As mobile continues to emerge as the most important strategy component in digital marketing for savvy dealers, it's more than just driving mobile traffic and having a good mobile website solution. There's a psychology to it all that applies to the different way visitors engage with your web pages through mobile devices.

This is why the appropriate landing page is so important. In this infographic by String Automotive, they point to four key bits of information that can help a dealer or marketing company maximize the way that people interact with their website through mobile devices.

We often hear that search and social are very similar. While there are definitely similarities in some regards, they are very different in the way they generate business. Specifically, the way they drive customers to you utilize pretty much opposite strategies.

The easiest way to understand the real difference in strategy is to look at the business model comparison of a food truck and a restaurant. Both serve food just as both search and social are supposed to serve you customers, but their philosophies are very different.

With a food truck, the idea is to go to where the people are and entice them to buy your food for the sake of convenience and serendipity. To do this, they select areas of high population and put their trucks in good locations at the right time - a busy office area around lunch time, for example.

WIth a restaurant, the goal is to pull people into the restaurant. You can't move the restaurant, so you have to entice them to make the trip to see you. There's the beauty of consistency that helps. People will see your restaurant in their travels and may decide to stop by one day. They may even seek your type of food and your proximity to them can make you a valid place to eat.

Social is like a food truck. It's active. It's on the go. It doesn't wait for people to come to it. It actively pursues business, trying different places and different times, even different messages on its flag from time to time. This isn't trying to be the destination. It's trying to catch people while they're at other destinations in hopes of grabbing their attention.

Search is, of course, like the restaurant. You can't take a restaurant to the people, so you have to wait for the people to come to the restaurant. Search is passive - people have to make the conscious decision to go to the search engine and find you, either by name if they already know you or in a general search for your type of "food" in your location.

Having this understanding can help dealers to realize that it's not a matter of focusing on either one or the other. They are going after different types of shoppers. Search passively waits for active shoppers while social actively tries to compel people to shop at that moment.

They're not equal. Search is an essential and social is a bonus. However, when the right strategies are applied to them, there's a tremendous opportunity to hit different people with the same purpose or to hit the same people from different angles. Either way, they both work to generate more sales.

For the last week, I have spoken to several dealers, a couple of vendors, and members of our team about how to position social media properly so that dealers will be able to take full advantage of it. We blogged about it, prepared a webinar, and adjusted our upcoming presentation at DSES to make sure that we're getting the word out about the tangible, measurable, ROI-based aspects of social media.

There was a lot of bad press going out and I felt the need to combat it.

The first thing that got me riled up was the infamous "nobody shops for cars on social media" post on Automotive News. Then, it was an article here on Driving Sales that got me even more excited about teaching on the subject. It was a comment, just a single sentence, that completely changed my perspective. I'm now endorsing the concept that most dealers should abandon social media.

"Shhh. Craig. Don't tell anyone about the dark posts. We don't want them to get too popular :P"

It hit me like an 18-wheeler. Robert Karbaum's comment made me realize that this isn't something for mass consumption. If too many dealers were aware of the ROI that properly targeted, masterfully crafted dark posts pointing to killer landing pages bring to the table, their effectiveness would be diluted.

The vast majority of what goes on with automotive social media is pretty much worthless. We know of one other vendor that is even remotely doing it right and I've seen a mere handful of dealers taking advantage of it. This is a good thing. It's a good thing for people reading this article. It's the reason that we're currently at 14/14 on our free trials converting into paying clients.

I now realize that this isn't something that needs to be given to the masses. It's not something that can benefit the industry as a whole. The proper social media strategy that actually does sell cars is only effective because so few dealers and vendors understand how it works.

There are many things that I'll post about in the future and many topics that we'll all discuss, but this is one of those that doesn't need to be broadcast to the general automotive industry. There's no need to let the cat out of the bag. It can't be let out. If it ever did, then it wouldn't be a cat anymore. It would lose its effectiveness.

Thank you, Robert, for making an extremely valid point. Social media has a power that cannot be matched by any other advertising venue, but only when utilized properly. If everyone knew that, then it would no longer be as strong.

In essence, I was being Syndrome from The Incredibles.

It seems as if every couple of months I find another reason to hop on my soapbox and make the case for a product that we don't even sell, but I have to mention again that chat going offline is a big problem in our industry. Since leaving the world of websites, I have come across this challenge more than any other. Perhaps I had a sheltered existence, but I never knew how common it was for dealers to turn their website chat "offline" for extended periods of time.

