For almost 10 years now, we have all heard “This is the year for mobile!”…REALLY?!?

We see posts on all over Twitter about the growth in mobile use and web traffic. Ironically, most are coming from people using a desktop.

So, as we always do, we decided to gather the data, set up the experiment and test it!

First, we had to define “What is a mobile device?” This is a real problem because too many people want to define a tablet as a mobile device. In my opinion, it’s not. We needed something more than my “opinion”, however, so we looked to Google.

The Google Adwords platform now combines tablet and desktop use as the same thing.

“The device doesn’t matter as much as the user context does”, said Google’s Group Product Manager Surojit Chatterjee on context, “User context drives what people search for, and the actions they take. So for example, say I am at home in the evening, and I’m doing a search. The actions that I will take will be largely the same if I’m using a smartphone, tablet or notebook, because the context is the same. Particularly between notebook and tablet, the query patterns are very similar.”

There you have it. A tablet is more like a desktop to a user than a mobile device is. A tablet is not a mobile device!

First, we started with the data. Here are the facts:

• Less than 12% of all retail automotive website traffic is from a mobile device. – (Source: OnlineDrive user base)

• In 2013, mobile traffic rose to 15% of all search traffic and tablet traffic made up another 15%. When you hear that mobile traffic is 30% of all web traffic, keep in mind that true mobile traffic is only 15%. The greatest increase in mobile traffic has come from defining a tablet as a mobile device. – (Source: ShopVisible)

• While mobile traffic rose, TRUE mobile conversion was the lowest of all of the devices at .05%. Traffic from tablets came in a 1.6% and desktop traffic came in at 2.5%. - (Source: ShopVisible)

MOBILE CONVERSION WAS 410% LOWER THAN EITHER TABLET OR DESKTOP CONVERSION!

This data would seem to support the notion that context does trump device.

Next, we looked at user intent. Here are the facts:

• 91% of mobile phone users go online to socialize. – (Source: Ruder Finn)

• 1 in 8 users compare prices on their phone while shopping. – (Source: comScore) When you do the math, that is 12.5% OF 15% of all web traffic. In addition, less that .05% of those shoppers said they would leave the dealership they are at to go to another store. – (Source: OnlineDrive Marketing Mix Study)

• 70% of all mobile searches result in an action within 1 hour, yet the average auto shopper take 59 days to make a decision. – (Source: Mobile Marketer and OnlineDrive Marketing Mix Study)

• The average mobile user spends 25 minutes per day checking email. – (Source: Return Path) That IS NOT mobile marketing.

These facts would support that very little auto shopping or influence is gained from mobile. Auto shopping and research is not the user’s intent when they get on their mobile device.

So here was the question that needed we sought to answer:

“Which device will produce the highest conversion rate: mobile, tablet or desktop?

We set up an experiment with 20 of our accounts. We set up a control group of 5 accounts and tracked conversion over 380,000 in-market visitors on our micrositesbyu.com platform in a responsive-design format.

Our hypothesis (and really most people’s hypothesis) is that a responsive design would reduce friction on a page and help increase conversion. In this case, you would be correct. There are many other factors, however, that affect conversion: the two largest factors being the context of the search & the intent of the visitor.

Here were the results.

There was a 61% lift in conversion in aggregate over the control group from mobile and using responsive design.

HOWEVER, when we individually examined results by device, here is what we found:

• Desktop – We had to change the desktop design slightly to meet the responsive design requirements. The result of that change: + 111% relative increase in conversion!
I am sure at this point you are starting to realize that one of the other two device types OR both had a significant negative result on the conversion rate.

• Tablet – + 31% relative increase over the control group. Basically, no statistically significant difference.

• Mobile – -17.7% relative DECREASE over the control group. Again, no statistically significant difference.

Based on both the behavioral data and test data, here is the bottom line. After reducing friction using responsive design and even making the user experience better, we could not change the visitor’s context or intent. Those drive conversion far more than design.

In the end, mobile customers are NOT in the mindset to convert. They are not in a true influential research mode where your marketing will have a significant impact on their buying decision – whether that decision is to buy or simply who to buy from.

So what is mobile good for?

1. On average, it takes 26 hours for a person to report a lost wallet and 68 minutes to report a lost phone. – (Source: Unisys) Have a VALUABLE mobile app for your store. Allow for mobile service scheduling BUT (most importantly) use it to monitor service wait times throughout the day.

2. It takes the average person 90 minutes to respond to an email and 90 seconds to respond to a SMS text message. Make sure both your Marketing Automation System and CRM has SMS text capabilities.

3. The iPhone 5 and later versions give the user the ability to block ad tracking and SMS ads that they consider intrusive. If you are using SMS, make sure your message is relevant.

