Tag Archives: automotive marketing
Dealer Website HeatMaps = more effective sites
Posted on 19. May, 2009 by admin.
Analytics only give you a static interpretation of your site visitor’s activities. You may be able to tell how many people have visited your site, or viewed a particular page, but you won’t be able to gauge effectiveness of design elements, link placement or popular areas of your site. If you want to know where people are clicking on your site, and which areas could use improvement, you need a Heat Map. This will help you visualize your visitors and see what is the “hottest” link on your site.
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Email Marketing Solutions for Car Dealerships
Posted on 08. Mar, 2009 by admin.
Email marketing solutions can help your car dealership enhance the number of vehicles that come in for service. Keeping consistent numbers is all well and good, but everyone knows having increasing monthly numbers is better. Email marketing solutions track the campaigns you send out so that you get real time data on the customers who are interested in the promotions you offer them regarding your service centre.
By reminding your customer to bring their cars in for service, you have the opportunity to multiply the amount of vehicles coming in for service. More vehicles for service means higher numbers in sales.
So, how do email marketing solutions help you bring more cars to your service center? Simple, all your customers really need is a reminder: “Hey you know that asset of yours that you paid thousands of dollars for? You need to make sure it’s in tip top shape, and it will only cost you $50.”
Your DMS most likely lists all of your clients’ contact information, such as how many times they have visited, and when their vehicle is due for service. This is vital information for you to use when creating a campaign through automotive email marketing solutions.
You can also use the “number of visits” and the “vehicles due for service” categories, to help you segment your email marketing solutions campaigns into frequent users, sometime users, and seldom users.
Now you are ready to create three different marketing campaigns, for three different target customer groups, while reminding them all how important their investment is to them.
Once you have created your campaigns, the magic happens. Email marketing solutions are equipped to track how many people have opened your email, if they have clicked on the promotions, or if they have sent your email on to friends or family.
The data gets even more in depth than that. You can know exactly who opened the email you sent, who clicked on each link within the email, on what day, and at what time. These insights can help you further segment your email marketing solutions campaign. As an example, let’s say that you are tracking those that “frequently” bring their cars in to your service center: 50% are clicking on their “$10 off preferred customer” promotion on the weekends; and the other 50% are opening and clicking on their emails from Monday to Friday.
You now have two more customer groups to better target your audience: weekend readers and weekday readers. You can then split your future email marketing campaigns into 2, so that your emails arrive into your customers’ inboxes exactly when they’re most likely to read it.
You will also be able to grow your list with a “forward to friends” button that is available on most email marketing solutions. For those customers that are constantly forwarding your email (we love these guys) you can show your appreciation by segmenting yet again.
You can offer them a special promotion for forwarding your email. This will keep them in the business of continuing to spread the good word about your service center.
It’s really easy to take “tracked” information and turn it into another campaign. Email marketing solutions are very user-friendly, so the tracking feature of most email marketing solutions gives you the option to export the data found within any given field.
Email marketing solutions will bring more people to your automotive dealership service center by providing you with the information you need to segment and target your customers. Catering to your audience’s exact needs will bring more of them to your service center and provide you with a better opportunity to grow your sales per month.
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Sales People Make Economies not Marketing by Grant Cardone
Posted on 08. Mar, 2009 by admin.
Economies do not exist until somebody BUYS something! And economies cease to exist when a sale is not made. Management then decides “customers aren’t buying anything so let’s just cut heads, slash budgets, hunker down and shrink our way to greatness!”
Prospecting, Interviewing customers to properly identify problems and opportunities and then collaborating with them to find appropriate solutions seems to be a skill set lost to an entire generation. How did this happen?
