Losing focus during your automotive social media campaigns is so easy. As the Internet Sales Manager, you must wear many hats. Because you are seen as “the PC guy” (which actually we are not) our days are full of “Fix my font size” and “Check my wi-fi” and of course the crowd favorite “Why is my computer so slow?”

The day is just too short to keep up with all these duties, (even though Internet people are known to be more organized and scheduled than most) Still, the danger is high that we just get overwhelmed and important things like writing a blog post about the new upcoming model, sending responses to questions, entering fresh Facebook content and monitoring the reputation on  the Twittersphere, Yelp and the other online entities falls by the wayside. 

MIRACLE ALERT: WIN BACK YOUR FOCUS WITH AN EDITORIAL CALENDAR

The idea is not new and for decades, the press, writers, bloggers and Marketing/PR departments have functioned smoothly thanks to this easy tool. When I was in charge of my dealership’s digital marketing, I created this calendar from scratch.

To get started I decided…

1) …on the frequency and the regularity of the events I wanted to share somehow – somewhere. I further looked how far into “the future” I wanted to plan. Month by month, quarterly or even longer. 3-Months ahead was my choice then.

2) …open up Excel and included e.g following columns for each month

Do the same for new cars coming down the pipeline. Repost car reviewsfrom experts in the automotive writer scene, post “spy” photos so you can’t identify what model it is this time – readers love this – I guarantee!

These are really only a few examples of how you can customize your editorial calendar, and I am sure you have plenty of ideas as well. You just need to make sure that you stick to the plan. When you have scheduled a blog post for Thursday – this blog post for Thursday needs to be online ON THURSDAY. Same with all the other scheduled events.

It is about developing a habit. Just think about the U.S. citizens most “looking forward to it” day – APRIL 15^th. Also when you do not want to do it (right now) – You have to. Push yourself into the habit and follow the plan you designed. Let nothing else come in between. The calendar and organizational discipline will rule this time!

Last advice: Share it with your superior and align your work with the offline advertising schedule of your profit centers. Here and there will be a chance to “sneak” in a subliminal soft-sell message ;)

Happy Selling!

Losing focus during your automotive social media campaigns is so easy. As the Internet Sales Manager, you must wear many hats. Because you are seen as “the PC guy” (which actually we are not) our days are full of “Fix my font size” and “Check my wi-fi” and of course the crowd favorite “Why is my computer so slow?”

The day is just too short to keep up with all these duties, (even though Internet people are known to be more organized and scheduled than most) Still, the danger is high that we just get overwhelmed and important things like writing a blog post about the new upcoming model, sending responses to questions, entering fresh Facebook content and monitoring the reputation on  the Twittersphere, Yelp and the other online entities falls by the wayside. 

MIRACLE ALERT: WIN BACK YOUR FOCUS WITH AN EDITORIAL CALENDAR

The idea is not new and for decades, the press, writers, bloggers and Marketing/PR departments have functioned smoothly thanks to this easy tool. When I was in charge of my dealership’s digital marketing, I created this calendar from scratch.

To get started I decided…

1) …on the frequency and the regularity of the events I wanted to share somehow – somewhere. I further looked how far into “the future” I wanted to plan. Month by month, quarterly or even longer. 3-Months ahead was my choice then.

2) …open up Excel and included e.g following columns for each month

Do the same for new cars coming down the pipeline. Repost car reviewsfrom experts in the automotive writer scene, post “spy” photos so you can’t identify what model it is this time – readers love this – I guarantee!

These are really only a few examples of how you can customize your editorial calendar, and I am sure you have plenty of ideas as well. You just need to make sure that you stick to the plan. When you have scheduled a blog post for Thursday – this blog post for Thursday needs to be online ON THURSDAY. Same with all the other scheduled events.

It is about developing a habit. Just think about the U.S. citizens most “looking forward to it” day – APRIL 15^th. Also when you do not want to do it (right now) – You have to. Push yourself into the habit and follow the plan you designed. Let nothing else come in between. The calendar and organizational discipline will rule this time!

Last advice: Share it with your superior and align your work with the offline advertising schedule of your profit centers. Here and there will be a chance to “sneak” in a subliminal soft-sell message ;)

Happy Selling!

Chapter IV - What not to do when looking into your website to figure out “is it working”?

As you will see down the line, a study confirms that we car sales people just obsess too much about it. What I mean is we constantly search for the “holy grail” in making a website flashy, pretty, and interactive with the latest gadget out there in the industry.

I get it – we possibly think we need to impress our potential new customers who have finally found our website – us picturing them glaring at their screen with Ohhhhs and Ahhhs coming out of their mouth. But sorry to disappoint you – we need to wake you up a little bit more roughly, like my grandma used to do when my brothers and I slept in too long, and poured a nice cold and refreshing glass of water in our faces.