4. Over 40% of clicks on mobile ads are fraudulent or accidental and conversion rates are the lowest by far of all devices. Make it easy for mobile users to contact you and integrate easy to use maps to help them find your store. Those are the top interactions between businesses and mobile devices.

As always we hope this helps and enjoy your feedback.

Someone in the community recently asked about revitalizing their internet department/BDC (join the forum discussion here).

For inbound marketing, leads determine success. The assumption is that the higher the lead volume and percentage, the higher the sales and service volume. All too often, these do not go in step with each other. Below we identify ten statistics that are the main cause of increased lead quantity not equating to increases in appointment shows and sales.

1. Setting an appointment at the time the lead is converted will increase show rate 37 percent. – This seems like a no brainer, doesn’t it? If the customer commits to the appointment at the time they submit the lead, there is a very powerful psychological affect.

Step 1: Lead Submitted

Step 2: Appointment Made

2. 37 percent of all automotive leads are never responded to. – WOW! That is a scary stat! When you consider that the real average cost of afirst-party lead is close to $100, for 37 percent to hit the floor is absolutely unacceptable. By “responded”, we simply mean that a call is placed from the dealership to a customer.

How to make sure all leads are responded to: Most CRM’s have a lead log of some type. Someone from your dealership should be reviewing that log making sure none of the leads are still open. To be sure that an actual call was placed, each BDC person or salesperson should have entered notes that an actual call was made. If you see a BDC person where more than 30 percent of their contacts result in a “Left voice mail” note, you likely have someone entering this as the default note when they couldn’t get to the lead.

If you really want to take this to the next level, have a proactive system that calls the BDC or salesperson with the lead information. If no contact is made, the system informs the manager immediately or, even better, the lead goes to an outsourced agency that will guarantee to make the call.

3. 86 percent of all automotive leads bought a car from the first dealership to contact them! – Wow, that’s a big number! When you think about this, it makes sense. If 37 percent of leads are never responded to and the number one reason a customer is online is to save time then, if you are the first to contact them with the answers they are seeking, it’s your deal to lose. Let’s face it, as car salespeople, we are at our best when we are with the customer.

4. You are 621 percent more likely to successfully contact a lead if called within five minutes of lead submission. – When we thought about why this happens this way it made perfect sense. According to ZMOT, while the customer may be shopping up to 18 different sources when researching the purchase of a car, the fact is they are doing it ten to twenty minutes at a time. Beyond that time, they are back into the everyday routine of their lives.

5. Contact success drops 100 times when leads are contacted between five to thirty minutes. – Bottom line: Thirty minutes is your cut off. If you don’t contact a lead within 30 minutes, you might as well wait until tomorrow. The results will be the same… BAD!

6. Appointment show rates rose 311 percent when the lead was contacted within five minutes of lead submission. – If you want customers to think you care about them and want their business, be responsive. Nothing says responsive like getting to a customer while they are still on your site.

7. The average number of contact attempts in automotive is 1.7! – There are so many ways to contact and follow up with a customer these days that there is no excuse for this statistic. The first contact doesn’t have to be a call but you should still be calling the customer if they haven’t come in and haven’t responded to digital communication.

8. Contact attempts beyond the second attempt drop off 540 percent but the closing ratio of a successful contact after the second contact attempt rises 222 percent. – This stat speaks for itself…. Never stop following up…EVER!

9. Sending an iCal or Outlook calendar invite for the appointment increased show rates 22 percent - This is a practice you need to get you BDC or Sales Staff in the habit of doing. Most people today manage their lives from their computer and smart phone. If you're not there, you don’t exist.

10. A personal call to confirm an appointment will increase show rates 36 percent. – This goes without saying. Why are we not doing it?

We have a lot going on in the dealership…maybe even more than a CRM system can even manage. To get the job done with inbound marketing, you need to be proactive, responsive and automated. I am afraid the current level of technology dealerships is still insufficient to make that happen. Business is suffering for many as a result and this will only get worse. Customer demand for efficiency will not stop.

Your thoughts?

Lead > Contact > Show > Sell (LCSS). That is the very definition of Automotive Inbound Marketing.

Have you ever noticed that the vendors in the automotive marketing space who are minimizing the importance of leads are also the same vendors that have never been able to generate them with any success?

Marketing is a conversation. The start of that conversation is a lead. If you’re relying on lot traffic alone, you are not maximizing your sales potential.

By not seeking those conversations prior to the customer coming onto your lot, there is no way to know their motivations for being there. If you don’t know their motivations, then you are simply along for the ride. It’s much easier to sell a vehicle when you have information prior to the customer arriving, wouldn’t you agree? 

The dealerships that understand the LCSS process are the ones who are selling more cars.

