Jim Flint, CEO and Founder of Local Search Group, discusses the three pillars that his company focuses on to ensure the success of his organization for employees, clients, and their consumers. 

In the Game of Thrones world that’s arguably as intense as the competitive retail space, it’s a scenario where “Kill or be Killed” is replaced by “Sell or Be Sold”.  As we closed out Season 8 of GOT, we saw first hand what happened when a dragon flew through the city and redefined “hot seat”.

Avoid the hot seat at your dealership by eliminating your advertising waste.

So how do you make your Google Ads more valuable?

I’ve seen the SEO’s who increase the overall activity to a dealer’s website with blog articles that yield searches out of state and out of the country. Feels good. Looks good, but we’d be mistaking activity for achievement.

And then your agency partner mesmerizes you into multi-channel funnel tracking? Last click. First click. Time decay. Those only predict online conversions. Sure text, form fills and phone calls—matter at some level. They are symptoms, not solutions though.

This is the uncertainty of the current dimension of Google Ads that so many Car Gurus miss. All the artists, rock stars, kings and queens can offer up the different thoughts, but their best bet is to understand the shopper journey and the ultimate trackable source of ROI. Sales.

As we dive deep into all the possibilities consider the following. Learn something. Build something. Unlearn it. Rebuild it.

We are in the process of rebuilding where shoppers are in the car buying journey. How many cars are going to locations via digital retailing? How many sales without leads are being submitted?

Start embracing zip codes as the ultimate conversion. It’s no more absurd than the new king of the seven--or did it become six--kingdoms. This is the primary, if not only, conversion metric to drive toward. Is my bidding by zip code resulting in a ratio for profitability? As sales tighten it’s a KEY consideration, if not THE consideration.

Where did you sell the car answers all the questions in one fell swoop--without getting burned.

Tonight four of the top draft picks in the NFL Draft are expected to be quarterbacks. Meanwhile, two of the top 32 will be wide receivers.

Recently I visited with one of the top collegiate quarterback coaches in the nation.

“There’s a saying in football that the further away you get from the ball, the less a part of the team you are. Quarterbacks are team leaders and offensive lineman are typically good teammates. On the other hand, wide receivers and cornerbacks, they do their own thing. They live on an island and aren’t really all that connected to the team as you might otherwise think,” he said.

It made me think. Would we be better off to look at “Marketing” as the Quarterback and “Sales” as the Wide Receiver in today’s automotive retail environment?

When the quarterback comes to the line of scrimmage, he assesses the situation, makes an adjustment, calls out an audible and starts the play. Further out, the wide receiver hears the adjustment, runs the route and maybe out of their five teammates the play results in a completed pass. Call it 20% odds. Even steeper odds, the wide receiver might catch a touchdown pass. When the big play does come, we celebrate the success. Sales anyone?

The football analogy works for a sales environment where marketing functions as the QB. Read the analytics, connect with the people, adjust the view and deliver the plan. Sales becomes the wide receiver. Marketing becomes the QB and knows what everyone is doing; however, the wide receiver just knows his route and that the goal is to score points.

Not unlike the NFL Draft, in today’s Big Data world, who you select as your quarterback will impact your team much more so than who’s playing wide receiver.

Who is the quarterback at your dealership? 

If given three wishes by a genie to help better support our clients’ goals, I’d ask these three questions:

1.  What’s your cost per sale?

2.  What’s your impression share for your name?

3.  How many salespeople do you have?

Sure, there are hundreds of questions to ask. Millions of data points.

Knowing these three things month in and month out, I’d be able to deliver the best marketing and advertising to our clients.

With those three answers, a calendar, Google Analytics and the Internet available to count the client’s cars, I’d be able to stack the odds in favor of our clients. Just like counting cards in Vegas.

For guidance on each of the above, think about targets of less than $350, impression share greater than 80% and 10 sales per staffed person. How the plans get assembled, how the creative gets executed, and how the sales results get measured helps to take the wish out of the marketing.

CEO Jim Flint continues sharing why dealerships need to alter their social media strategies in order to maximize effectiveness in this video blog.

CEO Jim Flint shares how social media has transformed and why dealers should alter their strategies to maximize their effectiveness in this video blog.

There are three huge ways to transform the Social Media at your Dealership

Tell Your Story

Telling your Digital Story is a huge step in the right direction. In the most recent quarterly conference call, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg indicated that stories were the next big thing, and he’s a guy that knows the next big thing when he sees it.

Not surprisingly, going vertical with your phone, planning for NO audio, and capturing users’ attention in 3 seconds or less are key. Stories can be skipped. Think accordingly.

Transform the Story

Many stories struggle with the command and control concepts of industrial business. The goal of corporations, after having established a competitive advantage, is to prevent risk and avoid failure. Thus, communication is approved and controlled by the business entity’s marketing department.

In a world of social media, the game has changed even though the decision-makers haven’t. As such, the command and control approach ironically gives the power to the dissatisfied few. Employees that leave on less than friendly terms can be a detriment; they will, can, and do leave negative comments. It happens - and those negative comments stand out!