The majority of customers reaching a desired website location wants just one thing: 

- “THE WEBSITE MAKES IT EASY FOR ME TO FIND WHAT I AM LOOKING FOR” – fact!

An entire 76% of questioned consumers by HubSpot in the second quarter of this year saw this as the most important factor for them to remain on the site and possibly purchase from the chosen vendor’s website.

Arguments from GMs and GSMs (and yes, even Internet Managers) such as “My website needs to look nice and pretty,” doesn’t fly and it is a presumption that we dealers just know it all. I heard it when I started back in a dealership, and I hear it still today as I am giving speeches or trainings on industry events. “My website looks too plain” or “why don’t I have anything moving in my website, like a running banner…?” – After seeing the results of the HubSpot study, it is very easy to give a response – because it won’t help!

Only 10% of consumers “want to see a pretty websites” and just 9% “love to experience a cutting edge interactive” website. Bummer…!!!

When I came back into the dealer world, the first thing I did was take down the “walking in lady telling me on the website how to appraise my current car”… I think she is just annoying and when getting into my backend looking at the websites duration time, the numbers pretty much told me “your conversion sucks.”

Looking again on the sites and pages duration time just 4 weeks later– surprise, surprise – the time my customers spent with me on the website had increased 38% and the numbers of pages visited tripled. Since I had these results with a minor adjustment (taking down the virtual spokesperson), I also saved some money on not paying any longer for this service.

I also love to de-clutter my websites. I go for clean, structured design with a natural feel of where to go next, well placed call to action buttons, and links inside the pages which will always lead back to the most profitable centers of my website – the service department, the used car inventory, used car specials, new car specials and the new car inventory.  

When having a smart linkage strategy, the success of page conversion and form submissions will naturally appear.

Chapter IV - What not to do when looking into your website to figure out “is it working”?

As you will see down the line, a study confirms that we car sales people just obsess too much about it. What I mean is we constantly search for the “holy grail” in making a website flashy, pretty, and interactive with the latest gadget out there in the industry.

I get it – we possibly think we need to impress our potential new customers who have finally found our website – us picturing them glaring at their screen with Ohhhhs and Ahhhs coming out of their mouth. But sorry to disappoint you – we need to wake you up a little bit more roughly, like my grandma used to do when my brothers and I slept in too long, and poured a nice cold and refreshing glass of water in our faces.

The majority of customers reaching a desired website location wants just one thing: 

- “THE WEBSITE MAKES IT EASY FOR ME TO FIND WHAT I AM LOOKING FOR” – fact!

An entire 76% of questioned consumers by HubSpot in the second quarter of this year saw this as the most important factor for them to remain on the site and possibly purchase from the chosen vendor’s website.

Arguments from GMs and GSMs (and yes, even Internet Managers) such as “My website needs to look nice and pretty,” doesn’t fly and it is a presumption that we dealers just know it all. I heard it when I started back in a dealership, and I hear it still today as I am giving speeches or trainings on industry events. “My website looks too plain” or “why don’t I have anything moving in my website, like a running banner…?” – After seeing the results of the HubSpot study, it is very easy to give a response – because it won’t help!

Only 10% of consumers “want to see a pretty websites” and just 9% “love to experience a cutting edge interactive” website. Bummer…!!!

When I came back into the dealer world, the first thing I did was take down the “walking in lady telling me on the website how to appraise my current car”… I think she is just annoying and when getting into my backend looking at the websites duration time, the numbers pretty much told me “your conversion sucks.”

Looking again on the sites and pages duration time just 4 weeks later– surprise, surprise – the time my customers spent with me on the website had increased 38% and the numbers of pages visited tripled. Since I had these results with a minor adjustment (taking down the virtual spokesperson), I also saved some money on not paying any longer for this service.

I also love to de-clutter my websites. I go for clean, structured design with a natural feel of where to go next, well placed call to action buttons, and links inside the pages which will always lead back to the most profitable centers of my website – the service department, the used car inventory, used car specials, new car specials and the new car inventory.  

When having a smart linkage strategy, the success of page conversion and form submissions will naturally appear.

This is the 3rd chapter of my "Diaries of an eCommerce Director", and the strategies and processes I am mentioning here are real life-time examples I did and implemented into my dealerships I had worked for.

I have visited hundreds and hundreds of dealerships over the past few years. Some of them were nice looking, some of them were elegant and others were just “awkward”. For example: Why would you as a GM or Owner love an idea during an upcoming Thanksgiving and Black Friday campaign and have your head lurking out of a turkey’s rear end – you want to be funny, alright, but do you think this idea brings you more customers during the holidays and want to buy a car from you because the idea is cute?

