It's okay if you've given up on the idea of selling cars or increasing service penetration through social media. On Driving Sales, it's likely that the majority of dealers have tried and found varying degrees of success or failure, whether on their own, through a vendor, or a hybrid of the two.

The reason that' it's okay for you to give up is because true automotive social media marketing requires a full commitment. You're either all the way in and you're embracing it wholeheartedly or you're simply maintaining a good presence without investing much time or any money. The in-between areas are pretty much worthless.

To get a better understanding of what this means, let's take a look at five truths that my team has found to be completely undeniable.

1. Small is the New Big

Everyone knows how big social media is. For dealers, the key is to get stronger reach and put your message in front of the right people by getting smaller. That doesn't mean you need shorter posts. That means that you should be taking advantage of the targeting capabilities and data that makes social media special.

2. Go on Offense or Defense, not Special Teams

We're using a little internal terminology here, but let me explain. We give clients two choices - going on the offensive with aggressive, "all-in" social media designed to go after local people who are in-market for a vehicle purchase, or going on the defensive by investing very little time and as little budget as possible (if any) to maintain a presence that represents the dealership well enough to pass muster. 

When we refer to "special teams" play on social  media, we're referring to what some dealers (and most vendors) are doing - trying (or pretending) to go on the offensive with social media but without putting the right mix of time, energy, budget, and strategy that can actually make it successful. The results of special teams play means that there's an ever-so-slight chance of scoring, but for the most part it's extra effort without any more benefit than a less-aggressive defensive posture.

3. Facebook and Twitter are Pay-to-Play (and the others are moving in that direction)

There is no such thing as true organic reach potential on for car dealers. One out of hundreds can ever achieve it and few in the world have been able to sustain it in the last few months since Facebook and Twitter have changed the way they operate with dealers.

Between Facebook's algorithm and Twitter's noise, you really have to be putting some, though not a lot, of budget towards your social media marketing.

4. Strategy Rules Over Frequency

In the world of search marketing, more is usually better. The more keywords you rank for organically or buy through PPC, the better. That's not necessarily the case with social media.

It would not be hard for a dealership to have a successful social media presence with one or two posts per week. It is very easy to have a very bad social media strategy with several posts a day. That's not to say that posting less is better. That just means that the strategy determines the frequency and not the other way around.

5. Social Supports Other Marketing Efforts (at least it should)

Even after the infamous Google video that denies social signals affect search rankings, they still came out and demonstrated ways that social media can be used to improve search rankings. They're not talking out of both sides of their mouths. They're simply making sure that SEOs understand the distinction between causality and direct benefit.

Traditional, website, and 3rd-party advertising and marketing can all use social media to benefit them and visa versa. Even with a defensive social media stance, it's possible to integrate social with other strategies to fulfill your needs.

Buying In

For some of you, it's a matter of embracing social media. For others, it's a matter of getting others at the dealership to embrace it. Social media can help improve business, and not just in an intangible way. It's more than branding. It's aggressive strategies. It's a lot of things, really, that make social media work. Unfortunately, that means that most dealers aren't doing it properly right now.

If you need help becoming convinced that it works or you want to try to convince someone else that an offensive posture can be truly beneficial, please feel free to ask me for help. I can walk you through the possibilities.

If there's one thing that I've seen in the last 17 years while working on the vendor side of the business, it's that there are often products and services presented to dealers that simply do not deliver what they promise. It's one of the reasons that I partnered with JD Rucker to form our own company. We wanted control to deliver results no matter what, something that we couldn't always promise when working for larger companies.

It's not that the various sales representatives or marketing departments at automotive vendors hope to rip off their customers. We all want our products to be amazing, but sometimes it's hard, particular for the larger companies trying to offer scalable solutions that can somehow serve their individual dealer clients. Then, there are the smaller companies who often bite off more than they can chew. In the competitive automotive industry, finding great products can be challenging.

Here are some of the things that I've learned that dealers can apply to help determine whether or not a vendor will be delivering what they promise.

Skip the Trophy Client Recommendations

Every vendor has a set of clients that they can count on for good references and good results. There's no need to talk to them. Find the ones that the vendor does not offer up. You can do this by checking the website for testimonials or case studies and then asking the sales representative for references.