A better approach is to drown out the naysayers. Align all employees with the company’s culture and how they should share their stories and experiences via the various platforms - the good stuff.

Think about it. Silence allows the squeaky wheel to get the social media oil.

If everyone at the store—say 100 employees—has 150 or more friends, the good—and it is good—will decidedly outweigh the occasional bad.

Boost the Posts

Organic traction on dealership posts is non-existent. Set aside a minimum of $100 to boost your own posts. Otherwise no one, but your employees and competitors, will see them.

I also recommend setting aside at least that much money, if not more, to incentivize employees to post perhaps by giving out a $25 Starbucks gift card to the employee with the best weekly post, then sit back and watch the healthy competition transform your culture in meaningful ways.

Sure, it’s scary at first, but what powerful, meaningful transformation isn’t?

Local Search Group provides dealership training on this topic for the entire store over a two-day period. The curriculum was developed in a university-style environment and delivered in the dealership - more importantly it works. Money back guarantee. If you’d like to discuss, we’re happy to engage.

The biggest driver of customer satisfaction today is speed.

As many have heard by now, the attention span of goldfish is 9 seconds. Human beings are down to 8 seconds. With smart phones and the associated instant gratification, attention spans are decreasing.

According to Google, customers leave a website if the page does not load within 3 seconds. Facebook advises us to tell our Facebook stories within 3 seconds, without sound, in a vertical orientation to capture the customer’s attention. That’s a lot to do without much time to do it.

The saying used to be "only the strong survive.” When did fast become the new strong?

The longer the wait, the greater the dissatisfaction. Delayed gratification exited stage left, and fast smartphones sit front and center.

What are you to do with this as consumers wait on your showroom floor or sit on your service drive? At the dealer level there are at least three things you could consider doing to speed up your customer experience:

1. Feed the speed monster. Give your customers a clean Wi-Fi experience. No secret passwords. Then routinely test the download and upload speeds via a free app like Speedtest by Ookla to ensure they are working. Post the scores. Keep pace with your bandwidth utilization.  Entertaining their children with iPads and streaming movies is a big win for parents.

2. Manage expectations without lowering them. If the customer thinks the oil change will be done in 30 minutes and it takes 45, the experience will be a poor one. CSI surveys as well as reviews will reflect the disconnect.

Just this morning on a flight from San Francisco, the Starbucks’ barista advised the customer behind me, “The food order could take 9 or 10 minutes.” When the customer got the food back in 5 minutes, he was ecstatic, “Great job! You got the food to me in five minutes!” At first, the barista didn’t understand the customer’s reaction until he repeated, “The food order could take 9 or 10 minutes” and continued expressing his appreciation. Editor’s Note: No! Jim was not the customer.

3. Track the time. Automotive retailers are operational masterminds, but when was the last time their service drive tracked the time it took for same day repairs? Somewhere short of handing customers stopwatches, we can know better by measuring and then shifting the amount of time it takes.

Start by knowing your daily repair order counts, express and main lane, and sales numbers for used and new. Then look into the hourly impact. Connect this with a quick staffing level assessment to determine if you have the highest staffing levels at peak customer times. You’ll likely find some opportunities for better deployment of your staff, which will help speed your customer through your sales process.

Even after implementing these recommendations for your dealership you’re still likely not moving fast enough for today’s consumer.

Annual announcements are nothing new for Google. If nothing else, Google rolls out new marketing elements, metrics and key performance indicators on a daily basis. If any company knows change, it’s Google. The Google algorithm changes approximately 500 to 600 times a year.

As SEO and SEM experts know, you have to test your assumptions when changes occur and redevelop strategies accordingly.

Historically, Google’s changes have involved three key concepts:

   *more relevance for today’s consumer

   *more clean-up of spammy activities

   *more money in Google’s pocket – aka financial changes

Late last year, Google made a change to Google Ads whereby the Ad Rank Score now calculates the speed of the target page and categorizes the user experience. It affects your online presence, your cost-per-click, and impacts cost since page speed is now a major ranking factor for mobile searches.

For stores that have deep linked VDP URL search campaigns—and who doesn’t? —for used cars, you should be wary of internet service providers that encourage you to take 49 photos of used cars. The corresponding impact of how quickly those pages load is key, and the more photos that exist on a single VDP can absolutely affect site speed.

Additionally, are you looking at page speed on a desktop with a Wi-Fi network? 70% of your website’s pages are visited through a mobile device. Slow-loading pages are like an invisible force field around your dealership ironically keeping customers out while driving your costs up.

The good news and bad news of it all is that your Ad Rank is recalculated each time your ad is eligible to appear. It’s a real-time, online auction.   Whether or not it’s ADESA, Barrett Jackson or Google, each car that runs down the lane will have bids that are affected by your competition, by the context of the consumer’s search, by the speed of your website’s pages, and by the relevance of those pages at that moment.

Keeping track of your mobile page score affects your advertising budget. Your Quality Score and loading speed on mobile devices make up your Ad Rank—a key to success in today’s retail automotive environment.

CEO & Founder Local Search Group Jim Flint discusses how dealers can have a good defensive strategy in their pay-per-click campaigns.