The most amazing part about the internet and social media is that it has opened up communication between people and businesses that was never possible before. We now have the ability to talk to our customers and for them to talk to us in an interactive fashion, allowing for clear lines of engagement that can be both public and private.

For car dealers, this has translated into an incredible way for them to broadcast their messages and get feedback in real time. On Facebook, people can like, comment on, or share their posts when they appreciate them... and even when they do not. The world is completely different than it was a decade ago when the most powerful method of online communication, the email, was still relegated to being private.

This all means that dealers can receive interaction, but it also means that they're required to deliver interaction right back at their customers. Every day, we see dealers who are not taking advantage of this. People will comment on their Facebook posts, talk about them on Twitter, or respond to their blog posts and YouTube videos, but we then see many of the interactions going one way. The people are talking to the dealers but the dealers aren't always replying.

This is a big mistake because proper two-way communication breeds more communication. When people see your posts and also see that you're replying to the people that are commenting, it makes it more likely that they'll want to comment even more.

It also creates a proper feedback mechanism. A lot of dealers are doing this best practice on review sites, but then the same dealers are failing to engage on social media. When you allow social media to be a way for people to engage in a proper discussion on automotive topics, you're allowing them to help you get more reach for your messages.

The more you comment back, the more new comments you'll get. The more new comments you get, the more people will see the posts that are getting the comments. It's a great way to increase your message exposure.

Perhaps the most important reason to reply to everyone who comments on your posts is that it's simply proper manners. If someone says "hi" to you in the grocery store, you'll usually say "hi" right back at them even if you don't know them. It's good form to reply to those who talk to you and that carries over to your social media interactions.

Dealers that are doing this well can take it to the next level. They can get involved with other conversations of a general interest to the local community and start to really express the dealership's personality. This is key on social media. After all, part of being "social" is interacting with as many people as possible.

The streets in the social media world run in both directions. Savvy dealers are making sure that they're not just seeking engagement from others but that they're being engaging as well.

If there's one thing that gets me riled up, it's the types and degrees of education in the automotive industry. The car business has always taken care of me, so I try to always take care of the car business.

On many of the blogs and networks in our industry, there are sections for exclusive content and separate sections for "community posts" or syndicated content. Both serve an important role and I publish profusely in both. Here's why:

Community Content is General

There was a time when I didn't agree with posting the same article to multiple places. It seemed obtuse from a search perspective and annoying from a dealer perspective to see the same content republished over and over again on a wide variety of sites.

A friend and someone who manages one of the sites changed my opinion on this. He pointed out that content of general interest to the majority of dealers are better served when a post is published in multiple places. While the vendors seem to be on all of the networks, he pointed out that most dealers are on one or two regularly. If the content is good for them to read, then it's important to publish that content everywhere so that more dealers have an opportunity to read it.

That's the idea of the Community Posts section on DrivingSales. They know that there will be content duplicated here and elsewhere. They know that the content can be good, so why exclude it? Rather than cut it off completely, the team chose to have two sections (as many networks are doing nowadays) with the prime real estate given to Driving Sales Exclusives and syndicated content still visible but less prominent.

Exclusive Content is Meant for the DrivingSales Community

We have something special here at DrivingSales. I don't work for the company, but I have been a part of the community since the beginning and I've helped Jared and his team on several different projects over the years. I don't own it, but it certainly feels like I have a stake, even if not a financial one.

There are certain pieces of content that could be published elsewhere, but that has a unique resonance with this particular community. For those posts, the website offers a little radio button (pictured above) where industry bloggers can designate that "this piece of content is being publshed here and here alone."

This gives it better positioning and the opportunity to be broadcast through the DrivingSales newsletter (one that I highly recommend). It's for this reason that more and more people are posting duplicate content in the exclusive section. They publish it here and in other places, but then they select the "Exclusive to DrivingSales" radio button because, "hey, who's going to notice, right?"

I notice. The DrivingSales team notices. It doesn't take a genius to copy and paste a paragraph of content into Google to find out if a piece is unique or not.