During my career I worked with several website providers and roughly 14 OEMs, and I discovered that website success relies on you - the eCommerce Director or Internet Manager and the support teams of the vendors working together. As so often in life, relationship is everything, and with a frequent exchange of ideas, suggestions and plans of these two parties, life should be getting easier when thinking about an ad campaign or message on your websites.

When you have an OEM endorsed website provider, I would invest in the endorsed solution first. Many shoppers are looking for that brand of car, not you, so make that “door” to the dealership as appealing and competitive as possible. It will help you as an Internet Manager to focus on the main duties of your job – processes, response time, coaching your crew, selling cars and reporting.

The other duties of creating specials, developing more content pages, graphic work are important as well, but let’s be clear here – how many of you are educated SEO specialists, graphic artists and writers – wouldn’t you rather leave it to a specialist? The good OEM programs even help you pay for these people to make your life easier. Some OEM endorsed providers will do a lot of the work of running their campaigns on your site for you. The advantage to a dealer is as clear as chicken broth, as we say in Germany. No delays to display your specials, the right numbers, the right models, the right small print. Campaigns like “Autobahn Event” or “Mr. Opportunity” are implemented right from the get-go compliant.

Be honest here, how often did you find yourself surfing hours for the right images on Google, only to create yourself an event on your website mirroring the national OEM campaign and then suddenly receiving an email of the OEM compliance department, stating that your “Civic special does show the wrong trim line and pricing”, and you need to take it down to get not flagged!

Do I hear “cookie-cutter” and “plainness” remarks? Remember what I wrote a few lines prior – you are responsible for success of your department and I expect from you to be pro-active to make your website stand out. If your site is “cookie cutter” it is because you didn’t invest to make it better. One of my sites was an OEM Cobalt site but I found out I had over 1700 design variations I could choose from.

You’ll be amazed at what you can do if you just work with your vendor.

Here are some ideas which helped me early on in my career to achieve my goal in having the best website in the city:

• Discuss with your website provider’s service person your creative ideas, and what restrictions the OEM. They look at other dealer’s sites – have them give you a tour of what they think is working well.

• Decide what keywords you want to add in the SEO of your website. Think about negative SEO keywords and competitor’s make and models to implement in your content.

• Make sure that each of the photos you want to have shown on specials, About Us and Direction pages are tagged with phrases, which are named after your models, dealership name and location. This will be easier to get picked up by our friends – the search engines.

• Develop with your service person additional pages of the models you are selling. Each model page needs to be created individual with some outbound links and cross links on some particular key phrases. Example: Model XYZ come with scheduled free maintenance for….” – scheduled free maintenance should be linked to your service page (service special, schedule service online or similar).

• DO NOT JUST COPY OEM content from the OEM website and say you have created a search engine relevant page inside your website. It actually will do nothing for you in regards to SEO. Written creative needs to be at least 70% unique in its content to be considered “worthwhile” for Google. So use the content of your OEM and just spice it up with your own words and messages, and do not forget to name your location in these model pages.

• Consider the OEM and website provider ad-packages, which will give you an entire array of digital online marketing tools. Retargeting, Mobile websites, designated phone numbers will bring you more traffic in form of phone calls. No doubt – no “yeah, but” – I am sticking to my statement, because I have had seen too often dealerships failing and to generate valuable leads, only to save a few bucks. It works, and it had worked always for me.

Last but not least – Let me reflect on the purpose of using an OEM endorsed website provider.

It is all about getting more sales by being consistent with the “personality” of the brand and leveraging the shoppers they are creating for you with their advertising.

For example, the OEM wants their customers finding a constant CI (corporate identity) and consistent message – from OEM website over to the franchise website – and so do many shoppers. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have an opportunity to convince shoppers that your store is better than the same franchise down the road. What happens when you don’t do this?

Volkswagen has a blue/white/gray scheme and I witnessed the following scenario. A dealer located in the Southwest thought it would be great to integrate a desert color palette of yellow, umbra, black and gold throughout the pages for their VW franchise. Not only was it hideous but totally denied the affiliation with the franchise. I actually listened to recorded phone calls generated from the website’s 1-800 numbers, where the customers were asking if they have VW Golf’s in their inventory! True story!

Do you think a McDonalds franchisee, who paid money, time and efforts to build his own burger restaurant and the brand in her city suddenly would come up with the idea to get rid of the branded yellow/red M and instead goes for a pink/purple expression?

Stick to the corporate identity and personality your OEM is providing to display and message your brand appropriately. You’ll get more sales.