I know there are plenty of people out there who believe that chat is a minor component of their websites. One guru even told me he thought chat was worthless. I've explored the numbers on dozens of websites with numerous chat services at play and I can say with a certainty that communication, website visitor experience, and leads are all improved with the right chat.

Why do they go offline? Why do many dealers allow the only method of real-time late night communication to go unmanned? How can dealers afford to have chat off during lunch, while on test drives, or while hanging out with the receptionist?

I believe wholeheartedly in managed chat, but I know there are plenty of dealers out there who can make a valid case for having their internal team manage the chat. However, unless they're managing it 24/7, there's still a gap that needs to be filled through chat backup services. As I've posted publicly before, I recommend CarChat24. One of the biggest reasons is because they offer both managed and backup chat services that keep the dealership's website communications online at all times.

There is plenty of evidence that people do engage in vehicle purchasing research late at night or early in the morning before work when there's nobody to call at the dealership. Chat is the only other valid real-time communication tool. We've all seen email and lead form submissions plateau or even drop in recent years. People are less likely to fill out a form than they were in the past. While a call is great to get, there are people who want instant information but who prefer chatting over talking on the phone.

I could totally understand it if we were talking about thousands of dollars to get people to cover chat 24/7, but we're not. I don't recall who was charging what for the managed or backup chat services - it's been a couple of months since I sat through all of the presentations - but I do know that it was much more affordable than I had imagined.

To me, it's a no-brainer. Making sure that someone is available on chat at all times means giving potential customers the opportunity to interact with the dealer on their own terms. When they want to chat, you have to be there for them. Turning it off for the night or during a bathroom break can be the difference between getting the sale or not.

If you aren't using chat software or services at your dealership, you're missing out. If you have your chat go offline for extended periods at a time, you're missing out.

Don't dismiss this. It's an important part of website success and it's only going to become more important as millennials continue to enter the car buying world.. I don't want to generalize and I know there are excpetions, but most millenials prefer instant yet indirect communication rather than phone or email communication. That's why they don't always answer their phone but they reply via text almost instantly.

Chat uses the same principles. It's an additional way for potential customers to contact the dealership.and a way that is preferred by many. Can you afford to miss out on the leads and sales that chat provides?

When it comes to marketing (and just about everything else), there are right-brained thinkers and left-brained thinkers. The right-brain thinkers are more subjective and often more creative and would not like the concept of social media having two options. It makes it too black and white. Left-brain thinkers are guided by logic and wouldn't necessarily believe that there are only two categories in social media marketing. In other words, neither type of person will likely agree with the assertion of this article, at least not at first.

One can make an argument that there are definitely multiple sub-categories, styles, and strategies that go into social media marketing, but there are really only two stances that businesses should take. These two categories can be called "outbound" and "inbound" social media strategies. They shouldn't be confused with inbound or outbound digital marketing strategies. In the case of these social media categories, we're being a little more straight forward than that.

An outbound social media marketing strategy is what most who believe in social media want to achieve. They feel that social media is a venue through which to reach people, communicate, improve branding, and expose the company's messages. Its goal is to be aggressive and take advantage of the fact that the masses are using social media regularly. In many cases, customers are spending more time on social media than any other digital activity.

An inbound social media strategy is very different from a pure inbound marketing strategy. It can be viewed as a defensive posture, a way of covering social media without much time or effort. It's about checking off the social media task box. This is the type of strategy that a business should employ if they either do not believe in social media as an appropriate marketing venue or they do not have the time and/or budget to put a true effort towards an outbound strategy.

Let's take a look at each strategy in more detail.

Outbound Social Media Marketing

This is an "all in" strategy. It focuses on the beliefs that lots of people are on social media, that sites like Facebook have the data that can be used for hypertargeting them with the right messages, and that either ideas or website clicks can be driven through an aggressive advertising component.

In the case of car dealers, for example, social media offers a venue to target people who intend to buy a certain vehicle in the near future. By taking advantage of this data and putting the right messages in front of them, dealers are able to pull people in from social media sites onto landing pages on their website.

To do it the right way requires an investment. It can take time to craft the messages, monitor the profiles, and participate in conversations. It takes advertising dollars to get the message out to the right target audience. Social media in general and Facebook in particular is a pay-to-play model. The old concepts of organic reach are dead.

Inbound Social Media Presence

You'll notice that I did not call it "marketing". With an inbound strategy, a business is simply creating and managing a presence so that they are there without putting in much effort. It's not a defeatist strategy by any means. For many, they have not found the benefits of social media or they're not ready to invest what it takes to have a strong marketing strategy, so they simply get their social media covered.