I understand the desire that many vendors have to promote their businesses using any way at their disposal, but I humbly ask that you honor the "Exclusive" options on this website. That doesn't mean to post it here first and then post it elsewhere later. It doesn't mean to post it on DrivingSales and no other automotive blogs but then to post it on your own blog or an off-industry site. Exclusive is exclusive. If you're going to post it elsewhere, there's a section on this site dedicated to content that is of general interest to other networks or other industries. If the content is great, it doesn't have to be at the top to get attention. Enough people read the whole site, exclusive or not, so that strong content in the community section can still get incredible exposure.

Thank you and sorry for the rant. Carry on.

The car business is loaded with lions and gazelles. Some are ferocious, competitive beasts who want nothing but the best and they're willing to do what it takes to acquire it. Others accept what they're given and they're happy to still be alive and thriving after the economic hardship came and went.

This fall conference season gave me the opportunity to meet a ton of dealers. One of the most encouraging things that I witnessed was an unexpected resurgence of the hunger that drives many of us in this industry. I've seen too many people on both the dealer and vendor side spend the majority of their time complaining about how things aren't great and not enough time making them great. This fall, things seem to be different.

When I spoke at some of the conferences, there seemed to be much less skepticism. A lot of the things I speak about are pretty crazy for the time (I'll never forget the crazy looks I received at a conference in 2008 when I said that search engines were more important for marketing than newspaper ads), so it was like a breath of fresh air to watch people hear the progressive topics I discussed and take notes furiously.

That's the good news. The bad news is that there are still so many dealers out there who are satisfied with their OEM mandated marketing programs. There are still so many dealers who believe in checking off the various marketing boxes on their to-do list rather than striving to find the best of the best in each individual discipline. There are still plenty of dealers who listen to their vendors without questioning the numbers or calculating the ROI.

It discouraged me a bit on my drive home from the last conference until I realized something. This isn't bad news. If every dealer went after the best, nobody would actually be the best. If most dealers weren't enamored by the mediocrity they were getting peddled by many vendors and most OEMs, then the cream would have no way to rise to the top. If everyone wanted the best of the best, we wouldn't be able to handle all of the business we'd be getting!

(Stop groaning - you know that last line was funny)

The bottom line is this - if you're reading this now, chances are high that you're doing so because you're on the pursuit of greatness. You read the industry blogs. You try to attend the conferences. You hold your vendors accountable and you push the limits with your OEM. You are the lion in the picture above. Congratulations. The gazelles in this industry won't know what hit them.

Success doesn't fit everyone, but it might fit you perfectly.

Lightning never strikes in the same place twice... unless your name is Robert Karbaum and you're at the Bellagio in October.

For the second time, Karbaum walked away with the award for the best idea at Driving Sales Executive Summit. His idea, the YouTube Postal Service, is not only brilliant. It's easy, effective, and falls under the category of the ideas I hear that make me ask, "Why didn't I think of that?"

Congratulations, Robert! In case anyone didn't get to see it, check out the idea here:

The past two years has seen a decrease in the number of website leads for many dealers. We're getting more visitors and fewer people filling out lead forms. The trend has caused what I've seen as an increase in the number of calls to action on pages, particularly on inventory pages. This is a mistake.

The truth is this: more is not more. It's less when it comes to calls-to-action. You don't need to have a dozen of different ways for people to contact you. You simply need to make the right ones the focus and to make others stand out.

It's something that I've wanted to discuss for a long time, but only now and I comfortable doing so because I have no horse in the race. I no longer work for a company that sells websites, so it's easy for me to go after the website providers without repercussion. Call me a chicken. I can handle it.

Here are some examples of great pages with their calls to action positioned appropriately:

Fewer Buttons... with Standouts

How many ways do people have to contact you on your vehicle details pages? You probably have several in the right sidebar alone.

In the example above, the dealer has one call to action inline (Request Sale Price) and a pair of calls to action that are "standouts" (Carfax and CarChat24). This is powerful in that it narrows the choices. Keep something very important in mind: your calls to action do not compel action. They give the option.

