Targeting is the name of the game. Most dealers (and even some vendors) are really starting to embrace this concept. Gone are the days of illogically spent marketing budgets and shotgun techniques...

...at least we wish those days were gone. Unfortunately, they're not. Many vendors still promote bulk marketing practices and many dealers are still buying into it. Producing favorable numbers is easy. Taking qualified buyers and getting them to engage in a meaningful way with your dealership is harder, but there's a silver lining: you have tools available to you to target the right people and get them to the right venues.

The Right Venue

First and foremost, the best venue for producing more sales is your website. That's not to say that there's anything wrong with AutoTrader, Cars.com, or any of the other places where your inventory can be seen. However, any opportunity you have to take them to your website will yield more favorable results.

Between social media advertising, search engine marketing, LotLinx, and display advertising, you can take prospective car shoppers to your website where they're more likely to convert and buy. In most cases, you can take them directly into your inventory, specials pages, or specific landing pages.

You don't have to drive everyone to your website. That's a mistake that some dealers are making that's taking the concept of "1st party leads" to the extreme. Some people simply won't visit your website no matter what you do and they may still buy a car from you if they see your listings elsewhere. However, it's important to keep it to a minimum. Only use the services that actually work.

The Right People

The amount of data available about car buyers is exceptional. That may not be a good thing in certain arenas (yes, I'm talking about you, NSA), but when it comes to helping people buy a car, there's no better way to do it than to target real buyers who are in the market today.

Facebook has the data that they get from Polk. You can also plug in data from your DMS, Experian, and other data services.

Google Analytics can track most of it, so plugging in the data you receive from these data services or even you OEM can guide where and how to do your marketing. It's creating a cottage industry within the data arena for companies like String Automotive or ZMOTAuto to utilize for assisting dealers.

We are firm believers in the idea of letting the data guide your actions.

What it All Means

I'll admit that there's a little self-serving happening in this article. No, we're not promoting our products. We want dealers to become aware of the importance of bringing peope to your website. I cannot stress enough that there are plenty of good expenditures that have nothing to do with website traffic, but our opinion is firm that the primary focus of any digital marketing campaign should be to drive shoppers to the place where they're most likely to turn into a valid car shopper pulling into your dealership.

When you're looking at a marketing option, ask yourself one important question: will this put buyers on my website? It's not about bulk traffic. It's about quality traffic. It's not about leads, though some may argue that point. To us, it's about sales.

Sell more cars. That's the goal, right? The easiest way is by driving the shoppers to you directly so they're more likely to drive away in one of your vehicles.

You have two cars. They both have 4 wheels, a transmission, a four-cylinder engine, red paint, and a sporty feel to them. To someone just hearing about it and who didn't know much about cars, they might seem to be pretty much the same.

One is a 1957 Ferrari TRC Spider with the rare inline-4 and the other is a 1993 Geo Storm GSi. If someone knows nothing about cars, they might pick the latter since it's 36 years newer, but here on Driving Sales it's safe to say that everyone knows which one would go for $4 million at auction.

The problem with SEO in 2015 is that everyone is describing their product the same way. I was on a presentation last week when a prospect told me that our description of SEO matched with another company's. I know for certain that this particular company does very little in the way of actual SEO, but looking at the brochure they left and reading about it on their website made me feel like I just showed up at a party wearing the same outfit as someone else.

There are universal buzzwords being tossed around in our industry right now. Content. Links. Social signals. Schema.org. Unique title tags. The list is pretty long, just as the list of similarities between a Ferrari and a Geo Storm would be long. How can dealers discern?

Unfortunately, I've come to the conclusion that there's really no way to truly differentiate unless quality is checked. If a dealer receiving a pitch for SEO doesn't closely examine the quality of the work being performed, there's no way to tell the difference between good SEO and bad SEO.

I know what you're thinking. All a dealer has to do is ask for examples of results. The work is only as important as the results, right? The sad reality is that every SEO or website company with more than 20 clients can come up with great examples of SEO prowess. There are plenty of dealers across the country that don't even have SEO but who are ranked well for their keywords.