Finding the other clients can be easy with larger companies but harder for smaller companies. Either way, compile your list of dealerships that the vendor is highlighting on their website and during their presentation. Ask for examples. THEN, ask for more examples. They should be able to do this on the spot. If they can't there's a potential problem (unless they're really, really small, in which case you might have to press harder).

It's okay to tell them what you're doing AFTER you've received their list of people they want you to talk to. Letting them know is important because it immediately lets them know that you're going to be aggressive in your monitoring of the results. Believe it or not, this makes a difference in how your account is treated. As sad as it is, the concept of the squeaky wheel getting the oil applies for most vendors, big and small. It's okay to be a little squeaky.

Request Month-to-Month Contracts and No Setup Fees

There are many dealers who have been doing this for some time. Some vendors simply won't do it. Despite the concept that a company that believes in itself won't need contracts or setup fees, there are still too many risks for some products such as CRM and DMS. However, most products that can be delivered on a monthly basis have few upfront costs other than a setup that normally falls within the cost collected for the first month.

With that said, it's not worth passing on a great product for the sake of contracts or setup fees. There are those who simply do not offer month-to-month contracts or that cannot waive setup fees. That does not mean that their products are inferior, necessarily, but making the request and putting out a little fuss is a good way to find out exactly what is entailed with the initial setup.

Ask Why Dealers Leave

This is a tough one and not every sales representative is prepared to answer this question. You might even want someone who isn't able to answer the question well so that you can ask to have the name of a couple of dealers who have cancelled recently.

Be careful. If you're looking for a perfect vendor you'll have to keep looking regardless of the segment. Nobody is perfect. Everyone messes up. Sometimes, the expectations are too high. Sometimes, there are things that happen that make a product or service ineffective. Sometimes, it's simply a matter of a new GM or ISM who came in and made a bunch of changes.

Speak to the Doers

The sales representative is trained to answer sales questions. Ask the same questions of the people doing the actual work. If you're strongly considering a company, ask for the customer service or operations people to be on the second call. They're more inclined to under-promise.

Put the Guru on Notice

Most companies have a guru or a "micro-celebrity" who represents the company at conferences or in the blogs. Get them on the phone and ask them to personally take interest in your cause. They do not want to get a bad personal rap against them in most cases and will help you to perform better.

Doing this goes beyond asking. This is where the power of reviews and public testimonials can come into play. Be willing to speak out whether they do a great job or a poor job and make certain they know about it.

Have a Panel Interview

When you're narrowed down to a handful of candidates, bring them all in together. Let them know that they'll be going head to head with other vendors. Get multiple people on your side to ask questions of everyone. The way they present their products will be different when they know a competitor or two is on the phone with them.

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There are plenty of things you can do to get the real picture, but the best thing you can do is to do a ton of research. That's not to say that you need to work slowly. Believe it or not, there are times when a dealership can do more damage than good by establishing up front that they'll be "high maintenance" clients. Keep it fair. Stay polite. Make great decisions.

The more people that are shopping for a car that you can get in front of your inventory, the more cars you're going to sell. Some would say it's a bold statement. Others would say that it's pretty obvious. Depending on which side of the coin you're on, you'll either need to be convinced or you're already doing it.

Let's start with the disclaimer. Everything our company does is geared around driving more VDP views. Search, social, and even our partner products like LotLinx are all "inventory drivers" for our clients. We don't believe in coaxing people to these pages. We're going after intent.

With that out of the way, let's get into the hard facts. People have so many choices when it comes to finding their next vehicle purchase. There are more third-party sites vying for their attention than dealers in any given market. These sites try different things in order to generate revenue. Some sell subscriptions and placement like AutoTrader and Cars.com. Others sell listings themselves like Craigslist and eBay. Others sell leads. They all know that the automotive industry is lucrative and they want to make money. There's nothing wrong with that.

A recent trend has been for many dealers to focus specifically on generating their own leads. They don't want to be part of these other listing sites. They don't want to buy leads. They are finding that the highest quality comes from people who are visiting their own site and they would be correct. However, there's an important fact to note before cancelling all of your third-party subscriptions.