To understand this, think of it logically. If someone lands on a vehicle they don't really want, they're not going to make this statement: "This really isn't the car that I want, but would you look at those buttons! I need to contact them about this car regardless of whether I want to buy it or not!"

The opposite is true. If they land on a car that they want to buy, they will find a way to contact you even if you put the buttons on the bottom of the page and the phone number in 10-pt font.

Calls to Action Before the Action are Great

We are big fans of keeping it simple. However, there are times when appropriate calls to action on the "transition" pages make a lot of sense.

In the example above, the dealer has Automark Solutions buttons at the top that work to get their information before they have selected a vehicle. Some dealers would say, "but we want them to go to inventory because that's what all of the gurus say."

It's incorrect. With the understanding that my company specializes in driving traffic to inventory, I can tell you that it's not a goal. The goal is to sell more cars. It's easier to sell more cars to people who contact you. In the case above, the opportunity to grab their attention and generate a lead before they look through inventory is powerful. If you rely strictly on your VDPs to generate leads, you're letting your inventory do the talking for you. We want the lead, not the VDP views. While VDPs are often the most common way to generate leads, if you get the leads before they get to the VDP, you're even better off.

What if you don't have the exact vehicle they want? In that case, driving them to the VDP hurt. How many people know about dealer trades? More importantly, how many people buy the vehicle they intended to buy from the start?

Just get the lead.

Popups Suck. Most of Them.

We all hate popups. They get in the way. They're annoying. However, in most cases, proper popups work to get more leads.

Keep in mind that standard, true "popups" are ineffective. However, Java popups like the ones visible above are effective. DealerOn has built their brand around the idea of being able to guarantee more leads to dealers. Their secret - that awesome little popup. It works.

I better title for this article would have been "You Don't Need More Calls to Action. You Need Better Ones."

Oh well. Maybe next time.

The mad rush is just starting. By this time next year, the majority of automotive website providers will have responsive, adaptive, or a hybrid in place as their website platform. The days of focusing strictly on the desktop and having a plug-in mobile solution are quickly fading.

That's the good news. The bad news is that so many responsive websites that I see are failing miserably at delivering on the actual benefits associated with RWD. This is why I was against them less than two years ago (even though the company I worked for at the time was developing responsive websites). Just because a vendor puts their websites on a responsive platform doesn't mean that they'll be delivering the expected results. The shortcomings of responsive must be addressed.

When looking at responsive websites, I look at several different components to determine if they're good or bad. The strange part is that it's not universal even within the same companies; I found one provider in particular that had very strong responsive sites launched last year and then really poor ones launched recently.

Instead of going into all of the factors, I've isolated it to three that dealers who are considering responsive should look at closely.

Mobile Site Speed

Speed plays an important role in two of the biggest factors associated with mobile websites: organic search rankings and bounce/time on site/engagement. Google takes into account how fast a page loads in their organic ranking algorithm. People won't wait for pages to load - bounce and page abandonment rates increase dramatically with every second wasted after only a few seconds of loading.

To check the speed of a site, you need to check a few pages: the homepage, specials pages, vehicle details pages, search results pages, and landing pages. Plug the URLs into Google's PageSpeed Insights and check the results.

One major note: don't get caught up in the numbers too much. I know of at least two vendors who would fight me on this point (mostly because they do well with their own PageSpeed scores), but this is really a red light/green light issue. In other words, a website that scores a 99 on mobile PageSpeed isn't much better than a website that scores 60. Google takes it into account, but your site won't tank if your website scores a 55 as long as the rest of your SEO is strong.

You're looking to make sure that they're not scoring in the 20s. Even if they do, it's important to ask why. As someone who has worked at a website provider before, I know that there will be dealers that demand that their 24 hi-res banners floating across the homepage stay intact on mobile. If you're looking at website providers, be sure to check multiple sites.

Intuitive Mobile Interface

If you really want to make me upset about a particular about poor use of a responsive platform, you'll make the mobile version a duplicated, shuffled version of the desktop variation. There is so much that a vendor can do when utilizing RWD when it comes to functionality on mobile devices and I see so few taking advantage of it.