Ask yourself this question:

“In today’s connected world, how do you expect to compete if you are not going to get more leads, contact more potential customers and get more of them to show up at your dealership?”

If you come up with an answer to increasing sales that doesn’t include increasing shown appointments through contacting more customers from leads, please enlighten all of us in the comments of this blog post. I assure you that we want to know.  

For those who do not have another answer, I am going to break down each step and give you data and suggestions that I hope will help you see increases across each step of LCSS.

Leads – Lead Generation is actually quite simple, I wish I could tell you that it was magic (it isn’t) and that I was the only wizard who knew the spell (I’m not). Not unlike medieval alchemists, however, it’s science and that can seem like magic. So I am going to give you the secret formula on how to turn leads into gold.

Lead generation is a formula and a four part cognitive process that happens in the mind of your customer.

Four Part Process:

Headline – First and foremost, you must have a compelling headline. People don’t read the web. They scan it. You need to ensure that your headline is compelling and will attract your prospect. Not only do you need to be able to grab their attention but you must also make them want to read or see more.

Offer – Clear, Compelling and Credible. These are the three C’s that must be present in any offer you make to your potential customers. Clarity trumps persuasion. If your dealership is simply producing cute slogans or creating offers that require lengthy explanations, than you are already dead in the water. Customers do not have time for cute. They also do not have the time to spend figuring out exactly what your offer is. If they don’t understand it, they will simply move on to the next offer. THERE IS ALWAYS ANOTHER OFFER!

Call-To-Action – What do you want the customer to do? Knowing the answer to this question is overlooked far too often.

In most marketing, especially in the case of web marketing, the calls-to-action are generic and non-compelling. An example would be “Get More Information.” This is not a call-to-action. If the customer does click on it, you are not going to get a lead. You are simply moving the customer to the next page that has your submission form below the fold with NO CALL-TO-ACTION at all. A call-to-action has to make the visitor want to act. While a call-to-action like “Get More Information” may increase your VDP views, those have ZERO CAUSATION TO SALES! There certainly may be a correlation but there is no causation. If you want proof, take a look at the highest VDP views on your website. You will find that they correlate to the most popular vehicles you sell. The VDP view itself did not cause more sales, its popularity did.

A Reason – In the end, you must give your prospect a reason to give you their information. If there is no reason provided, don’t be surprised that you didn’t get a lead. The reason you give your customers to convert into a lead is the single most important part of lead generation. If you cannot unlock a reason for customers to give you their information, you will not be successful at generating leads.

The Formula

Your ultimate goal is quality lead generation. A quality lead, however, is not simply a lead that results in a laydown at the end of the buying cycle.

Quality Leads - Quality leads are those that include an accurate name, e-mail address, along with home and cell phone numbers. The accuracy of the information in the lead is what makes it quality, NOT the customer’s position in the buying cycle. Lead generation is the first step. Without good contact information, the remaining steps are useless.

Contact – The lead simply tees up the conversation. Contacting the customer by phone IS the conversation. Without a phone conversation, you will have very few shown appointments. There are some in our industry that believe a contact is defined by connecting via e-mail. Nothing could be further from the truth! The ONLY definition of contact is by phone.

“People buy from people not from websites or emails.”

Phone contact is where the conversation must take place. Purchasing a vehicle is still the second largest purchase most people will make in their lifetime. Purchasing a vehicle is very much related to personality and lifestyle decisions made by the consumer. Most consumers will require a connection to the person they make that purchase from. That will never happen through an email or on a webpage.

Response time is a very important factor when it comes to connecting with customers. Not for the reasons you think or have been told, however. Responding to the lead within five minutes doesn’t make the customer more receptive to you. While it may impress them, and it’s a great start, it’s not going to make the customer choose your dealership over your competition. What a five-minute response time will do is increase the chance that you will be able to contact the customer and that they are still receptive to your information and connection. Once you’ve passed the ten-minute mark, your customer is most likely back to their day-to-day routine of life.

ZMOT will tell you that a customer visits 18 different Internet sites before making a purchase decision. What it doesn’t tell you is that customers visit sites over a 50-day period during sessions lasting only 10-15 minutes at a time. They are not sitting down for two-hour research sessions about a vehicle.

With this in mind, your goal should be to connect to the customer while they are still focused on purchasing a vehicle. By contacting them within five minutes, the customer is more likely to give you their time and set an appointment. Time is the primary reason your customer is on the Internet. The more time you can save them, the more likely you’ll be to get an appointment. By focusing on getting an appointment rather than selling them a car, they’ll be more receptive to you’re the reason you give them to visit your store and, ultimately, set an appointment.