The reason that the leads from a dealer's website usually convert so much better than other leads is because they are often a captive audience. Most of your search traffic is coming from searches for your dealership by name, which means that they want to consider doing business with you. There are fewer barriers to overcome to sell them a car when they are already inclined to like you, so the lead quality will always be higher here.

This is why we recommend to dealers to still participate in other sites while focusing on their own. It's why we partnered with LotLinx. It's why we push SEO so heavily and it's why we position our social media product to be specifically geared towards driving people intending to buy a car to your website.

The reason that driving shoppers to your VDPs will increase sales is the same reason that putting people behind the wheel will sell more cars. It's excitement. When they're shopping, they're in the early stages of excitement, but it's still present. They can picture themselves driving it. They like to look at pictures. They want to read the specs. They want to scrutinize the history report, compare the prices, check out the features, and imagine what Toreador Red would look like in their driveway.

As dealers move forward with their evolving strategies, it's important to look at the numbers. There are no tricks to this, really. Regardless of where they are on the internet, there's a chance that you can get them in front of your inventory. The advertising possibilities are endless. Don't get caught up in complicated strategies. Get more people in front of your cars and you will sell more of them.

There was a dream that was Rome. You could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish, it was so fragile.

Okay, so that’s not really original. Any opportunity to plug in a line from Gladiator, I’ll take it. Despite the overly serious tone of the quote, it plays well with the dream that was social media. The idea of having a set of free venues through which businesses could interact with consumers and the consumers could interact back presented itself as a grand concept to be desired and cherished. Unfortunately, the dream is dead. Success on modern social media requires one of two things: serious fame or cash invested.

Unless you’re Justin Bieber, your brand needs money in order to be relevant on sites like Facebook. There’s no other way to look at it. Even Twitter gets exponentially more useful when a little money is applied to it. LinkedIn, YouTube, and possibly Pinterest and Instagram are all heading down the road of pay-to-play if you really want to find success.

It’s not the evil plan of social media sites come through to their end game. In fact, most of the social sites outside of YouTube went in with the hopes of not having to apply advertising as a primary source of revenue, at least not in the formats they’re presenting themselves in today. “Advertising” was a dirty word in social media startup circles just four or five years ago. Today, they’ve accepted that their dreams of making money through networking and data are simply no long realistic. As their dreams died, so did ours.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that the cost of playing the game right is, for now, extremely low when compared to the potential results. For a fraction of the cost of Google Adwords or display advertising, campaigns can be set up through social media that bring in similar results. In some cases, depending on the goals and campaigns, the results can actually be better despite the lower spend. Let’s take a look at the recent past, the way it works today, and the near future:

It All Blew Up

For better or for worse, the people muscled out the businesses. On Facebook, for example, the feedback from users was that they simply weren’t interested in seeing as many posts from pages as from profiles. They might like the show Game of Thrones and they might not mind occasionally seeing updates posted on their news feed, but for the most part they go to Facebook to see videos of little nephew Timmy sliding into 3rd base. Facebook obliged recently (and really, for a long time they’ve been creeping in this direction) and made it less likely that posts from pages were visible in news feeds.

There’s a silver lining to this, though. While users were not as accepting of posts in their news feeds from pages that showed up organically, they’ve demonstrated a tolerance for sponsored posts. In essence, they know instinctively that they have these services for free and that Facebook is a business. As long as they have some sense of control over what they’re presented, they don’t mind ads on Facebook any more than they mind television commercials. They tolerate them. At least on Facebook, they have the ability to let Facebook know which posts they don’t want to see on their news feeds.

Social media blew up. It got too big for brands, at least from an organic perspective. On Facebook and Twitter in particular, the feeds are too cluttered with personal posts to allow the business posts to come through naturally. That’s okay. We should be paying. If anything, this makes it to where the aggressive businesses can take advantage of the exceptionally low cost of entry without being muscled out by popular pages with their organic reach.

Today

Now that we know that organic reach is dead, we can move forward with the benefits of this. Facebook has done a terrible job at educating businesses about their advertising powers and Twitter has done even worse. Google+ – don’t get me started there. This is bad for them. It’s great for us. It’s great for companies that are starting to take advantage of it.