Let's start with the basics. Your phone numbers do not need to be clickable on a desktop. They definitely need to be clickable on a mobile device. To the right is an example of a page that intuitively changes the phone numbers that are visible on the homepage into a single phone number that can now be easily clicked on a smartphone.

This might seem like a no-brainer, especially considering that many smartphones can recognize phone numbers and will automatically make them clickable, but not all are like that. I've even seen some website providers that plug the phone number in as an image.

Another thing you'll notice on that mobile homepage is that it auto-populates "New Vehicles" in the CarFinder portion. This is a minor point, but one worth making. Every button should have a destination even if nothing is selected by the visitor. In other words, there are many websites out there that force the consumer to make a choice before the button will work. By auto-populating the most popular selection (in this case, new cars), they can instantly click through and get to inventory without having to pick one or the other. Again, minor point, but in this competitive automotive market, every little bit can help. Attention to detail is so very important in websites.

Here's another example of proper use of RWD, this time on the search results page. If you were to visit this site on your desktop, there's no Click to Call button. However, on a mobile device, the button doesn't just pop up on vehicle details pages. It's in every listing on the search results pages as well.

Dealers know that contact form fills are down. Some of this can be attributed to an increasing distrust by the North American population with transmitting their personal information online. Moist of it can be attributed to the fact that we're doing more web surfing online and forms are a pain in the rear (especially for those of us who have big fingers).

Every simplification of the contact process is a benefit to the overall effectiveness of a website to generate more leads. I'm a big fan of simplicity when it comes to calls-to-action, but I also want to make sure that no opportunities are missed.

Now, let's discuss buttons briefly. Most things should shrink when seen on mobile devices: pictures, videos, banners, forms, etc. Buttons, on the other hand, should get bigger. Make it easy for people with fingers as big as mine to go to the right places by making sure the buttons are sized appropriately for mobile.

One final point on intuitive mobile interfaces: make it work well from top to bottom and utilize the proper order. I'm not going to embarrass any website providers by putting in an example, but they're bad. When a screen shrinks, particularly when shrinking to the size and shape of a vertically held smartphone, the order of the modules makes a huge difference. I've seen responsive websites that plug in the contact forms and other important modules below some exceptionally unnecessary items. Sometimes, entire modules on a website should disappear altogether on mobile devices.

Things that Don't Break

A website shouldn't break on mobile devices, nor should the plugins associated with them. This was a huge issue a couple of years ago in the early days of the responsive boom when websites would render properly but the plugins would not. Sometimes, they would even break the sites altogether.

Today, many of those problems have been fixed but there are still plenty of poor ones out there. Make sure to test out all of your website plugins on responsive websites. To do this, you may have to ask the website provider you're considering if they have examples of websites that use this plugin or that widget.

In the example to the right, Amaral is utilizing CarChat24. If you go to his site on a desktop, there are several prompts to get desktop visitors to engage in chat, including an appropriate Java popup. If all of them were placed on a mobile site, they would dominate the screen and would hurt the functionality. As you can see, the multitude of chat prompts have been replaced by a small prompt at the bottom of the screen.

Don't just check the buttons. Check the landing pages as well. There are several plugins out there that take visitors to specific pages on the website. With plugins, this can become a mobile nightmare if they do not render properly.

Think of it like this - anything that you add to your website that isn't built by the website provider must be checked across multiple devices. As the world continues to become more mobile in its surfing style, you cannot afford to have pages that do not work on mobile devices.

Full Testing Coming

Over the last several months, I've looked at 9 responsive web design providers in the automotive industry and 2 that are hoping to get into the industry. Most were not ready for primetime, but only one of them was actually bad enough that I see no hope for them in the future. No, I'm not going to reveal who those ones were.

Three scored strong marks in my tests: DealerOn, FlexDealer, and WorldDealer. I'm not done. At next year's big convention, we will be looking at the latest and greatest. Then, we'll be putting together a comprehensive list of recommendations that we'll be posting right here on Driving Sales. In the meantime, we're looking for other website providers to consider as well as stories of experiences from dealers in the trenches with responsive websites today.