This is the 3rd chapter of my "Diaries of an eCommerce Director", and the strategies and processes I am mentioning here are real life-time examples I did and implemented into my dealerships I had worked for.

I have visited hundreds and hundreds of dealerships over the past few years. Some of them were nice looking, some of them were elegant and others were just “awkward”. For example: Why would you as a GM or Owner love an idea during an upcoming Thanksgiving and Black Friday campaign and have your head lurking out of a turkey’s rear end – you want to be funny, alright, but do you think this idea brings you more customers during the holidays and want to buy a car from you because the idea is cute?

During my career I worked with several website providers and roughly 14 OEMs, and I discovered that website success relies on you - the eCommerce Director or Internet Manager and the support teams of the vendors working together. As so often in life, relationship is everything, and with a frequent exchange of ideas, suggestions and plans of these two parties, life should be getting easier when thinking about an ad campaign or message on your websites.

When you have an OEM endorsed website provider, I would invest in the endorsed solution first. Many shoppers are looking for that brand of car, not you, so make that “door” to the dealership as appealing and competitive as possible. It will help you as an Internet Manager to focus on the main duties of your job – processes, response time, coaching your crew, selling cars and reporting.

The other duties of creating specials, developing more content pages, graphic work are important as well, but let’s be clear here – how many of you are educated SEO specialists, graphic artists and writers – wouldn’t you rather leave it to a specialist? The good OEM programs even help you pay for these people to make your life easier. Some OEM endorsed providers will do a lot of the work of running their campaigns on your site for you. The advantage to a dealer is as clear as chicken broth, as we say in Germany. No delays to display your specials, the right numbers, the right models, the right small print. Campaigns like “Autobahn Event” or “Mr. Opportunity” are implemented right from the get-go compliant.

Be honest here, how often did you find yourself surfing hours for the right images on Google, only to create yourself an event on your website mirroring the national OEM campaign and then suddenly receiving an email of the OEM compliance department, stating that your “Civic special does show the wrong trim line and pricing”, and you need to take it down to get not flagged!

Do I hear “cookie-cutter” and “plainness” remarks? Remember what I wrote a few lines prior – you are responsible for success of your department and I expect from you to be pro-active to make your website stand out. If your site is “cookie cutter” it is because you didn’t invest to make it better. One of my sites was an OEM Cobalt site but I found out I had over 1700 design variations I could choose from.

You’ll be amazed at what you can do if you just work with your vendor.

Here are some ideas which helped me early on in my career to achieve my goal in having the best website in the city:

• Discuss with your website provider’s service person your creative ideas, and what restrictions the OEM. They look at other dealer’s sites – have them give you a tour of what they think is working well.

• Decide what keywords you want to add in the SEO of your website. Think about negative SEO keywords and competitor’s make and models to implement in your content.

• Make sure that each of the photos you want to have shown on specials, About Us and Direction pages are tagged with phrases, which are named after your models, dealership name and location. This will be easier to get picked up by our friends – the search engines.

• Develop with your service person additional pages of the models you are selling. Each model page needs to be created individual with some outbound links and cross links on some particular key phrases. Example: Model XYZ come with scheduled free maintenance for….” – scheduled free maintenance should be linked to your service page (service special, schedule service online or similar).

• DO NOT JUST COPY OEM content from the OEM website and say you have created a search engine relevant page inside your website. It actually will do nothing for you in regards to SEO. Written creative needs to be at least 70% unique in its content to be considered “worthwhile” for Google. So use the content of your OEM and just spice it up with your own words and messages, and do not forget to name your location in these model pages.

• Consider the OEM and website provider ad-packages, which will give you an entire array of digital online marketing tools. Retargeting, Mobile websites, designated phone numbers will bring you more traffic in form of phone calls. No doubt – no “yeah, but” – I am sticking to my statement, because I have had seen too often dealerships failing and to generate valuable leads, only to save a few bucks. It works, and it had worked always for me.

Last but not least – Let me reflect on the purpose of using an OEM endorsed website provider.

It is all about getting more sales by being consistent with the “personality” of the brand and leveraging the shoppers they are creating for you with their advertising.

For example, the OEM wants their customers finding a constant CI (corporate identity) and consistent message – from OEM website over to the franchise website – and so do many shoppers. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have an opportunity to convince shoppers that your store is better than the same franchise down the road. What happens when you don’t do this?

Volkswagen has a blue/white/gray scheme and I witnessed the following scenario. A dealer located in the Southwest thought it would be great to integrate a desert color palette of yellow, umbra, black and gold throughout the pages for their VW franchise. Not only was it hideous but totally denied the affiliation with the franchise. I actually listened to recorded phone calls generated from the website’s 1-800 numbers, where the customers were asking if they have VW Golf’s in their inventory! True story!