There are caveats, most notably that the ad types used to bring people to the table and try advertising are the worst ones. On Facebook, the “Boost” and “Promote Your Page” buttons are the easiest to get you started and the worst at achieving results.

Data. That’s the power of social media. Unfortunately, both of the basic types of advertising have trouble thinking about scratching the surface of the data components. This isn’t the place to go into details about how the data works, but suffice to say that it’s extremely powerful when used appropriately.

That’s today. Get involved and use the data that you have as well as the data that Facebook has. With that understood, what will the future look like?

Shifting Towards Mobile First

Everything is shifting to mobile.

Everything is shifting to mobile.

Everything is shifting to mobile.

It cannot be overstated and it doesn’t matter where you put the emphasis. Mobile will eclipse desktop soon for nearly all forms of internet browsing. It already does with social media. This is why, no matter what you think about social media, you must make sure that your digital marketing strategy focuses on mobile first and allows the desktop experience to happen as a secondary course. That’s not to say that desktops are dying or that they don’t need to be considered. They simply need to reside in a mobile world as if they’re big mobile devices without the touchscreen. Heck, there are plenty of desktops and laptops that already do have touchscreens.

As social media continues to evolve and mobile grows in eyeball share, so too do the advertising strategies need to match appropriately.

Social media is no longer organic, at least not for businesses. To move ahead, you have to either use social media from a defensive posture or go full force with the advertising component. The in-between strategies will do nothing more than waste time and energy.

I've taken some criticism over the last week for selecting CarChat24 as the dealer website chat provider that I like the most. Angry calls. Angrier emails. Nobody wants to hear that their product was not selected and I understand the vast majority of the criticism from other chat providers in the industry.

One piece of criticism that I do not understand comes when providers try to convince me that 24/7 chat isn't important. In the digital age, availability is often the deciding factor for consumers. Perhaps I get this from personal experience. I know that I work during the day, have dinner with the family, spend some time with them, and then begin any online activities that don't pertain to my business. This time, late at night, is when I do research (in my case, I'm looking for a house AND a car), order things online, and surf the web before going to bed.

My wife is different. She wakes up early. She does all of her planning, research, and shopping for the day before the kids wake up. It was actually an experience she had with a dealership chat that prompted my exploration of them in the first place. She needed to drop the Jeep off before taking the kids to school and wanted to know how early she could do it. At the time, the store wasn't open (she called anyway, just in case) and so went to try to chat with some dealers. The first two had contact forms where the chat would normally be. The third had a chat operator that informed her when she could drop off her vehicle. Needless to say, she went to the third dealer for service.

These two situations are, of course, anecdotal, which is why I spent the last couple of months exploring the various options. It was in looking at the data, reviewing the statistics and reading through some overnight chats that I realized just how important always-on chat really is.

This is the age of availability and convenience more than anything else. We have grown accustomed to getting answers to nearly any question we have in moments. Since the majority of dealers do not have a receptionist standing by to answer the phone 24-hours per day, the instant access of information can only be delivered by dealers who have 24-hour chat. The numbers are growing. More and more people are online late at night or early in the morning and the trends are showing no signs of reversing.

The opportunities are out there. Dealers that are willing to take advantage of as many of them as possible are the ones who are going to be most successful both in the long term as well as the short.

In October, 2013, I posted a controversial article about the differences between responsive and adaptive websites and came to the conclusion that, at that time, properly coded adaptive websites were performing better than responsive websites in the automotive arena. I stand by that assertion as long as the timestamp is attached. In other words, adaptive was better in the automotive industry than responsive in October, 2013.

Today, I am happily reversing my opinion. The industry has caught up. There are a handful of companies in our space that have not only improved on the earlier iterations that I did not like but who have taken their responsive sites beyond the adaptive sites that were performing phenomenally well. It's not that adaptive sites are bad or that they've fallen off at all. Today, the responsive sites (and the numbers attached to their results for dealers) have surpassed their adaptive counterparts.

The real difference in the platforms that I have seen launched in recent months compared to the original batch of automotive responsive website designers is that they seem to have followed (coincidentally, I'm sure) a different assertion I made a week after the original post that dealers and their vendors should build websites for mobile first. Mobile is today. It's getting bigger tomorrow.