Two major shifts drove this change. In the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, virtually every company had a sales force that were required and depended on things like; prospecting- the creation of customers, product knowledge, application knowledge and selling skills. Great companies were built on great sales teams who were responsible for creating opportunities not for just selling them. The sales team was the engine, leading the charge, driving the revenues of the company! In the 90’s sales teams were deemed to expensive to maintain, inefficient, difficult to manage and the responsibility for driving revenues shifted to the marketing department. The theory was that the company could create demand for products and services through advertising, promotion and gimmicks then the company could merely harvest the flood of incoming orders with call centers or order desks. The second major shift currently taking place is from traditional marketing to internet marketing.
But, what happens when customers stop looking and searching the net and the phone stops ringing? Because selling is a lost art the solutions are limited to- increase the advertising, make even bigger claims of the importance of customer satisfaction, lower prices (again) and increase gimmicks like no money down, rebates, zero percent interest and free trips. Companies started spending more money on ad campaigns and google search then the entire sales force makes in salaries and commissions. While these marketing shifts created breakthroughs in the ability to reach greater numbers of potential customers, the fact is it failed! You don’t have to look far to see the corpses of companies who relied on marketing and disregarded the sales team; Circuit City, Heard Automotive, Dilliards, Sears, Washington Mutual, Wachovia and Merrill Lynch. These companies failed because of their dependence upon their marketing campaigns and their inability to sell their products! Marketing without a trained sales team is a “one way” vehicle, causing the company to only activate at the point of marketing and then become passive at the point of creating an opportunity or even closing on those created.
These marketing methods virtually eliminated management’s expectation of the sales team and their abilities. This is a critical problem in a recession, maybe event the cause of it, whereby the customers stop looking for new products and services, and therefore are immune to the wiles of marketing and promotion. The consumers’ focus in now also on cutting expenses and unless your product or service can help them save money without any investment, they simply won’t pay attention. Search engine optimization is useless when potential customers stop searching.
Companies must return to the creation of true sales skills and sales teams because without them nothing happens! Management, marketing and customer satisfaction does not sell product. Sales people sell products and you must have effectively trained salespeople that can (1) generate a prospect and (2) know how to determine what is needed, (3) how your product or service can satisfy that need and (4) how to justify a purchase decision. The lost art of real salesmanship must be restored in order to create the revenue a company desires.
A well trained sales team, not management, not the internet, not customer satisfaction and not marketing is the only thing that can cost effectively create customers in this economy. Economies exist only when someone finds a prospect and then sells that prospect a product or service at which point they exchange money with your company. Sales people drive entire economies and without them we have no economy.
Grant Cardone, Author of Sell to Survive
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Craigslist Automotive Marketing Video
Posted on 01. Feb, 2009 by admin.
Please view a great Craigslist Automotive Marketing video and learn how many visitors, phone calls, and emails that you can gain from doing Craigslist the “right way”. Sell more cars and eliminate third party lead providers and other vendors. Some of our dealers have saved thousands over autotrader and cars.com marketing budget.
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Think Small for your Automotive Marketing Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Posted on 31. Dec, 2008 by admin.
The big automotive marketing companies think big, act big, make big deals with the manufacturers. Major marketing contracts are negotiated on the manufacturers (dealership’s?) behalf and the best automotive website and marketing solutions are chosen based on some factors that occur behind closed doors without dealership involvement, intervention, or say in the matter.
However, when the big marketing company represents YOU and also ALL of your local competitors, who benefits the most? How does the Internet, Google, the manufacturer, and this big automotive internet marketing company decide who will rank #1 on Google for “Honda New Jersey” or “Houston Honda Dealer”? You paid your money just like the other 10 guys in your market, but why is the other guy beating you in the search results when you have made the same investment, paid the same bill, to the same manufacturer or vendor?
Who will get the #1 spot? Will it be the big Chevy dealer or the little Chevy dealer who wins in Google? Is money a factor, luck, favoritism? Is it first in first on top?
Well, some of these questions can be put aside because here are some good points to ask the “big web developers” or “largest automotive marketing firms” in the US when they ask for your business…
A few questions to ask the Large automotive marketing companies
1) How do you get me ranked higher than my competitor, when we both use the same exact site and SEO?