Do you think a McDonalds franchisee, who paid money, time and efforts to build his own burger restaurant and the brand in her city suddenly would come up with the idea to get rid of the branded yellow/red M and instead goes for a pink/purple expression?

Stick to the corporate identity and personality your OEM is providing to display and message your brand appropriately. You’ll get more sales.

I can stand up now but only with a helping hand from my team - Chapter II "Diaries of an eCommerce Director"

So I got that squared away right from the get-go…my website looks good; First to Second grade content (I will explain it further down what means) is in place, but what do I do with all the leads generated via my website, website forms, 3^rd party leads and so on.

What is here the status quo on response, follow up and long-term usage of these valuable leads, email addresses and phone numbers? I am getting with my team with purpose of finding out what they love and hate currently in their daily tasks. And “No”, I do not think that I always just have a typical “bitch session” occurring out of these meetings. It gives me more likely a 360 degree view of who in your team is “who”. Who is doing what? Who is “a sleeping” star? Who is “all words no action”, and so on…?

 It further allows me to guide particular leads to the right team members in place. Like the ZAG leads. These particular customers, who do not like the hassle and haggle, and want to receive a more “exclusivity club member” handling of their inquiry, requiring a sales person with great customer follow up skills and soft, courteous manners.

Almost like the proverb – It fits like a Glove.

Next…and I am sure I do not have to stretch this one any longer – Look at your response times of your crew. There can be no excuse for any sales person in the Internet world having response times of >55 minutes and letting the incoming lead sitting there until the next stone age.

Come on, everybody should know by now, the early bird will catch the worm and with research showing a 50% higher chance closing the lead into a sale, when having contact with the prospect first, your action should be clear with no questions to ask.

Last but not least during my transition from crawling and staying up to the walking phase one immense important question comes next. How do we handle our phone calls? First at all make sure that you have dedicated phone numbers for each individual lead provider and website, so you can track your ROI and conversion much easier. The most important feature these numbers should include is the “recording” function, which will allow you and the other members of your dealership management team to listen to the calls and how they were handled by the crew. I know we as dealers spending a lot of money on training and other ideas, but phone training is in my opinion the most essential training part you should allocate money to.

Listen to your sales people and service advisors phone calls – you will have a pretty good idea why your closing ratio and conversion rate is where it is – Good or Bad!

I saw during my digital marketing career that most of the Internet people love to email, even so that the phone should be their desired tool to get the customer in. As I discovered in my analytics backend tool of my website providers – >80% off the generated website leads were coming in via phone calls and not just by form submission.

Eighty plus percent – and I still hear sometimes my peers complaining about their “website is not performing”, I would have to ask “what do you mean?” – “Is it your form submissions?” “You’re not getting enough phone calls?”

Really, what do you mean?

Is it really the website? Or is it the response how we handle incoming leads not captured correctly and not crediting our web platform for incoming calls?

Nevertheless I would love to share one particular observation I made after a Manager decided to cancel a digital marketing package in one of my stores, which I had assured him provided excellent digital online exposure … retargeting, display ads, banner ads, PPC, SEM, designated landing pages, mobile, designated phone numbers – you name it.

The argument made for the cancellation was “it looks like that it is not doing anything for us and we did not receive any more leads through it”. We Internet Pro’s know that these statements can be “smokescreens”, the real reasons are almost always the same – budget cutting or some salesperson has sold them some new “shiny object”. But I knew this was the wrong decision for the store and I had to prove it.

I received a chart with numbers on leads, visits, etc. provided by my OEM, showing my competition and their (as well mine) lead counts during national ad campaigns - painting a clear picture. Every dealership in this chart, which had stuck with the Dealer Advertising Package during the national ad campaigns, had more than three times more incoming phone calls than my “sorry ass” store, with no ad package.

I reviewed the same charts from a quarter back, and when we had signed up for the OEM ad package we were in a very different position: phone calls up, new car sales up, more 3^rd party website referrals were all much higher! I figured out if we would have stayed with the package we would have sold 10-18 cars off the OEM campaign, not the 4 we did.

Cancelling it was just ”a bad business decision” or should I call it plain and simple "dumb"? So I am asking now, why would a dealership take money out of a proven program like that to save a buck or buy leads from 3^rd parties, that close at 6% when everybody in the dealership world knows, that phone calls and website leads have 2-3 times the closing rate?