If everyone has examples, we're back to having to judge the quality of the work. It's a pain because it means reading through content, testing that content out in searches on Google or Copyscape, and even asking for conversion numbers to see if the page was effective at actually driving leads.

Plenty of people have written about the questions one could ask their prospective SEO firm to see if they know what they're talking about, but I am going to go back to the beginning on this one and focus on getting examples of work. It's actually contrary to what many post, but there are a couple of dynamics at play here. First, most companies have someone on staff who can talk intelligently about SEO even if they aren't actually doing it right. Second, the "right" answer might not be so easily explained.

An example for the second dynamic at play would be looking at links. PageRank is dead, so that's no longer an indicator of the quality of the site. Page and domain authority are decent indicators, but even those are slow to update and don't always paint the right picture, particularly if a page is loaded with outbound links that dilute the effectiveness.

So, it comes down to the one universal truth that every great SEO service I've ever seen can hold as sacred: quality of content. Thankfully, you do have the ability to discern this because you can tell the difference between good content and bad content. There's really no such thing as "SEO content" anymore. If it's good for SEO, it will be a great read for a human as well.

Get examples. See what they're posting on your site as well as anything being posted offsite. If it's stuffed with keywords, sounds robotic, or generally makes you feel like rushing through to get to the end, it's probably poor content. If you can read it and get engaged with what's written, Google and Bing will likely like it as well.

It's not a perfect science, but there's an art to SEO as well. If it makes sense to you, it will make sense to the search engines.

Compared to a couple of years ago, the number of dealers who have some sort of mobile strategy is exponentially higher. As an industry, we're starting to really understand just how important mobile is, but there needs to be more action and less discussion, in my humble opinion.

Here's an article I wrote on one of my blogs. It was originally meant for a general business audience but I adjusted it slightly so we can apply to the car business as well.

Enjoy:

When I finally stopped counting, I found 43 articles posted this week on various publications proclaiming that everything was going mobile and that marketers and businesses need to make the appropriate adjustments. All of the articles had two things in common: they gave reasons why we needed to market to mobile users and they didn't give very good ways other than the basic or generic methods for doing so.

Well, I'm here to give you some good ways to do it. That's all. No need to convince you that you need to do it. If you're reading this article, you already know. If you're not reading this article, you probably already know. Now, let's get away from why and start really digging into how.

Build Everything for Mobile

Everything. I didn't say most things. I didn't say "everything digital" or "all of your advertising". I said "everything" and I mean it.

Signs. Billboards. Television commercials. Radio spots. Newspaper ads. PPC campaigns. Social media posts. Your website. You employees' apparel.

Pretend like people will be carrying around smartphones and tablets with them everywhere they go. Pretend like their primary method for interacting with businesses is not the phone, not their email, not their laptops, and not coming to see you in person. Pretend like they're on the verge of using their mobile device even when they're in your store. Now, stop pretending because all of that is already a reality.

Watch your customers at the store. How many of them check their phones during the visit? Check your analytics. Look at the devices through which they're viewing your website.

Now, give them the opportunity to have a mobile experience with everything you have. Once you have the opportunities in line, give them the reason to act. For example:

• Forget about paper coupons for parts or service. Put virtual coupons at your store if they download your app or go to the "In-Store Customer Discount Page" on your website.
• Post unique videos and articles about specific vehicles. I'm not talking about stitched videos. I'm referring to sending a salesperson or someone else out to that new model that just came off the truck and giving it a good, short walkaround. Lots of dealers and vendors are talking about video, but few are investing into the medium properly. It doesn't cost much if anything. It takes time and commitment.
• Let customers post to your site, community, or social profiles. In fact, encourage them. Give them incentive to do so. Tell them if they post a selfie with your sign in the background, they'll get 10% off. Images posted to Facebook or Twitter are much better than checkins on Yelp.

I could spit out ideas for hours, but we're writing an article, not a book. Think of ideas for yourself. What can you do with everything you have to make it part of the mobile experience.

