“Looks like I need a new video strategy,” said one dealer during a break at the Motor Dealers’ Association of Alberta (MDA) convention held in Banff, Alta. “Video, video, video,” said another.
Indeed, dealers were bombarded with information about why they need to beef up their video, social media, and other digital marketing efforts at the MDA’s two-day “Connection Convention” event held at the spectacular Banff Springs Hotel resort May 4-6.
A mix of seasoned speakers who are fixtures on the auto dealer speaker’s circuit joined other presenters with recent dealership experience to provide dealers with a broad overview of digital trends and best practices.
Dave Guilford, Enterprise Editor with Automotive News kicked off the event with a keynote.
The event kicked off with a keynote luncheon presentation from Dave Guilford, Enterprise Editor with Automotive News. Guilford’s overview set the table for the presentations that were to follow. He showed dealers examples of how OEMs and dealers are embracing social media and digital marketing. “Digital marketing and social media give you opportunities to sharpen your marketing,” says Guilford. “But it’s challenging and it’s an atmosphere of constant change.”
With 60 hours of new videos uploaded to YouTube every minute, and with the site getting more than one billion unique visitors every month, video is experiencing explosive growth. “This is all happening very quickly,” says Guilford. The growth in tablets and smartphone usage also means more devices are easily accessible for watching video, including the 100 million iPads that have been sold since the device was introduced in 2010, he says.
Guilford says dealers can use YouTube as a free network to distribute all sorts of videos including videos to: introduce your stores, meet your key staff, show vehicle test drives, solicit happy customer testimonials, and promote service. “The pace and scale of growth in the digital world is indeed staggering,” says Guilford. “People expect rapid innovation, they expect transparency.”
PRE-LAUNCH CAMPAIGNS
Automakers are getting better at using social media to influence car buyers, he says, often launching campaigns to promote vehicles months before they formally launch. This low, or no-cost social media is cheap and can be effective, but Guilford also cautions it can backfire, citing examples of some poorly thought out campaigns that ended up with the OEMs apologizing for very public gaffes.
“In some ways, social media marketing is harder than traditional marketing,” says Guilford, adding that the content needs to be constantly refreshed and updated because people don’t want to see the same thing over and over again. “You have to keep it spontaneous,” says Guilford.
Guilford said technological change and new tools have created a different type of shopper — like those who are using their smartphones on your lot — and dealers need to be ready for them. That means dealers must have their websites optimized for mobile phones. The best websites detect that a mobile device is accessing it, and will present the mobile site experience to the user.
MINE YOUR DATABASE
Smart dealers are also using database mining to seek out customers who are more likely to be in the buying cycle, such as those that have positive equity in their vehicles. Armed with that information, dealers can then reach out to offer them lower interest rates on new models or lease pull-forwards. But Guilford says only 15 per cent of dealers use database mining on a regular basis.
Guilford advised dealers to “be friends with Google” because 93 per cent of car shoppers do some shopping on Google and two-thirds find their dealerships via Google. “Google wants to play an even larger role in online vehicle retailing,” says Guilford.
He said he expects Google’s current experiment in the San Francisco, Calif. area, that allows consumers to shop dealership inventory without going to dealership websites, might soon roll out across the rest of the country.
More of the vehicle transaction may also move online. He says Chevy has been experimenting with something it calls Shop-Click-Drive (www.shopclickdrive.com) and he says it’s been getting great dealer feedback from their test program. “It seems to be something that is coming,” says Guilford.
Guilford also talked about the importance of protecting your online reputation, advanced apps to help sales and service, and the need to embrace the change. “There is an advantage to be gained if you are good at it.”
SALES PROCESS HASN’T CHANGED
The highly energetic Dennis Galbraith, from DrivingSales University, gave an overview of how much things have changed and yet how the fundamentals of vehicle sales still remain the same.
Dennis Galbraith, from DrivingSales University, said the sales process hasn’t changed.
He said the sales process has always been: Listen, matchmake, demonstrate, close. “I submit to you that the sales process has not been changed by the Internet,” says Galbraith. “We have been doing this for decades.”
But there is, however, a profound difference. “The Internet has ears. It listens,” says Galbraith.
While dealers sit quietly, their customers are clicking, chatting, and saying all sorts of things. If dealers get better at listening, they’ll be in a better position to respond to a customer who has already provided all kinds of information about what they are looking for.
But to get that customer to your website, you have to do lots of little things right, says Galbraith. He cited examples of dealerships that aren’t doing things right, and advised dealers to spend more time on their online vehicle listings, writing better descriptions and taking better photos. “Even on new cars, you will get a much higher click-through on pages that feature actual photos of the vehicle, not stock photos or no photos,” says Galbraith.
He showed an image of a young man in a dealership lot taking photos of a vehicle and said: “That guy out there taking photos of the vehicle is selling cars,” adding that you can take all the photos, video clips and write a description of a vehicle in 12-14 minutes if you know what you are doing. “Put some science into this process because this is selling cars,” he says.
DIGITAL FILING CABINET
Eric Miltsch, Director of Product Strategy with DrivingSales.com, provided dealers with some tips and tricks on how to optimize their websites.
He described a website as a digital filing cabinet, and if it’s not well organized, it’s annoying to try to find anything. That’s the experience some dealerships present to their online customers. “Home pages are typically horribly designed,” says Miltsch.
During his presentation, Miltsch showed examples of some Canadian dealer sites that were poorly designed and he tore them apart, describing one as a “tossed salad” of content and links.