Shown Appointments – All too often, the only reason salespeople give a customer to come to the store is price-based. Salespeople are contacting customers and trying to sell a car, the dealership and themselves on the phone in the limited amount of time the consumer will give them. This is a very hard thing to accomplish. You are asking a customer to make a $40,000 decision over the phone. Most consumers won’t be comfortable doing this and that is why shown appointments hover in the 15-20% range. The ironic part is that some industry experts consider that statistic good. In order to achieve shown appointment rates of 50 percent or more, you need to give the customer a different reason to visit you than to make a $40,000 decision. The bottom line is that consumers want to be eased into the purchase. They are intimidated by this large purchase and, for the most part, won’t be willing to make it over the phone.

To increase shown appointments, salespeople should focus on the test drive and incentivizing customers to visit. You achieve this by making sure that there is no obligation, no pressure to buy and that you simply want to help them make the right decision and give them a gift for visiting. Incentives are the number one way to increase shown appointments. When your incentive is tied to the store visit, not the purchase, you will increase your shown appointments and those will translate into more sales.

Sell – Once the customer comes to the dealership, marketing has done its job. It is still up to the dealer to make a sale. Keep in mind, however, that if you are incentivizing your customer to visit your store, you must be prepared to deliver the incentive instantly while they are still at your store. If you cannot, it will do more harm than good. Ask yourself this question:

“When a customer fills out a form to get an incentive on your site for visiting your dealership what do you think they are expecting when they get to your showroom?”

They expect the incentive, of course.

How do you think they feel when you tell them “The check is in the mail”?

Now you have confirmed your insincerity to a customer who already doubted it.  They will leave feeling as if your incentive was just another hook to get them to come in.

When you do provide the incentive instantly and do so without any strings – not even a test drive – you evoke a sense of reciprocity with the customer. They will have more belief that you are being sincere in your effort. They will be more likely to listen to you and you will be more likely to get a sale.

Automotive Inbound Marketing is about providing value to your prospect in order to initiate a conversation on their terms. When they do reach out to you and initiate a conversation, make sure to provide value, make it easy and, most of all, save the prospect time. That is the number one reason that the customer is on the web to begin with and what they have the least of.

Yesterday as I traveled home from Digital Dealer Workshops in Chicago this was the question that was weighing heavy on my mind. I spoke with a lot of Dealers and Internet Managers there and not many had very good things to say about their marketing partners.
The problems were these:

1. Lack of support – For too many vendors support means someone to turn in a ticket to have something done a week from now that the dealership asked them to do. I’m sorry to disappoint but THAT IS NOT SUPPORT. The support a VALUABLE Digital Marketing Agency would supply is the IDEA and the PROCESS. Good support from VALUABLE Digital Marketing Agency means they bring you the marketing ideas, creative and the process by which to gain approval from your store then they execute that marketing campaign across all channels. 
 

2. Lack of knowledge – This stems back to number 1 but too many “Digital Marketing Agencies” are employing entry level people to try and tell a dealer how to spend tens of thousands of marketing dollars. A VALUABLE Digital Marketing Agency would have experienced marketing pro’s who work with your store to establish a digital marketing strategy and most importantly the historical numbers for the strategy to back it up.
 

3. Too Much In-Fighting & no focused direction – Marketing is so fragmented today that a Dealer has to have at minimum 5 vendors to get it all done; The PPC company, the Website company, the Email Marketing company, the Direct Mail Marketing company and Behavioral Marketing company. Add to that Listings, Conquest Email Marketing and CRM and you have 5 to 9 vendors who all blame the other guy when things don’t work and are all fighting to get some of the other guy’s budget.

To make the above matters worse all of these guys get paid a flat amount regardless of how they perform. It just seems to me that this is a recipe for inconsistency and confusion.

So here is what I think a VALUABLE Digital Marketing Agency would provide:
1. A Marketing Performance Manager with digital marketing experience
2. A Market Evaluation – basically some data to make sense of a strategy
3. A Marketing Strategy…duh!
4. The process, message and creative to execute across all channels (Website, Email, PPC, Direct Mail, Conquest Email, Behavioral Marketing, Listings, Social Media Marketing and Marketing Automation)
5. The analytics to show the campaign as a whole

MOST IMPORTANTLY THEY SHOULD BE PAID ONLY FOR THE VALUE THEY PROVIDE AND THE MORE VALUE THEY PROVIDE THE MORE THEY SHOULD BE PAID.

The question is WHAT is that value? It seems to me the value a Digital Marketing Agency provides is results in the form of Leads and Shows at the dealership so why can’t they be paid on those?

These are my questions to the community:
1. What in the above is missing a Digital Marketing Agency should provide for your store?
2. Why would you NOT want to pay them on the value they provide?

Looking forward to seeing some of the answers here, thanks to everyone who posts some feedback.

COMMUNICATION!