This is important because people will visit your pages and profiles. Most businesses have buttons that lead to their social media profiles right there on their website. The search engines will often rank social media profiles and pages high on search results for the business by name. Making sure that your pages have an ongoing flow of content is important while not being too time consuming or expensive.

It doesn't look good when people visit your social profiles and they haven't had anything added to them in some time. It's even worse when people are going to these profiles to converse with you or to leave a comment (such as a review) and it goes unnoticed. In extreme cases, Facebook pages can be "hijacked" by spammers leaving their links to unrelated pages. When this type of spam is found on a page, it can be worse than an embarrassment.

Why There's No In-Between

Some will balk and say that there are ways to have a good marketing strategy without going all-in. They are wrong. The benefits of a toe-dipping, low- or no-budget strategy that is trying to do more than establish an ongoing presence are no greater than a purely defensive inbound strategy. In other words, you can spend very little time and money on a basic inbound strategy or you can spend some more time and a little money on an attempted lite marketing strategy and the end results will be the same.

The gap between a basic presence and a "good" presence is minimal. However, the difference between a "good" presence and a full-blown outbound strategy is huge. If you're not going to go all-in, then you should focus on having a good presence rather than trying to work in a little marketing. It's a waste of time and money to go halfway. Either invest into it or keep it simple. There's nothing wrong with either strategy; they both have their benefits. Trying to be there in the middle, not quite bought in but more than just covering the basics, is a limbo that yields nothing more than keeping it all inbound.

It's a lot like poker. On some hands, you'll play it tight, particularly if you believe your hand is weaker than your opponents. On other hands, you'll play aggressive, even going all-in when the time is right. The fish in the middle who are trying to tiptoe through hands are the ones that end up losing their chips the quickest.

Every year, the Driving Sales Executive Summit is the premier educational event of the fall. It has been growing progressively since its inception and more dealers are learning that the education level at the event is very high. A best practice that I would like to share with dealers attending this year in October is to never rely on memory or educators to help you bring the takeaways back to your dealership.

Bring a camera and make sure it's wide open. For most of us, that means our smartphone or tablet. Humans are visual creatures and keeping an image/video catalog of the event will make it much easier to apply what you learn when you get back.

Here are some best practices for this (and any) conference:

1. Bring plenty of memory - Make sure you have tons of space available on your device, particularly if you're shooting videos.
2. Unload in the evening - You should be gathering so much useful data that a day's worth of pictures and videos can take up all of your memory. Whether you email it bit by bit to yourself or transfer it to another device, be sure to start the day off fresh.
3. Use your best note-taking - The visual aspect is the most important, but sometimes you'll need to take notes. If you're like most and you write it all down on a hotel-supplied noteopad, be sure to take a picture of your notes as well.
4. Get contact information - If you're like many, you collect business cards and brochures that end up in the garbage before you pack up or when you unpack at home. The real juice that you'll get is from the people that impress you, so be sure to get their contact information.
5. Set video quality to low - Some will try to record an entire workshop or speach, but this can take up a ton of memory. You don't want to get the first 15 minutes (which on some devices and some settings could be 3GB) and run out of space for the rest. Go into your camera settings and set it to the lowest possible quality. The audio will be fine and you should get everything you need off of the slides in the video even at low quality.

Everyone at Driving Sales and Dealer Authority wants as many dealers as possible to find a ton of value in #DSES. Don't rely on your memory. Notes are great, but visuals help. Don't hope that you'll have everything sent to you. Use your mobile device and come out on top.

For nearly two decades, most dealers have been divided in the way that they advertise. There is normally a budget for "traditional" advertising and a separate budget for "digital" advertising. While more dealers are consolidating their budgets, it's more than that. Should we be looking at it all as one holistic form of messaging?

The short answer is, "Yes". That doesn't mean mentioning your website URL in your television commercials. It's more than that. It's about finding the right message that fits your dealership and communicating in a consolidated manner across multiple channels.

It's easy for me to say these things as a CEO of a digital marketing firm because we do not do anything when it comes to traditional advertising. We do not make TV commercials, print ads, mailers, or anything that falls into that category. From our perspective, it's just a matter of marketing across a diverse range of mediums and our focus is on search and social, but it would make our jobs and the effectiveness of the efforts much easier to achieve if everything was consolidated to say the same basic things.