2) Am I allowed to choose the phrases I want to win in the search engines and if so what exactly will you do to ensure that I get there, and how much will it cost?
3) What comes for free and what is extra, regarding search engine optimization and SEO-based keywords?
4) What can I do, and what tools are at my disposal to self-manage my destiny on the Internet or has my fate already been decided when you signed the deal with automotive-marketing-company.com?
These are some tough questions that will make the big guys squirm because they really, truly have no alternative but to dodge the question or provide you with some lip service. “You’ve always been my favorite, you’re the best, we will get you #1 for what you need”, etc etc”. Just sign here on the dotted line… They are hoping you do not check, forget about it, or in a few months will let you know they are working on it, hoping to buy more time. Chances are good that your personal account rep will have left within 6 months anyway so all feelings of the sweet whisperings will slowly turn into a feeling of rage.
The Benefits of a smaller automotive marketing company are large:
1) We serve you, the client and do not have major conflicts of interest like the 500 pound gorillas do.
2) We can hand-craft a marketing plan that matches your exact needs to sell the cars you want to sell.
3) We move fast, have no red tape to cut through, and are on the forefront of the most current marketing techniques because we use them for ourselves. We talk the talk and walk the walk.
4) We do not have to cater to the manufacturers and limit your website, microsites, pay per click marketing, or automotive Search engine optimization to specific demands (unless co-op is involved of course)
Picture yourself for a moment inside a supermarket, in front of the ice cream freezer. There are 40 choices but the flavor is only vanilla. Who determines which vanilla ice cream container is placed in front? When you choose a major automotive web site marketer who also handles 39 other dealers in your DMA, what is the likelihood that you will be the ice cream in the front of the freezer?
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Top 5 pay per click marketing optimization techniques
Posted on 29. Dec, 2008 by admin.
We have posted some incredible pay per click (PPC) numbers for our clients. Before we give 5 good tips on how to maximize your automotive internet marketing, there are a few things you need to have prepared in order to measure the results. You need good analytics and a lot of time. That’s really it. If you work hard, you can get some results that look like this:
Chevy dealer automotive marketing sample
If you spend some time look at your bounce rate, exit pages, new visitor ratio, and keyword list, you can quickly match that up to your keyword and PPC budget to help your dealership spend less per click and get more for your money. The top 5 list below already assumes you have run a campaign and have some background knowledge on search marketing. It also takes into account that you have a Google adwords or similar campaign that has run for a month or so.
How to get more from your automotive pay per click budget:
- Review your keywords in your Analytics and remove those with very high bounce rates. If you are getting click after click on some top automotive phrases and still get a high bounce rate, then remove that keyword to give other keywords a chance to run. Some people will argue that a high bounce rate is indiciative that the dealership’s phone is ringing. This is possible so make sure to track every sales call to see if you can find trends. There are more advanced methods to track to phone conversion but we will save that for another article.
- Remove the keywords that are not converting. Do you have a decent bounce rate but they are not visiting any pages or filling out any forms? Remove it. There are usually some great hidden automotive keywords in your Adwords PPC account that have not had the chance to run that may convert better. Sometimes long keyphrases are good, sometimes they are not. There is no hard and fast rule that can be applied to all automotive advertsing online.
- Change your ads constantly. Testing testing testing is what marketing is all about. If you are not testing your ads or automotive copy then you are not maximizing your results. Just a few simple changes to your car copy or price of a vehicle in the small text ad can cause your automotive click through rate or CTR to skyrocket. We have a small handbook that we just may release to the automotive public on how to get the best click rates. Remember the phrase price sells cars? Well that often works with “price makes clicks” as well. A word of caution: Deceptive ads can cause high bounce rates, plus the fact that it’s just shady.