A Mobile-Only Website Would Work

All too often, we build a website for the company and make it really pretty on a desktop, but we neglect to put the same effort in for mobile. Whether you're using responsive, adaptive, mobile-ready, or full-site only platforms, make sure that your website is designed specifically for mobile.

My personal recommendation is to go with responsive, but this article is not the place for that debate.

If your primary website mimicked a mobile experience, you're better off than if your mobile website mimics a desktop experience. At some point in the near future, we will begin to see more websites that appear like mobile websites even when viewed on desktops. This is a good thing. Those who start doing it early will be ahead of the curve.

Social is Mobile

For a while there, it was looking as if Facebook would be able to become the only web presence. They faltered, then interest dropped off, but they got close. Now, we're still stuck with our standard online presence and a separate social presence.

But wait! It doesn't have to be so partitioned. Social media sites, Facebook in particular, have very powerful mobile connections. By drawing as many people in as possible to engage with you through their mobile devices on social media, you can start to bridge the gap and work towards a unified web presence. This is much trickier than what I can explain in a short article, but the strategy is one that we're implementing for clients now.

If you think social, think mobile. If you think mobile, make it work with social. Both can be made local, thus we hear about the SoLoMo concept that has been so popular at marketing conferences for a few years now.

Erase All Desktop and Analog Thinking from Your Mindset

This is the most important thing to do. We've hammered it so far in this article with everything we've said. Now we're going to push it all the way through to the other side.

You don't have a mobile website and a desktop website. You have a website. You don't have social media fans on mobile and social media fans on desktop. They're all on mobile (or will be eventually). You don't have customers walking through your doors who aren't seconds away from having their phone in their hand. Embrace it.

Buzzwords like "showrooming" and "competitive shopping" are real but pretty much meaningless until you have a purely mobile strategy for everything you do. Keep that in mind next time you're looking at your advertising and marketing budgets. If an expenditure doesn't assist in taking advantage of a mobile society, consider letting it go.

Look, I get it. Building a social media program for car dealers that is scalable, effective, and affordable requires choices. In many cases, vendors have to pick two of the three in order to maintain their business.

With that said, it still appalls me to see "personal" messages from the dealership being broadcast in bulk. One can make a valid argument that bulk messaging around the release of a new vehicle or an upcoming program is acceptable. There's an OEM strategy that we've been working on that plays with this concept in certain circumstances. However, when a message is supposed to be heartfelt from the dealership, please turn automation off.

The two dealerships above were part of a batch of personal messages sent simultaneously to dealers across the country. It's a generic as can be and makes the risky assumption that people will never follow more than one dealership, therefore they'll never know it's an impersonal bulk social media post. That assumption is incorrect and dangerous.

Let me end this mini-rant by saying that if you cannot put forth enough effort to make "personal" messages for your clients that are actually personal, you should consider a different verticle. The automotive industry deserves better.

(Thanks for reading my rant and sorry for sounding like a scrooge but this stuff really chaps my khakis.)

From a business perspective, there's really only one choice for marketing vendors. Software sells. It's easier to sell to businesses, particularly in the automotive industry. It's easier to sell a software company to a larger entity. Software is scalable. Strategy is too confining.

Strategy relies too much on people. It isn't scalable in most circumstances. Unlike software, the more that dealers start using a particular strategy, the less effective it becomes. Anyone wanting to build a successful digital marketing company in the automotive industry should definitely choose building software over building strategies. To build a company that's based upon strategies is absolutely insane.

I like being insane. It's good for the digestion.

Car dealers have the potential luxury of being able to take software and build strategies around them. Vendors can as well, but it's much riskier to do so. There are several companies who were built around the concept of supplying like-gated contests to post to Facebook. When Facebook outlawed it, many companies had to pivot or die.

Dealers aren't restrained in such a way. You have the ability to build great strategies around someone else's software without the financial risk of crumbling based upon changes. The companies that had a foundation built on Facebook like-gating died. The dealers that built a strategy around Facebook like-gating simply had to change their strategy. The dealerships didn't shut down because of Facebook.

