smoke and mirrors required to try to prove value are gone (at least for some vendors/gurus). Make it real or go home – that’s what we’re faced with today.

In 2014, make it a priority to re-evaluate your position. Take a pitch or two. Read some blog posts. This isn’t about buying into a trend, though that alone should be pretty obvious. It’s about reading the writing on the wall – I see so many individuals who are active on social media, yet are unable to see the value of social media for their business. It’s not your fault. You simply haven’t been shown the real deal.

Find the real deal about social media. Your business success may depend on it.

Article originally appeared on Soshable.

If you've participated in automotive internet marketing for long enough, you've very likely heard the concept that "content is King." It was in play back in the days when I started researching search engine optimization all those years ago and it never really stopped. There was a dirty little secret that few of us in the SEO community ever mentioned, but it's been safe to say it for a little over a year now.

Content wasn't really king. It was important, but it wasn't king - not by a long shot.

When I started at TK Carsites in 2007, I wanted to prove that point. I was given a single website that belonged to the company that we wanted to rank for the important "used cars" keywords. They had a gameplan that included creating pages for every major metro in the country, populating them with tons of unique content, and playing the game the way that it's supposed to be played. I told them to hold off for a while. This was an opportunity to do some testing.

We didn't add the content... nothing. The homepage was flash and had three words in the title tag - two of them being "Used Cars". I then went through an extremely aggressive link-building process and started attacking dozens of cities. In less than two months, we were ranked in the top 3 for over 30 major metros and #1 for a dozen. These weren't easy keywords. "Baltimore Used Cars". "Dallas Used Cars". "New York City Used Cars". We Google-bombed the site and it paid off. Sadly, we didn't develop the site very much after that, but the point was made.

Fast forward about a year and we started recognizing that Google was changing the game. I was certain that they were heading towards a set of quality-control mechanisms that would change the game. We started shifting towards a content model that included high-value sites, blogs, and guest posting. We still used some of the lesser link-building styles such as directory submissions, but we stopped all forms of footer/sidebar/signature link building. If it could be done in bulk, we weren't going to use it. Google was catching on. I was sure of it.

2009 came and went. No major change. Content was a little more important, but link-building still ruled. In fact, our high-touch, high-maintenance technique was working but not much better than the spammy techniques some were using that we abandoned.

2010 - same thing. I was getting worried. I was sure Google was close. They had to be. Unfortunately, I was getting a little pressure from the SEO team because they were seeing that the techniques that I assured were evil were still working.

2011 - Panda. YAAAAY! No, wait. It didn't address the links. The spammy techniques were still working and my expensive strategy was having trouble fighting off the bulk players.

Then it happened. Penguin. April 24, 2012. The day that I thought would be coming in 2008 or 2009 finally arrived and all of the things I had hoped for came true. Some of our competitors fell of the map, Death-Star-style. "as if millions of SEO's cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."

Today, the strategy, a content- and quality-based strategy, is alive and well. Finally.

So what was the point of all that? Today, content truly IS king, but not in the way that most perceive it. The reason that I build a new company that focuses solely on content, search, and social is that the three are now part of the same digital marketing strategy. You cannot do well with any one of them without doing well at the other two. Content is king because the quality necessary for pure link earning and social media marketing is finally bridging the gap. Unfortunately, that's bad news for the vast majority of dealers because the boilerplate content that populates so many dealer websites is hurting you. Chances are you're not really feeling it because you've never experienced the different; if nearly everyone is doing it wrong, then "bad" is actually average.

Here is a good infographic that demonstrates many of the connections that are associated with content as part of SEO and thus part of the holistic digital marketing strategy. Enjoy!

The excitement has been building for a little while now and we're finally here. 2013 was awesome for many of us on all three sides of the ball - dealers, vendors, and OEMs - and 2014 is trending towards being even better for many. On the other hand, the dangers popping up in many marketing disciplines are also casting some doubts on the future of a good chunk of the industry. Yes, that means that there are dealers, vendors, and even OEMs that are going to be in trouble if they don't keep up with these changes and watch the trends more closely.

Search marketing is definitely one of those arenas where the trends are amazing for those "in the know" and potentially disastrous for those who are missing the point or not paying closed enough attention to the writing on the wall.

In the infographic below by Arrae, there are some good bits of information that can help you make some marketing decisions in early 2014. We don't agree with all of them - for example, the list of companies to use for correcting and monitoring listings is in a completely misleading order. It's funny because they have GetListed at the top. Having worked with them all and others, I would put GetListed in the middle of the pack at best. It's a service owned by MOZ and that might be the reason it's listed so high, but that's not the best. In fact, if they would have put the list in the exact reverse order, it would have been more accurate. Oh well. I understand the love for MOZ - we use their software ourselves!

There are a few other points of contention but overall the list is great. Think mobile. Monitor your listings for both reputation management as well as SEO. Focus on localized content. Great stuff across the board.

Here's the infographic:

This is a quick reminder that nobody needs now. It's also a permanent reminder about the way that a dealership's internal marketing culture should operate (in my humble opinion based upon experience) and should be repeated every month, not just at the end of the year.

It's the end of arguably the best year for the car business in a long time. I remember the last time I was working at a dealership at year-end and the excitement we felt as we were closing in on the all-time record for a 40-year-old company. I also remember a lecture I had to give to the owner that went something like this:

• Owner - Who were you meeting with just now?
• Me - A website vendor.
• Owner - Why are you messing around with a vendor? We have one week left to break the record! They can wait.
• Me - You know my philosophy on vendors. We get the best deals at the end of the month.
• Owner - Then talk to them at the end of next month. We need sales now!
• Me - I understand, but there's only so much I can do to influence this month and all of it's in motion. However, spending an entire extra month with a poor website would do more damage than any positive I can bring to the table for this month. Your sales people are responsible for making the sales happen. I'm responsible for putting the deals together and making the leads happen. Every lead you're seeing today is a result of what I've been doing for the last 2 months, 6 months, and even 12 months.

I won't go into details about the rest of the conversation because it didn't go well. I left the dealership a few months later, not out of spite but out of commitment to continued excellence.

With the right strategy and a strong work ethic, everyone is capable of playing now and planning for tomorrow. They are not two masters pulling in two different directions. If there's a deal to work with a customer right now, work it. During the downtime between customers, work the future. In our industry, we often get so wrapped up the now (for good reason) that we betray our plans for the future (for bad reasons).

This is it. It's the last week of the year. Every month, there's a last week of the month during which just about everyone is pushing to make it happen. Just don't get so engulfed by the end of year or end of month push that you forget to make time for improving your marketing today. If there was ever a time to grind a vendor on prices or services, this is the time. Just as you're trying to make your month, they're trying to make their month.

Plan ahead. Make it happen.