When we as eCommerce Directors or Internet Sales Managers know about these scenarios, we need to open up our mouth and discuss that with the executive leaders in the dealership. When she or he is giving you an ear and the time, I guarantee you will have success to close more deals when implementing the sources I just discussed. It is on you to be an advocate for these stats and to take your time to explain the findings to your GM or President, in case he is not digital marketing savvy.

When you find too much of road blocks and the same old same old in your dealership, find a partner who will trust your expertise and that you can deliver a turn around.

I can stand up now but only with a helping hand from my team - Chapter II "Diaries of an eCommerce Director"

So I got that squared away right from the get-go…my website looks good; First to Second grade content (I will explain it further down what means) is in place, but what do I do with all the leads generated via my website, website forms, 3^rd party leads and so on.

What is here the status quo on response, follow up and long-term usage of these valuable leads, email addresses and phone numbers? I am getting with my team with purpose of finding out what they love and hate currently in their daily tasks. And “No”, I do not think that I always just have a typical “bitch session” occurring out of these meetings. It gives me more likely a 360 degree view of who in your team is “who”. Who is doing what? Who is “a sleeping” star? Who is “all words no action”, and so on…?

 It further allows me to guide particular leads to the right team members in place. Like the ZAG leads. These particular customers, who do not like the hassle and haggle, and want to receive a more “exclusivity club member” handling of their inquiry, requiring a sales person with great customer follow up skills and soft, courteous manners.

Almost like the proverb – It fits like a Glove.

Next…and I am sure I do not have to stretch this one any longer – Look at your response times of your crew. There can be no excuse for any sales person in the Internet world having response times of >55 minutes and letting the incoming lead sitting there until the next stone age.

Come on, everybody should know by now, the early bird will catch the worm and with research showing a 50% higher chance closing the lead into a sale, when having contact with the prospect first, your action should be clear with no questions to ask.

Last but not least during my transition from crawling and staying up to the walking phase one immense important question comes next. How do we handle our phone calls? First at all make sure that you have dedicated phone numbers for each individual lead provider and website, so you can track your ROI and conversion much easier. The most important feature these numbers should include is the “recording” function, which will allow you and the other members of your dealership management team to listen to the calls and how they were handled by the crew. I know we as dealers spending a lot of money on training and other ideas, but phone training is in my opinion the most essential training part you should allocate money to.

Listen to your sales people and service advisors phone calls – you will have a pretty good idea why your closing ratio and conversion rate is where it is – Good or Bad!

I saw during my digital marketing career that most of the Internet people love to email, even so that the phone should be their desired tool to get the customer in. As I discovered in my analytics backend tool of my website providers – >80% off the generated website leads were coming in via phone calls and not just by form submission.

Eighty plus percent – and I still hear sometimes my peers complaining about their “website is not performing”, I would have to ask “what do you mean?” – “Is it your form submissions?” “You’re not getting enough phone calls?”

Really, what do you mean?

Is it really the website? Or is it the response how we handle incoming leads not captured correctly and not crediting our web platform for incoming calls?

Nevertheless I would love to share one particular observation I made after a Manager decided to cancel a digital marketing package in one of my stores, which I had assured him provided excellent digital online exposure … retargeting, display ads, banner ads, PPC, SEM, designated landing pages, mobile, designated phone numbers – you name it.

The argument made for the cancellation was “it looks like that it is not doing anything for us and we did not receive any more leads through it”. We Internet Pro’s know that these statements can be “smokescreens”, the real reasons are almost always the same – budget cutting or some salesperson has sold them some new “shiny object”. But I knew this was the wrong decision for the store and I had to prove it.

I received a chart with numbers on leads, visits, etc. provided by my OEM, showing my competition and their (as well mine) lead counts during national ad campaigns - painting a clear picture. Every dealership in this chart, which had stuck with the Dealer Advertising Package during the national ad campaigns, had more than three times more incoming phone calls than my “sorry ass” store, with no ad package.

I reviewed the same charts from a quarter back, and when we had signed up for the OEM ad package we were in a very different position: phone calls up, new car sales up, more 3^rd party website referrals were all much higher! I figured out if we would have stayed with the package we would have sold 10-18 cars off the OEM campaign, not the 4 we did.

Cancelling it was just ”a bad business decision” or should I call it plain and simple "dumb"? So I am asking now, why would a dealership take money out of a proven program like that to save a buck or buy leads from 3^rd parties, that close at 6% when everybody in the dealership world knows, that phone calls and website leads have 2-3 times the closing rate?

When we as eCommerce Directors or Internet Sales Managers know about these scenarios, we need to open up our mouth and discuss that with the executive leaders in the dealership. When she or he is giving you an ear and the time, I guarantee you will have success to close more deals when implementing the sources I just discussed. It is on you to be an advocate for these stats and to take your time to explain the findings to your GM or President, in case he is not digital marketing savvy.