We've been told on more than four occasions by respected people in and out of the industry that basing our company around strategies for Google, Facebook, and other ever-changing software providers put us in a position of facing potential oblivion every day. This risky business that we've gotten ourselves into is the key to our success. Living on the edge keeps us sharp. It keeps us always looking in all directions for threats and it allows us to continuously need to improve on what we're doing for dealers...

... and that's the point that dealers need to understand for their own digital marketing presence.

Don't rely on software. Had Robert Karbaum relied on YouTube software to do what everyone else does with posting standard video content, he wouldn't have won the Best Idea Contest. More importantly, he wouldn't have been able to improve his process and increase sales at his dealership.

Dealers have the benefit of being able to live on the edge with their strategies and not have to face oblivion. We might be crazy for doing so, but you definitely don't have to be. Take the tools, turn them inside out, devise plans around goals that your competitors would never see, and develop your own success through brilliant application of everything the digital age gives us. In a single word: innovate.

Most articles like these start off with phrases like, "looking back, it's hard to believe..." or "there have been ups and downs, but we never lost sight of..." - I'm not going to start this article that way. Instead, I'll say this: "It's been pretty easy, so easy in fact that I'm actually a little worried that I did something wrong without knowing it."

One year ago last week, I officially launched our website and started looking for people who wanted to go on an adventure. The official documentation, bank accounts, tax forms, and other such things wouldn't happen for a month, but on this date in 2013, we had a website and were ready to take on clients.

There's something incredibly cool about hitting the one-year mark. We can now say that we've been around for "a little over a year", which I'm hoping will reduce skeptical coughs when prospects talk to us. We have a full year's worth of data to plug into reports. We can get a bigger line of credit. Otherwise, very little has actually changed. Unlike the birthdays of young people that are filled with excitement, ours is more of a sigh of relief. We made it through the period of time when doomed startups are most likely to find failure.

I would be remiss if I didn't offer observations to those who care and advice for those who are considering going down the same path. After thinking about it all day, I came up with seven lessons I've learned that some might find entertaining, others might find infuriating, and hopefully a few will find helpful.

1. Set a Direction with a REAL Goal in Mind

If you're going to do as I did, leaving a lucrative and cozy job to follow a dream, make sure you do so with real goals. "Making more money" or "spending more time with the family" are not real goals, at least not the kind that I'm describing. They are side effects of success that stem from building and running your startup properly. "Build and sell the company for $X billion" is not a real goal, either, because it's a result of your efforts rather than being something that you can realistically achieve.

A real goal should be something that guides the direction of your company, your employees, and yourself. It's okay if it's intangible or subjective as well. Those can actually be the best types. The real goal is something deeper than the obvious financial or lifestyle goals that we have so that achieving it makes all of the other goals come true.

My goal was to build a company that delivered unquestionable results. This translated to building a search product that was so powerful that a stranger could look at analytics and point to the moment that we started. It translated into a social product that makes multiple dealers exclaim, "I never knew you could actually sell cars on social media until now."

Will I make more money than I did before? Yes, 2015 appears to be heading in that direction. Am I spending more time with my family? Absolutely. In fact, my first family vacation in years is next week. These weren't my goals, but they're happening because we're achieving the real goal for the company.

2. Be Fearless without Being Stupid

When we were first getting started, we approached an OEM about their social media. They liked what we had to say and asked us for some examples of their dealers that were on the program. The good news: we had just signed one of their dealers up a couple of weeks earlier. The bad news: it was our first dealer for their brand.

We were fearless. We were also stupid. We had a great product and a great idea of how to apply it at the OEM level but we couldn't get beyond the second meeting because we jumped in before we had anything to back us up.

People often misunderstand the practical meaning of the word, "fearless." It's defined as being without fear, but we are human. We have fears. Those who tell you otherwise are either misguided or trying to sell you something. The practical use of being fearless is to do the right things despite our fears. Fearlessness in business and in life is about not allowing our fears to prevent us from doing what our hearts and minds know is best.