I just got through reading “Is the dealership sales call center obsolete?” on autonews.com. I got the article from Andy Warner on twitter. This article highlights dealers that have built, dismantled and maintain BDC’s and discusses the various pro’s and con’s of each but fails to get the real point.  

That said I am going to try and land the plane on this topic and let’s discuss where you think I’m missing it or what we can do to make it better. The reality is that we have a real problem here that needs to be addressed for the retail auto industry as a whole.

I have beaten the lead conversion drum for years to the point many think I am obsessed with it.

The fact is that I am but over the last 2 years I have come to realize that… “Lead Conversion isn’t enough”, we are going to have to get beyond lead conversion to the visit to excel and therein lies our problem.

When we get a lead or a call there are a few inherent things we know we have to do.

1. Answer the question
2. Give the price
3. Sell the appointment

But if you’ve answered the prospects questions and you’ve given them the price…why do they need you? When you get a prospect on the phone how do you get their contact information and make sure it is accurate, and then convince them to visit the store? These challenges are not new to the industry; they aren’t even unique to the automotive industry. The fact is all business working to generate leads face these same challenges.  

The answer… VALUE!

To get something from someone, a lead, contact information, a visit you have to give them something of value in return.

Value Drivers

1. Time – this is the number one reason the prospect is on the net to begin with, it would stand to reason if you can save them time in the shopping & buying process you will have an advantage (think Progressive.com). Here I suggest a 90 min test drive and purchase guarantee.
2. Information – the primary reason a prospect contacts the dealership is for information, about the car, about their trade, about financing and of course the price Joe Webb talks about these various types of appointments in a very good blog post “The Four Appointments Car Dealers Should Set” but what is the VALUE the customer gets for setting the appointment? This is where most sales people miss it and is your opportunity to place yourself above the competition with an online brochure about the car they are buying with information on why they should buy from your dealership and a video introduction from you with a walk around of the car. You see the dealership and the YOU are the only things they can’t get somewhere else. This is the reason we developed infoMagnet our online brochure tied to our incentive based behavioral marketing app. When you offer this value 98% of the time you will get good contact information from a phone call to your dealership and over 60% of these customers will show up at your store with a 80% plus closing ratio.
3. Convenience – we all pay more for convenience, we do business everyday based on what is most convenient for us. Make it more convenient for your prospect to buy from you. Deliver the car to their place of business let them drive it while you take their car and get the appraisal. I was doing this back in the 80’s and ironically I would sell at least 2 other cars to people in that office with in as many months after I did this for a prospect. My closing ratio…100%, I never lost a customer I delivered the car to.

Whether you are in the BDC or you are a salesperson on the floor you have to be able to communicate the value to the customer for giving their contact information, showing up at the store and buying from you. So you see it doesn’t matter if you have a BDC Department or Your sales staff handles the leads as they come in, they will all have to communicate value to get the customer.

The question is who do you want to train? That’s all.

So tell me, where am I missing this, if at all? What can we improve or add to TIME, INFORMATION & CONVENIENCE?  

The basic Law of Reciprocity states: To give and take mutually.

I have thought about this a lot over the last few months. We use this concept very effectively in conversion optimization by giving white papers, special offers etc. on landing pages. The idea is if the person gives something, you then give something of value in exchange. But think about it… you asked for the value FIRST. The visitor had to give you their name in order to get your value.

Isn’t that backward? Shouldn’t you give the value first then ask for the mutual value back?

Amazingly enough, this backward give and take works well; but recent events have made me start to wonder HOW WELL?

Earlier this year we launched ShowroomMagnet, our incentive based behavioral targeting engine for websites. We knew it would work well for conversion because these kind of popovers have always had a positive impact on conversion.  In addition, we’re making and offer and a single clear call to action (something too many websites lack).Not to mention we tested it, as we do EVERYTHING.

BUT there was a surprising side effect.  A few of our dealers started using this in a way we didn’t expect.

It started with Andy Wright at Lehigh Valley Honda, who by far was selling more cars from the program than most of the dealers.  I asked Andy, “What are you doing?” and the answer was so simple it was a little bit scary.

As customers came to the showroom with their gift card validation in hand (or smart phone as the case may be) Lehigh Valley Honda sales people would take them right to the desk and validate their gift card INSTANTLY. They would put it right on the customer’s  smart phone before they even took a test drive!

LeHigh “kept the promise” the website made. And they made it instant – as soon as the customer walked in the door.

There was no hook. There was no caveat.  They had promised a gift for visiting, the customer visited…so the dealership handed over the gift card. 

Here is the surprising part…

I thought when we started this we would see closing rates in the 30% to 40% range and that would be great!

Lehigh Valley Honda’s closing rate…. 68% over the last six months!