Take, for example, promotion of a tent sale. What we've seen happening for most dealers is that they have a television commercial produced, then they upload it to YouTube. It takes more than that. It should be a banner on the website. It should be a landing page. It means a planned out social media press for the event, including uploading and promoting it on Facebook directly rather than just sharing the YouTube video. It might even mean changing the title tag on the homepage temporarily, mentioning a shortened URL to the landing page on the television or radio commercials, or putting shortened links on mailers that are easy for the recipients to type in.

We're currently exploring the efforts of several vendors and agencies trying to do this. For example, WorldDealer employs a philosophy of "One Voice" that resonates with what we would love to see achieved with our dealers.

Are there any others that we should consider? What strategies have you employed to make this happen at your dealership? Should we still be separating the budgets and strategies out or are our reasons for wanting them separated valid?

Chime in here, please.

You've all seen the statistics. You've read the studies. You've probably heard about it at some point on the news and you've definitely been told this by a marketing guru of some sort over the past couple of years. The car buying world has gone mobile and your ability to get your message out to potential customers must be viewed by how it's seen on mobile devices first, desktops second.

In a discussion with a client today, we were looking at the way their traffic was being distributed on their website. Present on this "power call" was String Automotive who was delivering a market analysis, Remora who handles the website and search marketing, Automark who delivers the lead generation tools for the website, and my team which handles the social media. This savvy east coast dealer likes to make sure we all meet together monthly to discuss his marketing (a best practice that I strongly recommend to all dealers - get your vendors talking to each other).

We noticed that the traffic and leads were strong going into VDPs and the homepage, but the specials pages were not getting enough action. They appeared properly on desktop and the buttons leading to them showed a 7-to-1 click rate over other calls to action on the page, but they weren't optimized for mobile devices. This needed to be fixed.

One might wonder why we would want to change something that was generating such a high percentage of clicks and a good chunk of leads. This is a conundrum for many dealers. We often think that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," and normally I would agree. However, what we were seeing was good success. We weren't maxing out. We knew this because the pages didn't appear appropriately on mobile devices.

They weren't mobile-optimized.

The website platform had great mobile numbers until you got to the specials pages. So, the challenge became trying to figure out how to take String's data and keep the Remora website performing so well on mobile while replicating the Automark plugin success from desktop. Despite my part, social, having nothing to do with it, I am pleased to be working with this team on the solution because, well, that's how things should be.

We now have a solution in the works. In essense, this should really be a blog post about how getting your vendors talking to each other regularly is a key to finding the solution, but I'm going to stick with the solution itself on this one. We're going to build mobile-awesome landing pages. This is a key to success as I originally stipulated. The question is, what do they look like?

Here you go. Clear. Concise. If your landing pages take these qualities into account, you'll win the internet (whether it's being surfed on a desktop or a smartphone):

For a decade now, businesses and marketers have attempted to decipher the jumbled mess of social media and turn it into a true ROI generator. Hundreds of thousands of Ponce de Leóns have explored the social media countryside in search of the ultimate prize - tangible benefit from social media marketing.

Thankfully, it's not as mythical as the Fountain of Youth. Most are getting minor benefits from social media as long as they're sticking with it and applying some basic strategies. A few are getting real results from the branding and communication components of social media that are achievable by nearly anyone who tries hard enough and invests a little money into the endeavor.

For those who are really wanting to make a dramatic impact on their social media presence, the key is in storytelling. This is hard. That's not one of those feigned discouragements that marketers often use to dissuade businesses from trying to do it themselves. It truly is extremely difficult to take the mundane aspects of most businesses and turn them into something truly special that people are willing to passionately follow.

With social media storytelling, it's not about telling lies. It's definitely not about looking for the thunder in a bottle that some companies have been able to find through a combination of luck and some viral secret sauce that eludes the rest of humanity; how many tried to duplicate what Oreo did at the Super Bowl? Lastly, it's not about manufacturing buzz where it doesn't exist.

Storytelling requires finding those creative elements that are present in any business (regardless of how mundane the industry might seem) and forming them into a strategy that yields a path to success. It only takes one sentence to describe it but one could write a book on the actual strategy behind it. We'll try to keep it shorter here.

The story itself can be about nearly anything as long as it's relevant to the business in some way. It doesn't even have to be a direct attachment. It can be about customers. It can be about employees. It can be the journey that was taken to arrive at a particular product or service launch.