Responsive websites that are built to accommodate the demands and limitations of mobile devices do not lose out on desktop functionality. If anything, today's savvy buyer has grown accustomed to a more mobile experience on their desktops and appreciate the simplicity that such design brings to the table.

I am dying to name some of the companies that I have looked at over the last few months that have impressed me with their designs and website management tools, but now is not the time. There are five strong responsive design firms that have impressed the heck out of me lately. Two are well known. Two are less known. One is pretty much unknown in the industry. I won't name them because I have yet to do a comprehensive review of everyone's platform. Considering that there are about 50 players in the automotive website arena, it's likely that I will never make it through them all.

In lieu of recommendations or direct endorsements, I'll keep it simple and show you what you should be considering...

• Speed and User Experience: While I have never been big on "quality test" sites that spit out a score about how good your website is, Google has a pretty good one out there with their PageSpeed Insights. The desktop component isn't a huge deal but look at both numbers in mobile - Speed and User Experience. Shoot for a speed over 50 as a bare minimum and the UX should be high, preferably over 90.
• Mobile-Only Functionality: One of the arguments that adaptive website providers make is that you can't put mobile functionality such as "Click to Call" or GPS-enabled navigation on responsive sites. This isn't true, though most of the responsive sites that I have seen do not take advantage of this. You can have that sort of unique functionality appear on your responsive sites when they are on a mobile screen and have them not available on a desktop. If you're considering responsive, ask your vendor if this is the case for their sites.
• Morphing Buttons: Many of the buttons on desktop websites are square. This doesn't lend to an effective mobile translation most of the times because they are too big to see on a single mobile screen. When a responsive website is rendered on a small screen, those large buttons should "morph" into mobile-friendlier buttons, preferably long rectangles that are still big enough for those of us with fat fingers.
• Intelligent Navigation Bars: Just like with the buttons, the navigation bars at the top that are so easy to use on desktop often become a challenge on mobile devices. Most responsive websites stack the navigation options when viewed on a small screen. This is a mistake. Instead, there should be a transition to a drop-down menu for the mobile experience. It should be at the top right and be easy to push for us fat-fingered-folks.
• Remove of "Extras": Even though we'd like to think that everything on our website is of vital importance to our visitors, there are always "fillers" that make sense on desktops but not on mobile. For example, that scrolling display of all of your vehicle types (you know, the one that gets somewhere south of 20 clicks per month) should not be taking up space on mobile. It' fine for desktops but make for a bad mobile experience. Remember, mobile is about getting to the point.

There are plenty of other things that I could go into regarding what to look for in a responsive website design, but I'll leave it off where it is and add a single closing thought: a great adaptive website is still better than a good (or bad) responsive website. Let the numbers guide you in your decision. It's about getting leads and driving more people to your inventory both online and offline. Make sure that the experience they're receiving in their mobile exploration of your website is better than any of your competitors. It makes a difference.

Inbound links still matter. Despite what you may here from SEO gurus around our industry, the power of high-quality, relevant, and natural inbound links to a dealer's website is still apparent. Google's Matt Cutts acknowledged that in the long run, this may not be the case.

That day, however, is not today.

Google is reportedly in the middle of a 10-year plan to discount links from the search algorithm. The best guess is that they're at about year 5 of this plan, which means that we still have another half-decade to make the adjustment. Many of us already are, but that does not mean that links should not be a part of the overall strategy.

Earn them. Use them appropriately. Avoid anything spammy or unnatural. Focus on incredible content that can get people to link to you rather than schemes or techniques for building them. That's what we do. That's what you should be doing as well.

Here's the video from Cutts answering the question recently about inbound links.

For years, many social media "gurus" have been talking about the power of social media being its popularity. It's huge and getting huger. People spend so much time on it. Dealers need to as well, right?

While that's partially true, it's really not in the size or reach of social media that the real benefit can be garnered. That's the catalyst, not the goal. The real goal is achieved by taking advantage of the huge amounts of data that social media's popularity gives it. Sites like Facebook know more about us than just about anyone, even Google. If it wasn't for the NSA, Facebook would probably hold the crown for knowing the most about our personal lives.