- Group your keywords into proper campaigns and make everything match. If you are marketing Hondas and trying to get clicks on Civics, Accords, and used Honda’s, then setup a campaign for each. You can subdivide further, but this will enable you to match the keywords to the ad copy to the destination web address which Google just loves when you are trying to sell more cars online. Google wants more clicks and will reward you will a high quality score, which leads to item 5.
- Fix your Adwords quality score. What is Quality Score you ask? In a nutshell, Google reads your keywords, campaigns, url, and destination page along with several other things including your relevancy and CTR, and gives your keyword a “Poor, OK, or GREAT” score. The Greater the score, the less you pay per click and the more relevant the results to the customer. You want the car buyer that is seeking a used Honda Civic to see your used Civic ad, and be brought to a used Civic webpage filled with relevant offers. Google likes when you do that, make Google happy and pay less.
How is this for conversion rates? This does NOT even take into account the phone calls this dealer received from the online marketing or pay per click campaign we performed for them.
automotive marketing conversion rates
There are many other tactics and techniques but let’s talk results. I challenge any automotive marketing expert or PPC specialist or so called automotive internet marketing company to beat these numbers:
Conversion Rates: Over 30% conversion rates on some keywords (you want more of these and less of the rest)
Bounce Rates: We have some clients receiving bounce rates in the single digits. What this means is that the shoppers are clicking around your website, microsite, or your ad. You want a low bounce rate. See graphic below for a real dealer from the past 30 days.
automotive marketing bounce rate
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Automotive Internet Marketing with Bad Data
Posted on 13. Dec, 2008 by admin.
Last week we discovered that one of our automotive search marketing dealers was making decisions on how to spend their internet marketing money off of bad website Analytic data. We do not handle the website, but we help them review their analytics and uncover the piles of waste and reallocate that to the proper areas. After months of question and answer Pure dealer.com discovered that this major web company was counting all website management and setup time as part of the site visitation, page visit, bounce rate, and page views. This may sound like a small thing, but the data was off by nearly half since it accounted for the entire time that this developer spent setting up and configuring the website.
When you are trying to determine where you automotive marketing internet investment should go, you need to track it and rely on good data. The fact that the data was based off of a web providers “home grown” version of Google Analytics was enough for us to smell something fishy from day one.
This web provider also took credit for all automotive pay per click traffic we generated and renamed it “Organic” which is a very deceiving tactic, although they will not admit it. Requests for raw log files to analyze the data have gone unanswered. They also did not properly track the search engine optimization we did nor recognize the sources of traffic that we know were brought to specific pages on the dealer’s website.
It’s tough enough being a car dealer right now without having your automotive internet marketing arm fighting against your dealer website provider. Do yourself a favor and get an unbiased Analytic tool in your site like Google Analytics.
We have put this into dealer.com websites as well as bzresults websites, tkcarsites, and numerous others or have been given access to read what is already in some of these sites.
Take charge of your advertising budget and do not get bullied by providers that refuse to comply. We would be happy to give you free advise on your statistics and your marketing budget. Give us a call and bring your marketing and advertising to a new level.
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Dealer.com Search Marketing Challenge Article
Posted on 12. Dec, 2008 by admin.
I recently followed an article written on a blog site by a popular blogger and SEO consultant regarding the merits of dealer.com and search marketing versus pay per click and search optimization. Many automotive marketing experts do not realize how quickly a blog post or search content can be picked up on the Internet.
The lesson that this blogger was teaching was to try to prove that dealer.com search engine marketing did not spend enough focus on search optimization and spent more efforts on pay per click or SEM. Pure Dealer.com agrees that good SEO can beat PPC any day of the week, and sometimes it takes a long time and some dedicated marketing efforts to win the search engine battle.
Then again, did dealer.com speak too soon when they opened up a public challenge to test the power of search marketing? Dealer.com is a very well respected company that has experience huge growth and obviously is well versed on how to market themselves so I guess that Google will decide who wins this battle.
If you google “dealer.com search marketing” or “dealer.com search engine marketing” we will all know the answers to that question.