It's not about bungee jumping. That's what we did when we met with an OEM prematurely. It's about believing that the opportunities put in our path are there for a reason and the terrifying obstacles placed in front of us are there for us to conquer and become stronger as a result.

3. Pivot Early

So many startups over the last decade have pivoted. The majority of them did not last very long after the pivot. Unfortunately, unless you have something that is rock-solid with very little chance of needing major adjustments, you need to be ready to pivot.

The earlier you can pivot, the better. Even the best business plans and the most experience in similar situations can prove to be incorrect in the real world.

There's a reason that most pivots fail. They're almost always done too late. MySpace performed a textbook pivot right before they were sold. It was the right direction for the company. It was also about a year and a half too late.

Think about your company's pivot. Expect that it will be necessary. Build your assets with a potential pivot in mind. If it never becomes necessary, then count yourself as one of the enlightened (or lucky) ones. When it does become necessary, don't hesitate.

We've gone through a handful of very minor pivots, but the first major one is coming soon. Thankfully, ours is not one that will waste anything that we've built so far, so it's like having the best of both worlds - a great plan to start and a better plan to grow.

4. People Build a Business

The most important part of any business is the people behind it. This is commonly known to the point that it has become cliche. It's also the one that seems to evade so many startups.

One of the guiding principles we've used is to hire talent and find the right fit for them rather than to hire to fill a specific need. This is a point that most business people would happily debate me on and in the court of public opinion they would probably win the debate, but I stand by it.

We had our eyes on a person who showed all of the aptitude and seemed to possess the exact vision we wanted. One day, we noticed that she was suddenly available thanks to an honest and serendipitous Facebook update. We couldn't afford her and we didn't have a place for her, but the potential and talent forced us to pursue her. Thankfully, we obeyed lesson #2 (be fearless) and grabbed her while she was available. We scrambled to grab a handful of clients to pay for her and we haven't looked back ever since.

The saying goes that you should put your customers first. I disagree. If you put the members of your team first, the customers will be served properly as a result. Find the right people. Go out on a limb to get them. If they're right for your company, the role isn't really as important. They have to fit the company before they can fit a role.

If you hire the wrong people, even the best plans can go awry. If you hire the right people, there's very little you can do to make a mess that they can't help you correct very quickly.

5. Establish Personal, Unbreakable Covenants

In the movie Top Gun, Maverick learns early in the movie that he should never leave his wingman. In the final fight scene, he takes it to the extreme and puts himself in danger to make absolutely certain he doesn't break that covenant. It works, of course, and he gets to share an awkward hug with Val Kilmer as a result.

If you're going to leave the security of a paycheck and take a chance to build a startup, you should do the things yourself and with your company that you always wished you could do before. Just think back. There were times when you've said to yourself, "If I ever have my own company with my own rules, then I would definitely..."

For us, we set several covenants. We won't make our employees work on weekends, for example. I still regret the time when a client really wanted one of our team members to be at a Saturday event and I let him go. He was fully willing to help and performed his duties exceptionally, but I still regret it. That was a mistake and I don't plan on letting it happen again.

They don't have to be so tangible, either. One covenant we set was that we would never let reporting or customer relations get in the way of results. My partner and I had worked for companies that were great at talking to customers but had a challenge delivering the goods. Every customer service call was laden with excuses. We've unfortunately taken it to the extreme on some occasions, delivering incredible results but forgetting to toot our own horns to our clients. Thankfully, the results usually speak for themselves once we show them.

6. Make Friends AND Enemies

If nobody hates you, then you're not trying hard enough. Part of being a startup in the uber-competitive world of automotive digital marketing means that if we're doing our job, there will be those who view us as a threat.

Of course, there will also be those who can view you as a potential ally. Sometimes, those allies can come at the strangest times and from the strangest places.

We have had our share of both along the way. Even the enemies that we've made have mostly come as a result of doing things that they could not. There are those who can do things that we cannot do, and we've done what we can to become allies with many of them.