When you find too much of road blocks and the same old same old in your dealership, find a partner who will trust your expertise and that you can deliver a turn around.

Preface

After almost a couple of  years of working with a leading internet marketing vendor and working the speaking circuit Volker Jaeckel (aka “@VJnator”) returns to the dealership world as an Internet Sales Director.  “Here is my story of rejoining the store and the steps I took that made my website the best performing in my group and achieved “#1 CPO Dealer in the state” status six months in a row.  Let me share how I believe a new Internet Manager can quickly make their store a success as well.” (Stay tuned for my  upcoming workshop “Internet Marketing Cliff Notes -short, sweet and successful.”)

Chapter I - It hurts to crawl on my knees again. Luckily it is only temporary.

That is it….I am back into the dealership world. I missed you, the world of shiny showrooms, the smell of rubber and the so-distinctive new car smell. And yes, I missed the challenge of helping a store achieve its full potential as a 21^st century dealership embracing the Internet.

Tip #1: View your site through your customer’s eyes

Where do I start? Personnel? Process? Lead Providers? – No, I decided that shouldn’t be priority #1.  What is most important is getting an idea of how your dealership appears to your prospects. I needed to first put on my “consumer-glasses” to understand what they are seeing, and then I can determine the path forward that will get the consumer to buy at my store. What did I do? Let’s crawl and see.

All of us in the dealership should know by now that at least 90% of all car shopping starts somewhere and somehow online. Shoppers “Google or Bing around” search phrases related to the model desired and the city they live in. This initial search generally leads to reviewing 3^rd parties like Edmunds or AOL.Autos for test results and independent car experts’ advice. After that, they most likely end up on the OEM’s manufacturer website, lured by whatever seasonal offers or events are taking place right now. From the OEM website, the customer drills down to find which dealership is closest to their zip code. 

 So, taking this roadmap of typical automotive buying behavior, my first action should be clear: “CHECK YOUR DEALER WEBSITE(s)”. The things I will be looking for are pretty straightforward.

Does my website has the same advertising messaging my OEM is portraying on their site? For me as an eCom Director it is mandatory to have events like “Autobahn for all” or “Sign then drive” event on all my dealership websites. I am not speaking just about having the graphics but also written content of these national campaigns on my site(s).

Tip #2: Make sure shoppers responding to OEM advertising and programs find them on your site.

Adding OEM promotional content assures that local prospects looking for those campaign deals will find familiar territory and verbiage on my site. They know immediately that “VJ Motors” is participating in these well-known manufacturer deals seen on TV, Radio, Off- and Online. As a dealer, doing this will guarantee me a fraction of the millions and millions of dollars spent by my OEM. I get my piece of the huge advertising campaign pie – and everybody knows….I love pie.

Here was my first plan of action:

• Determine my OEM’s current ad campaign (In this case the “Going Going Gone Event”)
• Update all new car specials shown in the website with the particular “Going Going Gone” phrase
• Main URL page showed as first slider Going Going Gone event participation, linked to the New Car Special page
• SEO Content was modified and “Going Going Gone Event” as well “Autobahn for All” slogans were weaved in on homepage, New Car inventory page, New Car Special page and various model pages.

Because we all know that SEO results do not show up overnight, the written content placed on the described pages is here for the long run and should be not taken down when the OEM campaign stops – most likely you will see the same named event taking place again a few months down the road and in the meantime your content pages hopefully left some impactful results in the SERP.

Tip #3: Leverage all your content in social media and see SEO results soar

Post promotional content in your social media, such as a photo montage on your blog captioned “VJ Motors in Motorville enjoys the hundreds of customers stopping by customers during the VW Going Going Gone event.” The reason for doing this is that search engines love news updates through social media streams. By optimizing these channels with your dealership name and the event name in the post, you are supporting your organic SEO piece by piece. Try it – it has worked for me! 

Tip #4: “But I have no time to do any of this”

As a busy dealer, aligning with OEM’s may sound like a lot of work and too much of a hassle. I felt this way too.

There are two main ways I’ve found to alleviate the hassle issue: Choose an endorsed website provider and work with their professional account strategist. 

If your dealership has an endorsed website provider with OEM-coordinated advertising campaigns, the work you need to perform on your end will be a little bit less, thanks to perfectly timed and “ready-to-go” websites and landing pages at the start of the national campaigns.

Another thing that helped me was that I could speak to my account advocate at the website provider to assist me in my efforts to tweak my messaging to my taste. So, if you’ve signed up for this type of service – use it, bring up your ideas, and let them do the main frame work. That way you can focus on the other things you need to do, making a dealership or dealer group successful – as I will show you in my next chapter.