Bottom Line – WHEN YOU MAKE A PROMISE… KEEP IT! You’ll be amazed at the number of customers that will reciprocate… it goes back to The Law of Reciprocity.

Too often in our business we think we have to trick people… hook them into doing what we want them to do when really all they want us to do is keep the promise that we made.

Simple right?

So simple it’s a little bit scary!

_^"Why"?

This is the single most difficult concept for most marketers in automotive to understand.  “Why” is the reason AutoTrader and Cars.com run millions of dollars in ads on TV, then put only a fraction of that budget into real content that consumers go online to find “the expensive kind of marketing” as noted by Seth Godin in his book "All Marketers Are Liars" renamed "All Markerters Are Storytellers.”

“Why” is also the reason GM is failing at Facebook. They’re not asking “why” people even want to come to their social sites. They’re posting from within a bubble. “Why” is the reason people debate on Twitter whether they should use Adwords PPC or Facebook.  I absolutely love debates like these because they force people to think about "WHY” they believe what they believe... and “Why” is a much more important question than "WHAT". Ask the Merovingian, he knows.

Facebook or Adwords is not a choice; it's a question of message and intent...the “WHY”of it all.

What Ford and Scott Monty knows, that GM doesn't, is that people don't go to Facebook to find Ford or to find out "What’s going on at Ford"? The truth is, they don’t care!

People go on Facebook to keep up with friends and family and to discover things that are important to them, in other words, the "WHY” of what makes them visit a page. Ford and Scott Monty's team do a terrific job of producing content with that intent, the “Why” of it all, in mind.

People go on Google and other search engines to find things, that is their intent, their "WHY" and smart marketers buy keywords and write ads with that intent in mind. It’s a "WHY" question NOT a "WHAT" question...

It shouldn’t be "WHAT" are your goals from the platform?

But...

WHY are they there?

And more importantly, how can your message fit the visitor’s “why”?

The Merovingian would be proud!

I hope this post has helped you think more about why than what. I will be discussing “WHY” and bringing a lot of data on this subject in my Digital Dealer Session on Oct. 24^th In Las Vegas hope to see you there. 

ZMOT its everywhere seems like these days. With Google as the general session at Digital Dealer this year I thought I would talk about how we see the execution of ZMOT for dealers. Below are the slides from my presentation. I think these numbers will add up to a pattern if you look at the slides closely.

• There is not ONE ZMOT in Automotive there are TWO
•  
• People spend as much time consuming online media as they do off
•  
• Targeting is getting better & faster online, you can now target display like you target adwords
•  
• Offline marketing is just pushing consumers online so you have to be in both and understand where you are pushing them
•  
• It doesn’t matter how good you are at adwords or display, if your ad sucks you won’t get the click no matter how relevant you think your message is to the keyword
•  
• It doesn’t matter how good you are with your adwords or display and even your ad if your landing doesn’t match what you promised you won’t get the conversion
•  
• Remarketing is valuable if you use it right, if you just send the consumer back to the same page they didn’t like before it’s NOT
•  
• IT TAKES A COORDINATED STRATEGY ONLINE AND OFF TO WIN, NOT JUST AN INTEGRATED OR BUNDELED ONE

At the end of the day, I still see a lot of “Marketing Partners” who have a product, widget or new shiny object to sell not a coordinated service offering to help the dealer sell & service more cars.

That kills a General Manager it’s what he doesn’t know!

Those words spoken to me by one of the smartest dealers I ever worked for, Jay Marks, have stayed with me since 1996. Same principal applies in every position of the dealership but particularly in marketing.

Let’s face it Marketing is quickly becoming a dealership position. It’s a complicated dance between traditional and digital, the dealership and its partners. What is most alarming to me is the lack of basic information dealerships and their marketing partners have about the dealerships market and customers behavior. It’s always amazing to me that so many dealerships can operate even profitably and know very little about their market or their customer behavior. Even more alarming is the “Marketing Partners” they are using know less than the dealership, “They are not at the store!”.

The data is all there, in my earlier post “The Secret Weapon” I discussed the massive amounts of data that are available to dealerships and how you can leverage some of this data. I also talked about “What a Relational Marketing Database should do.”

One of its first functions is a “Market Analysis” you historical data will tell you a ton about

• Where your customers are willing to come from
• What cars they are willing to spend the money for
• What cars they are getting rid of
• Where your customer are will to come from for service
• What cities you have the best penetration in
• What vehicles make you the most money
• How and who to increase customer pay service with

I could go on and on but the post would be overwhelming.

Bottom line – If you are interviewing a marketing partner… and that is what it is an interview, and they can’t show you where the marketing & conversion leaks are, they can’t tell you where they think they fit in your marketing plan and can help then you already have your decision, it’s the same one you would make in an employee interview.