Here is the full repost of the article, with recognition to the author and full post here:
Search engine marketing is a great way to generate immediate traffic. What is often overlooked by by car dealers is the real value of a well optimized site and an aggressive SEO campaign. A recent post I did about dealership web traffic I referenced another post from Dealer.com on Drivingsales.com and feel that it was misconstrued based on the replies by Dealer.com.
Pay Per Click advertising has it’s place like for special promotions or a fresh site. However at the end of the day there are so many studies out there that show that SEO provides better value than Seach Engine Marketing or PPC. One of the best explanations was from Hubspot.com.
Their simple study showed that ranking number nine generates the same amout of leads and traffic as the number two paid listing.
From the post at Hubspot:
Here are the key takeaways from the data and the images above:
1) Organic results get 75%+ of the attention. People don’t click on the ads nearly as much as the organic results.
2) The first organic result gets over 25% of all clicks. Within the organic results, the first result gets the most clicks by far - more than double the second result.
3) Within the ads, the first ad also gets the most clicks. But, since you pay per click for the ads, you should care less about volume and more about if the traffic will actually convert and what your cost per lead and cost per sale will be.
4) There are a good number of clicks on all top 10 organic results. Even the last result gets about 3% of people to click on it - this is about the same rate as the second pay per click ad, and unlike the ad, its free!
SEO wins day in and day out. Search engine marketing is an expensive way to drive traffic. Contrary to popular belief SEO can be almost instant and that is the real purpose of this post to show how fast I can get it to rank for certain terms. I bet it will be faster than the time it takes to set up a pay per click campaign. Should see results in minutes not in ages, the term used to denigrate SEO. I took it as a challenge from Dealer.com
I’ll report back with results.
- Published at : 12:45 pm Decemember 12, 2008
- Ranking #1 for : “Dealer.com Challenge - SEO vs Search Engine Marketing” 2:00 pm 12/12/08 < low value but indexed.
- Ranking Number #6 for “dealer.com seo vs search engine marketing” 3:45 pm 12/12/08
- Ranking #1 for “Dealer.com Search Engine Marketing” 7:00 pm 12/12/08
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Automotive marketing case study-15% click rates
Posted on 11. Dec, 2008 by admin.
Our automotive services are vast and we are often asked what a good click through rate is on a pay per click ad. We have taken over campaigns that have less than .01% click through rate.
If you want to get the most for your pay per click then read on or give us a call.
Pure Dealer.com website design and marketing need to work hand in hand to make sure you maximize your click results. Many dealers believe that the click through rate is solely based upon writing a good ad. We have helped dealers completely dominate their competitors in Internet search marketing. We are conquering Internet Marketing through cunning tactics, ideas, and techniques that will help you get more automotive leads in this competitive automotive market.
As automotive SEO, SEM, and PPC experts, we look at the whole picture to help you get a lower click cost. Proper selection of keywords, with better written copy and aggressive offers, driven to a landing page or microsite will help your dealership leads increase.
Our Internet marketing strategies have helped increase dealership leads as much as 200% but not at the cost of low conversions. Sell more cars and demand high click rates of your pay per click provider. If you do not know what your marketing is doing, ask us to help you figure it out.
If you are in in the automotive marketing industry, learn more about how car dealerships can get quality leads from an automotive expert. If you would like to see a screen capture of sites and Google campaigns that are converting at 15% or higher, just email us and we will be happy to show you.
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Automotive Social Networking
Posted on 09. Dec, 2008 by admin.
If you do not yet understand all there is to know about automotive social networking, have no fear since it is a constantly evolving and changing marketplace dominated to large sites such as Facebook.com and MySpace and other players such as digg, sphinn, and many others.
The benefit for automotive marketing is that the more links you have from these popular sites the better. If you can tap into this great advertising opportunity, you can actually sell cars as well. It’s more than just a fad, it’s a new way of doing business.
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