Preface

After almost a couple of  years of working with a leading internet marketing vendor and working the speaking circuit Volker Jaeckel (aka “@VJnator”) returns to the dealership world as an Internet Sales Director.  “Here is my story of rejoining the store and the steps I took that made my website the best performing in my group and achieved “#1 CPO Dealer in the state” status six months in a row.  Let me share how I believe a new Internet Manager can quickly make their store a success as well.” (Stay tuned for my  upcoming workshop “Internet Marketing Cliff Notes -short, sweet and successful.”)

Chapter I - It hurts to crawl on my knees again. Luckily it is only temporary.

That is it….I am back into the dealership world. I missed you, the world of shiny showrooms, the smell of rubber and the so-distinctive new car smell. And yes, I missed the challenge of helping a store achieve its full potential as a 21^st century dealership embracing the Internet.

Tip #1: View your site through your customer’s eyes

Where do I start? Personnel? Process? Lead Providers? – No, I decided that shouldn’t be priority #1.  What is most important is getting an idea of how your dealership appears to your prospects. I needed to first put on my “consumer-glasses” to understand what they are seeing, and then I can determine the path forward that will get the consumer to buy at my store. What did I do? Let’s crawl and see.

All of us in the dealership should know by now that at least 90% of all car shopping starts somewhere and somehow online. Shoppers “Google or Bing around” search phrases related to the model desired and the city they live in. This initial search generally leads to reviewing 3^rd parties like Edmunds or AOL.Autos for test results and independent car experts’ advice. After that, they most likely end up on the OEM’s manufacturer website, lured by whatever seasonal offers or events are taking place right now. From the OEM website, the customer drills down to find which dealership is closest to their zip code. 

 So, taking this roadmap of typical automotive buying behavior, my first action should be clear: “CHECK YOUR DEALER WEBSITE(s)”. The things I will be looking for are pretty straightforward.

Does my website has the same advertising messaging my OEM is portraying on their site? For me as an eCom Director it is mandatory to have events like “Autobahn for all” or “Sign then drive” event on all my dealership websites. I am not speaking just about having the graphics but also written content of these national campaigns on my site(s).

Tip #2: Make sure shoppers responding to OEM advertising and programs find them on your site.

Adding OEM promotional content assures that local prospects looking for those campaign deals will find familiar territory and verbiage on my site. They know immediately that “VJ Motors” is participating in these well-known manufacturer deals seen on TV, Radio, Off- and Online. As a dealer, doing this will guarantee me a fraction of the millions and millions of dollars spent by my OEM. I get my piece of the huge advertising campaign pie – and everybody knows….I love pie.

Here was my first plan of action:

• Determine my OEM’s current ad campaign (In this case the “Going Going Gone Event”)
• Update all new car specials shown in the website with the particular “Going Going Gone” phrase
• Main URL page showed as first slider Going Going Gone event participation, linked to the New Car Special page
• SEO Content was modified and “Going Going Gone Event” as well “Autobahn for All” slogans were weaved in on homepage, New Car inventory page, New Car Special page and various model pages.

Because we all know that SEO results do not show up overnight, the written content placed on the described pages is here for the long run and should be not taken down when the OEM campaign stops – most likely you will see the same named event taking place again a few months down the road and in the meantime your content pages hopefully left some impactful results in the SERP.

Tip #3: Leverage all your content in social media and see SEO results soar

Post promotional content in your social media, such as a photo montage on your blog captioned “VJ Motors in Motorville enjoys the hundreds of customers stopping by customers during the VW Going Going Gone event.” The reason for doing this is that search engines love news updates through social media streams. By optimizing these channels with your dealership name and the event name in the post, you are supporting your organic SEO piece by piece. Try it – it has worked for me! 

Tip #4: “But I have no time to do any of this”

As a busy dealer, aligning with OEM’s may sound like a lot of work and too much of a hassle. I felt this way too.

There are two main ways I’ve found to alleviate the hassle issue: Choose an endorsed website provider and work with their professional account strategist. 

If your dealership has an endorsed website provider with OEM-coordinated advertising campaigns, the work you need to perform on your end will be a little bit less, thanks to perfectly timed and “ready-to-go” websites and landing pages at the start of the national campaigns.

Another thing that helped me was that I could speak to my account advocate at the website provider to assist me in my efforts to tweak my messaging to my taste. So, if you’ve signed up for this type of service – use it, bring up your ideas, and let them do the main frame work. That way you can focus on the other things you need to do, making a dealership or dealer group successful – as I will show you in my next chapter.