"I dont have to tell you you know what the decision is"

Finally if you don't have a basic market analysis you’re throwing darts in the dark… STOP even if your current “Marketing Partner” cant supply you with one you can do this yourself in excel.

Here is a link to a sample marketing analysis you can download that will at least give you the basic data to make good marketing decisions on. GET A SAMPLE MARKETING ANALYSIS.

Before you go chasing “Spinner Bait” (the shiny object) get your foundation right. Start with the data, get your market analyzed and look at who you need to target and how those people find you. Get that right then you can start to tackle the more advanced and subtle areas of marketing like social media, advanced content marketing, mobile etc.

Hope this helps,

Attend my session at Digital Dealer 12 “Marketing By The Numbers, Executing ZMOT In Your Dealership”

But you couldn’t be more wrong about microsites!

I have had a few dealers reach out to me lately on Microsites being a bad idea and even one of the largest industry providers asking me if dealers using them will be “Black Listed” by Google…REALLY?!  

In this video Matt Cutts from Google explains his OPINION on microsites and calls out a post by Vanessa Fox “Microsites A Bad Idea Most of the Time”.

Before I break down some of the miss-guiding in the video by Matt and the post by Vanessa let me say I have tremendous respect for them both as SEO Practitioners and Marketers in their own right and I can certainly see their points for poorly designed, built and executed microsites / landing page strategies.  

Therein lies the first point.

“A well designed, well executed microsite / landing page strategy will outperform your website with targeted channels & campaigns every time.” However as with most strategies if it is not well designed, thought out and executed properly it won’t work…duh!

You lose brand identity and audience engagement

Ok let’s get real here… Most businesses don't really have a “Brand Identity”, they do not define the brand they sell as Coke defines soft drinks and Google defines search, so brand identity isn’t our goal when we advertise on Google and it isn't the main reason or even a secondary reason we want to be found on Google or any other search engine.

Why we advertise…Why we want to be found… is to sell something!

To be quite honest with you most of the time the reason a visitor gets to us is because they want to buy something NOT because they want to “Engage with us as a BRAND” So sending a visitor back to your RANDOM ACCESS WEBSITE where they get entangled in the web of everything other than what I was searching for is well… in a word “SILLY”.

Where I am going to promote “audience engagement” and “brand identity” is in my blog first and foremost then use social media for support and conversation on my brand topics, NOT in my site.

Vanessa there is no doubt brand awareness and credibility go a long way toward getting the click and the visitors perceived value goes a long way to getting the conversion, but when they are in the mid and lower funnel to buy I want to provide them relevant information, easy, quick access to that information not drop them on the Encyclopedia Britannica the is my main website, especially if I am making a specific offer.

You lose the ability to leverage your audience

“Let’s say you launch an awesome site with a fantastic user experience, great products, and unrivaled customer support. For instance, let’s say you’re Zappos. Someone writes up a positive article about you in say, the NY Times. Readers start clicking over to your site. They see you sell running shoes. They just read about how great you are, so they feel confident about purchasing some products from your site. But maybe those same readers also need some clothes to go running in. If you had a separate runningclothes.com microsite, you’ve just missed a great opportunity to reach a targeted and motivated audience.”

The example above is absolutely what I mean by a poorly designed and executed microsite strategy. If they would have done it right the ad campaign would have targeted keywords “running shoes” and that would have dropped them on to a microsite that would have asked “What kind of running do you do” the choices would be under men or women and had links like “Sprinting, Long Distance, Cross Country etc.” that would have taken the visitor to a specific page for each shoe type and maybe even deeplink the visitor into the main website after the microsite has qualified them. In the end when the running shoe transaction is done the site should suggest running apparel and link them to another microsite or into the main site (depending on the situation) about running apparel.

The main point here… Don't confuse the visitor from what they were looking for in the first place with other offers or links for them to get lost, help them get what they came for quickly and easily then suggest others.  

I can’t begin to count the number of sales I have missed over the years not staying focused on what the customer wanted in the first place and muddying the water with other products.

The moral of your example… don't launch microsites for the sake of having a microsite, HAVE A THOUGHT OUT PLAN.

Let me add to this “NEVER BUILD MICROSITES AS A LARGER NET TO SOMEHOW GET MORE TRAFFIC” that is the biggest “BS” for the use of microsites propagated throughout our industry.

You confuse people and search engines

Here again Vanessa is confused by the poor microsite & landing page strategy. Mostly because I would not allow a microsite to ever be featured in the NY Times in the first place. If it was over your main website then you really need to take a look at your main site because you have bigger problems than microsites. Microsites are never used as a substitute for your main site and should never be what a media company like the NY Times wants to feature unless they are doing a story on the effective use of Microsites!