Please feel free to comment below or contact me directly if you have any recommendations of vendors I need to look at or experiences you'd like to share. As someone who worked for a website provider for seven years, it's truly refreshing to be able to look at everything with an open and detached view.

I can already hear the vendors scrambling to put together their rebuttals. I'm not going to dwell on the issue, but it's an important one to note.

For most dealers, it's okay to be in the mix. As long as you're on the first page on Google for the major keywords, you're doing just fine. Aggressive dealers, those who truly want to dominate, cannot do so if they're getting the same SEO that's given to hundreds or thousands of other dealers. Even if you believe the argument that SEO is scalable (which it isn't when done properly) then you definitely can't believe that two dealers of the same brand in the same metro can both get excellent SEO from the same company.

There's only one listing that can be ranked #1 for any given search. The math isn't hard. If a company is willing to do optimization for more than one dealer of the same brand in the same metro, there's a disconnect between what they think they can do and what can actually be done.

Again, I'm not going to dwell on it. You're a sharp audience. You can do the math and you can resolve to find better. In an automotive industry where everyone from the OEMs to the third party sites are pushing for parody (better known as "the race to the bottom"), it's easy to fall for the pitches. However, the gap between mediocrity and dominance is separated by strong strategy, proper execution, and exclusive dedication to helping one dealer per brand per metro. Otherwise, you're simply shooting to be in the conversation, not leading it.

Everyone knows about the front-facing part of social media. Some of us use it every day. Whether we're checking updates, following a story, or simply looking into what our friends are doing, we go to our favority social media app on our phones or visit the sites on our computers and explore the world socially.

The other side of social media is more mysterious. It's not that it's a secret; many discussions have been had about it right here on DrivingSales. It's that few dealers are talking about it, fewer vendors are offering it, and the social media sties themselves are doing a terrible job at getting the word out.

That's fine by us. The longer that it's a secret, the better it is for our dealers.

This other side, the "dark side" of sites like Facebook and Twitter, rely on their number one asset to help businesses spread their message to the right audience. That asset is targeting, and the methodology that these social networks employ are can be downright powerful.

Let's take a closer look at both sides to understand how they can work together.

The Front End

This is what you already understand. You probably have a Facebook page for your dealership. You're probablby posting images, links to blog posts, videos, and maybe the occasional special or inventory item. You have a certain number of fans who have a slight chance of seeing your posts. You may even be using advertising dollars to get more engagement or to encourage likes.

There are two primary strategies and a handful of secondary strategies that you can use. An aggressive, offensive strategy is designed to get as much engagement as possible. For us, this is our "high dollar" service that we offer to dealers because it requires daily actions, monitoring, and promoting.

The other primary strategy is a defensive posture. Post great content. Give it an opportunity to shine, but don't put a lot of time, money, or effort into it. While some see this as a give up mentality, it's really not - as long as you're taking advantage of the dark side of social which I'll discuss shortly.

The front end of social media is in play at most dealers. We could talk all day about the various strategies and goals, but as long as you're involved and doing something strong with this, the public side of social, then you're probably in pretty good shape. However, there's more...

The Back End

This is the part that few dealer are using. It's the part that takes the hyper-targeting data that sites like Facebook have in their back pocket and applying it to posting "dark posts" on the news feeds of those people who matter.

Whether you want to target intending buyers, current customers in your database, or people divided by demographics, this is the key to finding ultimate success on social media. Put Truck Month ads in front of people wanting to buy a truck. Put Customer Appreciation ads in front of past customers. Put Special Financing ads in front of people making under a certain amount of money. Do all of this targeting particular zip codes, cities, or radiuses around the area.

This is clearly too much to write in a blog post, but you can get the skinny at the upcoming Driving Sales Executive Summit in Las Vegas, October 12-14 at the Bellagio. JD Rucker will be discussing this very topic.

See you in Vegas!

First, a mini-rant. It will make sense why I'm starting with a rant before getting to the meat of the issue.

I was on the phone with a social client and their prospective search marketing provider the other day when I was blindsided by ignorance. It wasn't what I expected from a company that came highly recommended for their search prowess, so I called later on to talk to someone other than a salesperson to confirm that I heard properly.