Think about it like making a movie. It isn't about the end result of the movie itself, but rather the Blue-Ray extras and behind the scenes shots. Taking us through the process can be as fun (or more fun) than watching the end result itself. As humans, we have a tendency to enjoy watching things as they unfold.

A pretty good (not great, but good) example of this was when Pepsi MAX worked with NBA star Kyrie Irving to put the Uncle Drew series together for YouTube. The reasons that it was good is because it was able to tell stories that were interesting enough to get millions of views, was sustainable for a few posts to make it a series, and gave the behind-the-scenes view that we love. The reason that it wasn't great is because it had very little to do with the product itself with only occasional views.

A much better example is a Thai Pantene commercial from a few years ago. It told a compelling story and had all of the right elements but it did not let the product get in the way. In fact, you'll have no idea it's a Pantene commercial until the end. One thing that most will definitely notice is that during the concert, the main character has absolutely incredible hair. When the Pantene logo is shown at the end with the tagline, "You can shine," it all comes together for the viewer.

These are both big productions that most businesses cannot duplicate, but that doesn't mean that you can't draw inspiration from their creativity. The key is to make it last. It doesn't have to revolve around a video, either. A friend, , did an excellent job of using social media to tell the story of her new job. She had a countdown of the top 5 reasons to be excited about her new job. It kept anticipation high, friends (and potential clients) guessing, and showed that even individuals have the ability to tell the right stories about their business.

To succeed at social media marketing, businesses and marketers must embrace the right strategies and couple them with incredible stories. This post itself is an example of this as we will be rolling out stories of our own very soon for our clients. Stay tuned!

Today, using the “free” social media platforms as a marketing tool without spending money on them is about as useful as playing the first level of the freeware version of iPad game.

It used to be so exciting to think about how to market a business on social media. We would read articles, watch videos, go to conferences, exchange ideas, try things out, and come up with the very best way to reach the people. Just a few years ago, it was exciting to be in the social media marketing world.

Things have changed. Many of my contemporaries who have been working in social media for nearly a decade have talked to me lately about how it’s all going downhill, how organic reach is gone and that the pay-to-play model has ruined the industry. They say things like “money makes the crap float to the top” or “there’s nothing creative about paying for exposure.” I agree with them during these conversations, not because I believe what they are saying, but because I’ve found that the exact opposite is true. I’m just trying to avoid an argument.

The reality is that the death of organic reach on social media sites is the best thing that could happen to creative social media marketers. Does it mean that some of the bottom line dollars must be spent in order to get the content the exposure it needs? Yes. Does it also mean that the crap that once filled news feeds across sites like Facebook have been yanked in favor of a proper mix of profile posts with a sprinkling of important, targeted, and paid-for exclusive posts? Absolutely.

It was once pretty futile. Sure, a few posts could get some pretty good exposure, reach, likes, retweets, shares, +1s, or whatever, but there were times when the best content didn’t reach the audience at the degree it deserved. Relying on organic when organic was still an option was a poor strategy. Now that there needs to be a budget (a very small budget, mind you), the potential exposure for high-quality content has actually increased due to the shift in need towards social media advertising.

Facebook and Twitter are the two obvious choices for embracing the paid model and in both cases, the shift was a very positive thing. Our messages can’t get muscled out by the big players just because they’re more popular. Paying to get the attention to the best content or most important posts is a sure-fire way to make certain that the message reaches the right people every time.

The thought that it killed creativity is ludicrous as well. In fact, the dollars attached to the campaigns mean that more care must be put into them. Nobody wants to waste money, so embracing a higher standard of post quality is now at top of mind. As much as we’d all like to think that we were putting out incredible content every time before, the reality is that everyone has days where they’re going through the motions. It’s on those days that a free post can slip through that is terrible. With the paid model, we must pay more attention. It’s better for everyone involved.

We all got suckered into it. We didn’t want to pay for it and for many of us, the reason that we got into this game in the first place was because we could gain exposure for our own pages or our clients’ pages by being good at the game. The paid model doesn’t change that if you really think about it. By paying, we are more invested and will perform better across the board. It’s part of human nature.

They got us to try it. In many ways, it’s like the freeware games that we download that try to get us hooked so we’ll pay for the full version. We got addicted to this world of social media marketing and now we can’t get out of it. Thankfully, the shift is starting to weed out those who are ineffective at taking advantage of what’s given to us all. If you’re not willing to pay to play this game, you should probably find another. Organic reach is dead on social media. Perhaps getting better organic search rankings is better suited for those who can’t play in social media anymore.