Say Goodbye to 2009 - The Year of the Fine Whine

Let’s face it folks, we’re leaving a rough year for many in media companies and the automotive industry alike. 2009 saw many dealerships go out of business, auto companies downsize, and media companies lay off the wrong people. Therefore all that sadness and economic strife caused a lot of people to develop a fine whine. “Whoa is me” was the line of the year, I can’t sell any cars, my email leads are no good, what’s this social media stuff or how can I sell more with newspaper ads like it is 1984. If that was you, or everyone around you, it is time to make a change. It is time to move away from letting everything and everyone be mediocre and that being okay. It is time to start succeeding again. It is time to start making money again, and New Year’s Day 2010 is a fantastic place to start.

If you are working in a car dealership’s Internet department it is absolutely time for you to stop accepting mediocre and take control of the world around you. There are cars to be sold, many many cars to be sold, new ones, used ones. 2010 is a great year for you to change. It may have to start with the dealership itself. I hate to break it to you, but there are a lot of dealerships still out there (far fewer than last year at this time) that still just haven’t embraced how the Internet is affecting the automotive sales industry. If you work in a dealership that still thinks the Internet department is a necessary evil and it will just go away, do yourself a favor and jump off that sinking ship. Seriously, quickly….

Key areas of Mediocracy -

There are several areas of Internet business, within a car dealership, that should be reviewed, acted upon and restructured and successful outcomes are sure to follow

    Assumption that Internet Departments are only responsible for 10% of a dealer’s sales. This equation doesn’t make sense, and mostly it is for the same reason that newspaper companies don’t see themselves as obsolete, it is because dealerships refuse to recognize that 90+% of their traffic was driven in from the Internet and they are still trying to appease those old sellers that will tell you how many cars they could sell in a month, in 1984, and make sure they don’t leave. If Internet Dept. sales are only accounting for 10% of your total dealership’s monthly sales, then someone is trying to make justifications that match advertising expenditures to incoming revenue. That is a losing battle. Start to review every single process you have in the dealership, and start changing to focus on your digital showroom, interactive advertising and processes to handle the online shopper. Your processes stink, trust me I checked.

How many “lot guys” do you have keeping the physical lot moved around, cleaned up, street view marketed? 1? 2? 5? How many digital “lot guys” do you have to make sure your virtual showroom, your website, your SEO, your inventory merchandization is moved around, cleaned up, digital street view marketed? None? Hmm, I see something missing here. And I don’t mean the “IT” guy or the “Tech” guy - sure, those guys can write some mean code, but mean code never sold a car. You don’t hire lot folks that are terrific sales people, you hire lot folks to act out the direction of strong sales professional management - use the same philosophy for your digital lot team. Hire several high school or college kids, they probably know more about a computer than your IT person anyway. Put them to work following your orders on refreshing photos, moving around cars, updating inventory, adding specific sales copy and specials and ding ding ding social networking. Bottom line, let your sales people sell, and hire digital lot personnel to give them the best interactive foot forward to make sure they are doing that.

Where do you spend the most in your advertising budget? Is it still in print (there’s that sinking ship again)? Re-evaluate. I guarantee, if you pull out of the newspaper you are not going to lose any sales. If you just can’t walk away completely, for the love of all that is good stop paying for color and full page ads. And if you are running those same checkerboard ads that you were running in 1984, you are really wasting all your effort. How much time did someone on your team devote to making the list of the cars to put in the ad? And how to price them? And what options to focus on? You know the ones PW, 4WD, AC, AT…huh? What if you had devoted or empowered someone to devote that same amount of time to marketing ALL of your inventory, with real or near real time changes online? And yes, you can track the results immediately.