They selected their keywords straight from a template. The dealer would tell them the cities and then they would plug in those cities into their keyword template and, VOILA, they had a keyword list to plug into their campaigns.

This is the type of treatment I would expect from an OEM-level provider, but to see it coming from a boutique shop really turned me sideways. The whole idea of being small and nimble is the ability to give the personal touch; heck, that's why we built our company in the first place!

That experience prompted me to talk about data. Never before have we had access to so much of it. We know pretty much everything we need to know in order to guide our marketing and advertising decisions. That's the beauty of the digital age and it's often what separates the great dealers from the good ones.

Here are some of the things you should look for to let the data guide your decisions:

Location

Where are you selling? Where are you missing? Where are the buyers in or near your market? These are questions that most dealers can answer based upon their sales sheets and the information that the OEMs provide but all too often dealers are working from gut feeling rather than letting the data drive their decisions.

In most cases when we see dealers exploring the data, they get surprised. I say "most" because it happens regularly and I don't recall a time when some bit of location-based buyer data didn't surprise the dealer, but I can't know for sure that it's all of them. It's a lot. We'll leave it at that.

Purchase Preference

Depending on what part of a metro, county, or state someone lives in, there are tendencies that can be determined by the data. Some places are better for new SUVs. Others are better for used cars. It doesn't always correlate directly to the income levels within an area, either. We've seen occasions when a high-income area offers a lower opportunity for dealers to sell expensive vehicles than a mid-level income area.

In the expensive world of automotive advertising, seeing where the people are and what they're buying is so important when trying to hyper-target them with email, mobile, direct mail, television, and search campaigns. Then, there's social media - you don't want to get me started on how important this data is for social media.

Competitive Success

Who doesn't love to conquest? Unfortunately, we often see dealers that are targeting a competitors immediate area when that is usually not the low-hanging fruit.

Market sales data combined with proper analytics is the key to finding the greatest areas of opportunity for conquest sales, whether you're targeting another brand or a direct competitor. This data is readily available and isn't very expensive, yet we still see so many dealers targeting a radius around the competitors.

Use Your Analytics

Google Analytics combined with buyer data is the key to success. Many dealers have their own internal mechanisms for this. For others, there are companies like String Automotive that combine the data and present it to dealers in ways that are meaningful for them to take action.

Regardless of whether you do it yourself or hire a company, it has to be done. We don't currently offer it, but by golly we'd love to someday.

If you're like many, you're sick of hearing how big social media is. It's huge. We get it. That's not the real "juice" that comes through utilizing social media for automotive advertising.

The greatest benefit that social media currently offers to car dealers is through hyper-targeting. More dealers every day are taking advantage of the standard targeting components of sites like Facebook and Twitter - targeting by location, age, income, education, and any combination of these and many other demographic components available. Very few dealers are taking advantage of the stronger data that's available through a plethora of very specific data sets.

First and foremost, the use of your customer database is absolutely imperative. You might be sending direct mail to your customers. You're probably emailing them. Unfortunately, your also probably missing a large number of them because of spam filters and a general distaste for junkmail.

Social media offers a very direct way to get your message in front of them. We've discussed "secretly" about unpublished posts and the power of advertising directly to your customers, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Facebook has so much data that it's relatively easy for dealers to put very specific messages in front of very specific groups of people. If you're a Nissan dealer, you can target Altima buyers with one message, current Altima owners with another message, and people considering a Camry or Accord with another message.

It goes even further than that. We've seen tremendous success with seasonal posts. For example, targeting "2014 College Graduates" with a college grad buyers' program in May yielded more leads from that page in 3 days than in the previous 365 days combined.

If you are not planning to attend the Driving Sales Executive Summit, October 12-14 at the stunning Bellagio in Las Vegas, I have to wonder if you're really serious about succeeding. This is the conference to attend in October. If you are planning on attending, I encourage you to check out my workshop on this very topic where I'll be discussing in much greater detail how to make it happen at your dealership.

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