In the game of friends and enemies, it's a matter of having sharp eyes. You have to be able to see when there are potential allies to approach while looking towards the horizon (or even behind you) for the enemies that are waiting for you to slip up.

7. Enjoy the Ride

There's a certain level of stress that comes with running a startup. Stress is fine. It's part of life. The tribulations we go through make us stronger and test our mettle. There's another level, though, that is not beneficial. When stress becomes anxiety, it can have the opposite effect. It can be debilitating.

There will be regrets, setbacks, doubts, and trials, but if you're not enjoying the moments as they happen and having fun with the lifestyle that you're building, it may be time to swallow pride and check the job boards.

You must love what you do. There's no way around that. You should never build a startup that you do not thoroughly, passionately love.

I have been thoroughly blessed this whole year. I've found (or been found by) the right people. The good decisions we've made have proven to be fruitful and the bad decisions we've made have not been catastrophic. Year two begins now. It's time to double down and make it better than the first.

It's been a while since I bought a car. Six years. Yep, I'm one of those people. A lot has changed since then. I know that next time I buy one, I will definitely do something that I didn't do any time before. I'll check reviews.

It occurred to me this morning that I don't do anything at all without checking the reviews first. Before I watch a movie, eat at a restaurant, buy electronics, or get my hair cut, I read reviews. Heck, I usually won't watch a YouTube video if the ratings are too low. I don't think that I'm alone.

I've always known that reputation management was important for car dealers, but I suppose it never really hit home until I had my epiphany this morning that there must be other people out there who simply will not do anything at all without checking reviews. I have an insider's view, having a stake in a reputation management company, that makes me skeptical about them to some extent. I realize that positive reviews can be encouraged and negative reviews can be partially avoided. Even armed with this knowledge, I still read them and I usually trust them.

Those of us who read reviews often can tell the difference between sincere reviews and those that are less-than-trustworthy. There's something in the wording, something about the reviewers themselves that send off alarm bells. You can see how many reviews they've left in the past, whether or not they have real friends, and even something simple like whether or not they have a real profile picture.

I'm not telling you all of this because I think dealers need to know the importance of reviews. Most here on Driving Sales probably already consider their reputation to be an extremely important part of their marketing. I'm telling you this because right now, this morning, I finally get it. I have become part of the machine.

It's strange that it took me so long to realize just how important reviews really are.

Let's call it what it is. This is a post about active digital marketing versus passive digital marketing. It's one that covers two of the types of marketing disciplines that are near and dear to my heart, but more importantly it lays the groundwork for an understanding of the various marketing styles and how we should classify them.

First and foremost, let's get an understanding of what the difference is between active and passive digital marketing. In our industry, the word "passive" is often shunned, but in this particular case it's not bad at all. Passive marketing lets the customer make the first move. Search marketing is an example of passive marketing because you must wait for them to engage with the search engines to find a car before the marketing kicks in. Active marketing goes out to them - you make the first move. Email marketing is an example of active marketing because you're initiating the action. On our website, we compared it to stand hunting vs still hunting.

With that understood, let's look at more examples of each:

Passive Marketing Disciplines

• Search Marketing
• Classified Listings (Autotrader, Craigslist, etc)
• Buying 3rd-Party Leads
• Video Marketing (not preroll or paid)

Active Marketing Disciplines

• Email Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Banner Advertisements
• Video Preroll

The Active Message

By now you're hopefully asking, "Great. What's the point?"

Passive marketing is a discipline that requires positioning and strong messaging, both guided by relatively consistent ROI. Active marketing tends to have a wider range of success and failure, and I wanted to point out why.

All too often I see dealers applying passive marketing messages to active marketing venues. This is why there is often such a gap between the success levels of two different campaigns. With active marketing, you can be bold and timely more than you can with passive marketing.

We've seen dealers spending decent budgets on social media without a verifiable sale and we've seen the same dealers with the same budgets gaining tremendously in market share by selling cars directly through social media messaging through targeted ads. The difference was in the way that the message was pushed out and what the message said.