It isn't just in what we tell them, either. Social media sites have purchased or otherwise acquired vast amounts of data from companies like Datalogix, a Polk partner. This data, which can help dealers target people who are intending to make a purchase of a particular make or model in the near future, can be very beneficial for putting the right message in front of the right people at the right time.

As you craft your social media strategy, be sure to focus on the things that can make your targeting smaller, not larger. While there is definitely benefit in reaching as many locals as possible with certain messages, it's in the smallness of the data targeting that dealers can really take advantage of what Facebook and other social media sites have to offer.

Facebook is about as crowded as any marketing venue on the internet. There might be hundreds of sites vying for keywords that pertain to you on search (and no, having millions of results does not mean that they're all going for that keyword) and dozens of dealers selling cars in your local area on the classified sites, but there are thousands of businesses and hundreds of thousands of people to contend with in the Facebook news feed within your community. It's hard.

A prospect of ours was really trying at social media. They were posting great content on Facebook and the other sites, following a good chunk of the best practices out there, and even boosting a post every now and then. However, their reach, traffic sent to their website, and overall presence on social media was above average at best. They needed ads. They needed well-managed, properly positioned ads.

They needed the bullhorn in order to break through the noise that is omnipresent of Facebook.

We've seen the opposite situation in the automotive industry as well. Unlike most other forms of advertising, the message plays a huge role in the effectiveness of the advertising. Throwing money at poor posts or advertising good posts the wrong way can be less effective than not advertising at all and can actually have a negative effect on your presence. Once you have the bullhorn, you have to use it the right way or Facebook will slowly, methodically take it away. Your posts that were getting thousand of views from $10 in advertising will soon be getting hundreds. Eventually, you can kill your page's "love from the algorithm" to the point that the dollars spent are only helping you reach dozens of people. Quality matters in Facebook advertising.

Facebook is "pay-to-play". The other networks are heading in the same direction. Maximizing your effectiveness and using social media to sell more cars can only be accomplished by combining the two components: quality and volume. The right message spoken without volume won't reach the right people. The wrong message blasted out through the advertising bullhorn can do even more damage. The two go hand-in-hand.

I really don't know who I'm going to offend on this one. We've been researching so many vendors over the last couple of months that work with chat, lead-gen widgets, and website platforms themselves that we haven't taken the time to explore PPC vendors. Maybe that's why I was blindsided to find out that there are at least two vendors out there charging 20% and one that we found who is charging 25%.

Is it me or is this insane? We'll put aside the 25% vendor for now. I'm hopeful that it's some sort of accounting mistake or something. Focusing on the 20% charge, it really bugs me that this may be more common than I ever knew. I've always hung around the organic side of search, so PPC hasn't been a focus. With that said, I've managed dozens of PPC campaigns over the years and I could never imagine charging anything other than a flat fee.

To me (and again, I might be on the wrong side of this argument and would be very open to some education on this one), if a dealership is spending $10,000 per month on their PPC, $2,000 of it going to management seems high. If the software is driving the bidding and the feeds are generating the dynamic ads, wouldn't it seem that very little manual effort and development costs are going into the service on a monthly basis?

I've always been a fan of flat fee PPC management because of transparency. I want to be able to recommend to a dealer that they raise their budget without them wondering if I'm just trying to make more money and I want to be able to recommend that they reduce their budget without reducing my service fee. To me, adjusting a budget is a matter of changing a number or two in the backend and I cannot justify charging hundreds of dollars more per month for clicking a few buttons.

Here's the math:

• 20% service fee
• $10,000 per month initial budget
• Dealer wants to raise to a $12,000 per month budget
• Vendor clicks a few buttons, adjust some daily budgets
• Additional monthly cost for clicking those buttons: $400/month
• Yes, that's $4,800 a year for 5-10 minutes of effort

I'll say it again. I'm willing to hear why I'm wrong. I'd love to see the additional monthly effort that goes into a bigger budget. If that's not the case, I'm open to hearing why the cost is justified. If there are vendors out there charging a lower percentage or a flat fee that dealers (or vendors) are willing to recommend, I'd love to hear about those as well.

Someone, please set me straight on this issue. It's bugging me.