Re-evaluate your online spend as well. Success in an online marketing campaign comes from visibility. Right place, right time, right path. Does your inventory show up everywhere it needs to, are shoppers able to find it, find your dealer (if they are even ready to contact you) and should provide you the analytics to stock, price and merchandize vehicles correctly. Do you know what the most valuable piece of information that inventory can provide you online? Click Traffic - yup, the proof that someone, without fear of being contacted, found something interesting about the vehicle you were advertising and where you were advertising that vehicle. Just because they didn’t send you an email on it, has nothing to do with the success of the merchandizing. The days of equating to success to emails and phone calls are way past. Most online shoppers are 2nd or 3rd generational Internet buyers and they know that you’re only going to respond to a few of the emails they send in, and then you’re not going to answer their questions, or quote a price or send them the CarFax they requested, so why bother.  These shoppers learn from experience. If they are not avoiding a store altogether (which it is tough to avoid a store just because of their email process, because that would mean avoiding almost everyone) then they are avoiding the email system. It’s going into 2010, most shoppers expect that you’re marketing online pretty much the exact inventory you have, and they expect it to be at the physical address where it is shown to be so they will probably just drive by for a test drive. If they do opt for a phone call it is probably to make sure you still have it, or schedule an appointment to come by and see it. What’s left for an email? Well, the folks that find a vehicle that the dealer does not deem necessary to price (seriously? SERIOUSLY?) or they are far far out in their buying cycle and are just sampling what’s around. Over 50% of those people will still only receive one email response from a dealer, so when they do get around to buying a vehicle, you will have to pay for that lead again.

Look at your processes too… who answers the phone? Who greets customers? Who responds to emails? As store management do you really know what is going on with all of that traffic that you’re paying good money for? Chances are you don’t. Most of the online systems or tools will provide you with a multitude of reports. These are important, because they show you what’s working, what’s not, and what you should be doing with your inventory to push more traffic CLICK traffic. In most cases managers don’t devote any time to these, but keep them with the online or internet department managers. My suggestion is you devote some of that time that is freed up from creating those awful checkerboard ads for the newspaper back into learning how your real audience is interacting with your inventory. Those reports are great, and for the most part they will show you how well your inventory is doing within the space. The media reps think they are justifying the products you are buying, and let me save you some time on that. They are working - they always do. If you feel they are failing, revert back to everything I have been saying - devote more time to making your inventory work within them, and then start investing some time within your own processes. Do you have an Internet Sales Department? What do your other seller’s do? Shouldn’t you just focus on a sales department that handle sales? Unless of course your Internet Department is 90% of your sales force to match the audience? No? I didn’t think so. When email comes in, who answers? What’s included? Are you quoting yet? Are your quotes ultimatums based on blind assumptions about the shopper? (think about that one for a few) How quickly are you quoting? How completely are you quoting? What’s your competition doing? How many times is each seller responding by phone and email after the quote? What are they sending? If you think that CRM tool is doing the trick for you, I dare you to get on a follow up path with a couple of dealers using BuzzTrak. Seriously? Matching videos sent out at the exact same time each day from multiple stores. That is not setting your store up as a unique shopping experience.

Start the evaluation process with lead counts. Are your sellers handling more than 80 emails, each, monthly? If so, that’s too many.

If you have no social networking strategy in place, 2010 should be the year to get that done. Remember, customer feed back and community input is very valuable data. You cannot market through social media in the same way you do in print or on air, and if you try, you will fail. Be willing to admit that the 18 year old digital lot person you just hired knows more about Facebook and Twitter than you could ever hope to learn. Build your community and give back to them. The dealership will be securing life long customer relationships again if done correctly. Remember the lifetime value of a customer. If we can use the Internet to bring back any amount of dealership loyalty, it would be a win. And you can do a lot of social networking for the same price as that full page ad that you were running in color. Drop the color, drop the size and take some baby steps into the world of social media.

So let’s let 2010 be the year of refocus, and reinvestment in reality. Sure there may be some feeling of risk there, but the feeling is mostly on your end, and the risk is really just in your mind. There are hundreds of true professionals that will help you maximize your digital efforts. Don’t be afraid to ask us. Share your strategy. What sells cars? And we can apply it to the interactive spacw. We at UpShift Digital have years of experience in the car industry and interactive advertising space. We’ve been watching the movie, and we know how it ends.

No more whining, no more mediocracy. 2010 will be huge strides forward in online marketing strategy and dealers will win, again. Let us help!