Be bold. Tell them why right now, regardless of their current vehicle situation, is exactly the right time to come to the dealership and do business. This is the type of messaging that needs to play on active marketing venues.

On search, it makes sense to advertise "The Largest Selection of Altimas in the State", but in email or on social media, the message is wasted. Who cares? They're probably not intending to buy an Altima at that very moment and you haven't given them a reason to move up their buying cycle. It works for search and other passive marketing campaigns. It fails on active channels.

Instead, the message should be something like "The Biggest Discounts of the Year on Altimas are Happening RIGHT NOW for a Limited Time at Rucker Nissan!"

That's a message that plays.

Digital advertising can be broken down into message and exposure. Make sure the right messages are hitting the venues for the most appropriate exposure.

Over the years, I've worked with some of the best social media marketers in our industry. I've seen some posts that have hit incredible numbers on social media sites that were seen by tens, even hundreds of thousands of people. They were all memorable, not because the content was so incredibly awesome but because "going viral" on the internet is so hard.

In fact, it's not just hard. It's what most would consider to be a fluke.

It's for this reason that I want to warn dealers about the concept of going viral. Reference.com says that going viral is something "pertaining to or involving the spreading of information and opinions about a product or service from person to person, especially on the Internet or in e-mails."

It sounds awesome! Wouldn't every dealer love for their messages on their website, blog, YouTube channel, or social media profiles to go viral and get spread from person to person in bulk? Unfortunately, it's not something that can be easily manufactured. I'm not going to go so far as to say it's impossible (my partner has participated in making things go viral for dealers in the past) but it's extremely difficult and in many cases extremely worthless. More importantly, it's not something that vendors should be selling.

This is where I rant. A dealer told us that during a pitch, they were sold on the concept that an automotive social media company would make their content go viral. We asked for any examples that they had of this and apparently the vendor didn't have any that they we're "allowed to show" to the dealer when they asked the same question, but their strategy was somewhat compelling:

1. Generate really incredible content on their website.
2. Advertise the content on Facebook so that it's seen by thousands of people.
3. Let it get shared by many of those people so that it got tons of attention from other people, and more people, and more people...
4. Boom. You're viral. Let the massive traffic to the dealership begin.

The first two steps are very reasonable. The third step is questionable because one never knows when something is going to resonate enough with the audience in order to achieve the tens of thousands of social media engagements required to be even remotely viral.

The fourth is a joke. A viral post, if you're ever lucky enough to experience one, does not sell a massive amount of cars. It can help. It can obviously drive more traffic to the website and some of that traffic can turn into leads and sales, but it's not going to be a life-changing event.

Here are some realities dealers should know about the "viral content pitch" in case you ever come across it:

• For every example of a positive viral post, there are dozens of times when going viral is a bad thing. Most dealers that go viral do so because a news agency reported something bad that they did to a customer.
• Viral posts spread out to the whole country and often the whole world. We saw an example of one that hit CNN and Autoblog along with getting tons of social media love and the vast majority of the traffic was outside of 100 miles from the dealership. The campaign was a success and they did sell several cars as a result, but the sales increase was nowhere near the scale of the traffic increase.
• Quality often doesn't matter. For example, one of my posts accidentally went a little viral with 15k Facebook likes and around 50k visitors. This wasn't my best story ever. The topic was interesting - If You Still Think Car Dealers Rip People Off, You Don't Understand the Modern Process - but it wasn't what anyone would consider to be viral content. It simply resonated and took off. It was more luck of the draw than anything we did to promote it.
• As I said before, it technically can be manufactured, but it's so hard that having it as a centerpiece of a product is silly.

I'm not trying to throw stones at another vendor here. I'm simply trying to warn dealers that there are much better ways to spend your money and get realistic, tangible ROI results from social media. When I hear about pitches like these, it's no wonder that dealers are skeptical about social media vendors. We don't want to be classified as one of those who are selling snake oil. We like to keep things real.