Let me add here Microsites are not built or meant to rank, they are meant to have a traffic driver like PPC or Email and convert. Therefore that “Loving Touch” as Matt puts in the video is done for the offer not the site, nor do you worry about search engine indexing because SEO is not your traffic driver here.

Bottom line this confusion has nothing to do with microsites and everything to do with poor microsite strategy or a poor main website design, in either case it’s bad.

You may have to spend substantial additional resources

“As you build out the content of both sites, you have to decide which content to put where. And decide how to spend marketing, PR, and advertising resources. When you issue a press release, which site do you talk up? All of them? What if you have 20? And you likely are doing social media. Do you now maintain 20 Facebook pages and 20 Twitter accounts? I’m tired just thinking about it.”

C’mon Vanessa really?

• How do you decide Marketing, PR and advertising resources? – Based on if your marketing or advertising is making a specific offer and how you want to track that channel.

PR well if your “Press Release” is about a specific product send it to the microsite for that product, even better send it to your blog with more content about the specific product and use links and banners in your blog for offers on the product that go to microsites that convert that traffic into sales or leads.

• Do you maintain 20 Facebook pages and twitter accounts? – Surely Vanessa you realize that Facebook and Twitter just support & distribute content, what would make you think you have to have a Facebook page and/or Twitter account for every microsite?

Again the above examples are functions or a poor microsite / landing page strategy not of microsites themselves.

“It’s a poor carpenter that blames his tools”

You cobble your search acquisition efforts

If you are trying to rank microsites then you are using them wrong. I think I have explained that enough in this post.

It can be difficult to match promotions to search visibility

“The trouble comes in when that promotion sparks search interest (which it undoubtedly will). I’ve observed this with the Super Bowl commercials in both 2009 and 2010. In 2009, several sites, including Hyundai and Sobe advertised taglines that had corresponding microsites, but those domains redirected to the main domain. Advertisers expected that viewers would type the URL into a browser address bar, but instead, many people typed the tagline or domain into a search box. Since the domain didn’t actually exist, the advertiser didn’t show up in search results. You can see this, for instance, with Hyundai’s Edit Your Own campaign.”

Here again a Poor Microsite Strategy having nothing to do with using microsites for what they are supposed to do. If the agency that did this promotion for Hyundai would have understood a good microsite strategy and knew what they were doing they would have done the following.

Built a true “Edit Your Own” Microsite with the goals of the visitor in mind who saw the ad, instead of a URL and splash page just to see how many people saw the ad and acted which is what I am sure was the agency’s and Hyundai’s goal there.

Their goal should have been to provide good information in the microsite aligned with the ad and the visitor intent then collect leads based on an offer of more information to come or special incentives or discounts, then distribute a content marketing campaign designed to follow up nurture those leads and distribute the high quality leads that bubble to the top to their dealer body.

Secondly it was a big mistake not to integrate a good Search Campaign with this ad. As Vanessa effectively points out in her post most of the off line advertising you’re doing is sparking more searches for the offer than the URL you put in the add if you don't have an integrated search strategy with that offline campaign you are missing business.   

Vanessa here again you have an example of a poor strategy and a misunderstanding that microsites need to rank, not a problem with microsites. Microsites don't rank, they’re highly relevant & they convert.  

You don’t get the search engine value you think you get

This is a really long explanation about how keword rich domains don't carry the search engine value you think and I agree with Vanessa 1000 percent. Google is on to the keyword domain thing and it carries very little weight now, no matter what anyone in the auto industry tells you… IT DOESN’T there is too much data to support that.

But I will reiterate I DON'T CARE about the search engine value! If you have the right microsite strategy the only search engine value you do care about pertains to quality score, that’s it. SEO is not the traffic driver for your microsite strategy if it is YOUR DOING IT WRONG…STOP!

So let me wrap this up…

1. Your microsite strategy is NOT based on SEO
2. Microsites focus your visitor on the offer and logical path to conversion
3. If you are going to support offline advertising with microsites make sure you integrate PPC with it

 “A good strategy including the above, well designed microsites will out convert your main website every time”

Finally - Good microsites are closely tied to your keyword, to your ads and to your visitor landing making them highly relevant…what Google is all about! Any knucklehead that tells you that you will be black listed for doing that is a provider you need to stay very far away from as they are clearly clueless.

I hope my opinions here clear up some of the misgivings on microsites and help you think about them and your entire web advertising more clearly.

For more information on where to use microsites and landing pages see these links

Where Do You Use Landing Pages

Microsites & Landing Pages For Auto Dealers

About OnlineDrive:   

OnlineDrive is a Search to Show web marketing agency, helping auto dealers:

• Be found more in the right places
• Engage and convert more leads
• Get more leads to show at your store