He showed several examples where the dealership’s phone number was hard to find, or wasn’t prominent enough. Since half of the local searches are location searches, people want to call: so make it easy for them to find your phone number.
He also said dealers should not try to hide their pricing online by insisting people call for the price. “It just does not work. You are annoying the online shopper when it says, ‘call for price.’ People assume you are just the higher priced car in the market.”
And if your site isn’t mobile optimized yet, fix it. He said 75 per cent of customers who visit a non-mobile optimized website on their mobile phone will click off within five seconds — and will not come back.
Miltsch provided dealers with some easy, and free tips, such as setting up automated Google analytics reports and setting up the 20 goals within Google that allow you to track goals and conversions.
To get your website in order, you can follow some simple tips: clean up your filing cabinet; create a unique page title for every page; use unique page descriptions; write descriptive section headers; keep tabs on keyword frequency; embed deep links and ensure there are no dead end pages. Miltsch said dealers should give this list to the people managing their website and ensure they are following these best practices.
“People are dumb when they get to a website. They want to be led,” says Miltsch.
BEWARE OF BAD CONSULTANTS
Bill Playford, from DealerKnows Consulting, delivered a somewhat rambling overview about why dealers need to be careful when they are purchasing goods or service from vendors — or even hiring consultants like him.
He advised dealers to do due diligence on the vendors they are going to hire by doing Google searches, looking at their LinkedIn profiles, reading forums, talking to others about them and looking for “dirty laundry.”
Paul Potratz, digital marketing guru woke up the crowd.
POTRATZ PERFORMS
Day two kicked off with a rousing round of cheering and applause initiated by Paul Potratz, the dynamic leader of Potratz Advertising, and a widely regarded digital marketing expert.
Recognizing the early morning slot wasn’t to his advantage, Potratz got dealers up and moving and then set out to get them thinking. “Today I am going to talk about driving your profits up,” says Potratz. “I’m not going to talk about things you can’t do.”
That was music to the ears of many dealers, and then he led them through some tips on how to achieve better results through better marketing. “You can go back to your dealership and implement it without a vendor,” he says.
He says dealers need to first start by redefining who they are competing with. It’s not the dealer around the corner or in the next town. You are competing for the scarce amount of available time that consumers have available for you. “Everybody is your competition,” he says. “We can’t add more time.”
Because of the fast-paced lives we now lead, dealers need to adapt to this pace of information exchange in the on-demand economy.
Potratz also reinforced the need for dealers to start cranking out more video. “You need to have video,” says Potratz. People buy from people, so put your people in the videos, he says.
He also passed on some practical tips about how to find out what keywords people are searching for in your market to help better tailor your Google keywords purchase strategy. “Don’t limit your future by celebrating yesterday’s profits,” says Potratz.
Adam Thrasher, the “video king” of YouTube hyped video.
VIDEO ROYALTY
Adam Thrasher, the man dubbed the “video king” of YouTube, recounted a tale of how he used dealership staff to create hundreds of videos with no budget and ended up generating more than 500,000 video views in less than two years for his dealership.
Thrasher was hired to be an e-commerce director at a three-store group in Nashville, Tenn., and the only online presence they had at the time was negative reviews. He set out to change that to build a robust digital presence for the group. “I found video was the quickest, easiest and cheapest way to accomplish all those goals,” says Thrasher.
But you have to make the effort. “Google loves real video,” says Thrasher. “It indexes better than just about anything else I can think of.”
Video can drive more traffic, sell more cars and enhance your reputation, he says. Thrasher said the dealership produced three main categories of videos: vehicle walkarounds; customer testimonials and how-to videos.
For the customer testimonials, he says it’s key to hear from the customer, not the salesperson. “No one gives a crap about what you have to say,” he says.
WEBB MASTER
Joe Webb, from DealerKnows.com delivered an entertaining overview that helped bring the dealers back to the bricks and mortars world, after having spent so much time in digital cyberspace at the event.
“There is only one magic bullet for dealership success,” he says. “It’s the people you hire.”
Consumers might have changed because of the ease of accessing a glut of information, but a lot hasn’t changed, such as: the place where the transaction takes place — the dealership; and dealing with a sales professional.
Joe Webb, from DealerKnows.com told dealers to improve communication.
But salespeople need to accept that their world is more transparent, and they need to adapt to that. Consumers now want instant information on vehicle pricing and expect that information without having to visit the dealership to get it. People also want a personal response, and they want it quickly.
Webb advised dealers that improving their emailing, calling, chatting, video messages, texting and video chatting and mailing will improve sales and performance. “I don’t want you to spend money. I want you to improve communication with your customer,” says Webb.
Webb says his group did a huge study of hundreds of dealerships and found that 39 per cent of all emails that were sent out by dealership staff never had any questions for customers to respond to: they were just monologues and had nothing to engage a customer. “You need to create a conversation,” says Webb.
He suggested dealers should mystery shop their competitors and their own store to get a better sense of what it’s like to deal with them from a customer’s perspective.
And in terms of digital marketing, Webb says he thinks a dealership’s CRM tool is a critical and underused tool for getting closer to customers.
Al Awadia from Google Canada’s automotive practice, CADA Chairman, Alex Baum, Michael Hatch, the CADA’s Chief Economist, and the original Crazy Canuck, Jungle Jim Hunter were also among the featured speakers.
Denis Ducharme, MDA President talks with Michael Hatch, CADA’s Chief Economist
