Automotive Digital Marketing
Jan
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- Are you paying for prime rib and being served mass produced burgers from a third world country?
- Is the service you are receiving comparable to the price you are paying for it?
- Are you paying a premium for “service” and when calling for help sitting on hold to only find out something you want can’t be done or will incur additional charges?
The real question is are you paying for a maitre d’ and the only time you hear from your provider is when they have a new offering or it is initiated by you for service that has to run through multiple channels?
The difference between a partner and a provider are huge.
- A partner helps you become more successful and their success is dependent upon yours.
- A provider sells you their product for you to leverage and your success is dependent how the product is utilized.
The problem lies in when a provider bills themselves as a partner to justify the cost and then moves you through their process to deliver their cookie cutter solution, mass produced hamburgers, and delivers the bill on a silver platter. We would not tolerate it in a restaurant but every day I see dealers accepting it with various providers.
I was amazed when I contacted a website provider for support for a dealer client to only find out that support would take three days to add a form to a custom page, the dealer spends over $100K per year and is tied to a contract. This was after going to top level contacts inside the company. Another consultant experienced a website provider claiming SEO work as their own. (See my automotive website predictions for 2009 to get the details)
In the coming year we will see some established accepted practices by automotive vendors fade from existence as dealers become more educated and learn to hold automotive vendors accountable by demanding value for their money with service levels commensurate with cost. A partner will over deliver a provider gives you widgets to work with. Quit overpaying for widgets disguised as a partnership and a long term high priced contract should deliver more than excuses with mediocre service and results.
Paul Rushing 
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Jan
Driving traffic to a car dealer online is a never ending challenge and one most dealers do not understand. Mostly, they rely on advice from the automotive vendors that serve them to get advice to this effect. What is good for the dealers is even if they do not have an effective process in place to handle the leads they can still sell cars from it.
In the automotive online marketing niche there are many products offered and belief systems in place that are limiting dealers in finding the most effective way to develop an online presence and get maximum return on investment for their online marketing initiatives. It may be because a dealer is willing to overspend to achieve some results they do not have to manage or do not realize there are more effective ways to get in market car buyers to find them online.
Cars have become commodities today. Car buyers know that they can find out anything they want to know about a vehicle they are interested in online and are not as brand loyal as they once were. While at the same time dealer are having to compete not only with each other online they are having to compete with manufacturers, lead providers, regional promotions and affiliate marketers.
To top this off they have to deal with vendors competing with each other for the ever shrinking auto dealer marketing spends and this places dealer in the awkward position of making decisions on products and services they do not understand, for the most part.
In sales presentations for vendor technologies and degradation of other forms of marketing without substance or proof seems to be the way the niche works. It is sales processes like this that further the confusion for car dealers.
With all of the different forms of promotions available online dealers need to look for ways the most cost effective ways to get in front of potential buyers at all levels and cut through the BS being dished up in the niche.
Dealer search marketing and search engine optimization are just the basics for car dealer online marketing and just scratch the surface and place the dealers marketing initiatives in jeopardy if not executed properly. They both have their place and can compliment each other if executed intelligently, however seo trumps search engine marketing in cost and effectiveness.
Contrary to statements made by vendors in the dealer online marketing arena SEO is not free. It cost either time and knowledge, which most dealers do not possess, or money to have someone execute it properly. On the other hand search engine marketing via pay per click can and does provide value if you understand the demographic of the “heavy clickers” and create proper assets to convert them to leads.
Here is some excerpt from a study done by Starcom USA
The study illustrates that heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks. While many online media companies use click-through rate as an ad negotiation currency, the study shows that heavy clickers are not representative of the general public. In fact, heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers.
See it is studies like this that are not presented to dealers before they are sold products that are designed to be a dominator in search engine marketing. It would show that the quality of leads delivered via pay per click will typically be lower income, in the prime age demographic and basically looking for something for nothing or a job. However all is not lost for an effective search engine marketing campaign for car deaelrs if pay per click is looked at in the correct light.
no correlation between display ad clicks and brand metrics, and show no connection between measured attitude towards a brand and the number of times an ad for that brand was clicked. The research presentation suggests that when digital campaigns have a branding objective, optimizing for high click rates does not necessarily improve campaign performance.
Which says that ppc may be effective for online branding and optimizing for high click through rates may not be the most effective use of this medium unless you are presenting a very low price and the ability to help get this lower demographic in a car.
This is a very profitable demo in the auto industry if the dealer has outlets for secondary financing and ignoring the majority of buyers, while at the same tme not delivering the same volume of traffic an intelligent search engine optimization campaign can deliver.
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Dec
Automotive website providers have had a license to steal for the last decade and as 2008 rolls to a close I wish to make my predictions for the New Year and share some examples of how to hold your provider accountable.
Some recent activity in the automotive blogosphere and my personal interactions have brought some things to light that need to be shared as they relate to holding car dealer website providers accountable:
Another consultant shared his dealer clients interactions with Cobalt customer support where they claimed ownership of his search engine optimization efforts. To me it appears to be reactionary retaliation when the dealer realized they were not getting the seo services that they were paying Cobalt for and they, Cobalt, was trying to save face and denigrate the consultants work. He posted this at automotivedigitalmarketing.com and drivingsales.com, drivingsales removed the vendor name and I did another post about this automotive social networking issue.
and
Personally I have contacted BZ Results customer support to add a form capture to a page built on their platform and was told under no certian circumstances that it could not be done in less than 72 hours and there was no one that could tell me how to get their native form code in less than the same time frame. This was for a dealer group that spends over $100,000 per year with BZ Results. I even leveraged my network with top level contacts to no avail, my contact tried but I kept winding up on the wrong path.
In the first example if Cobalt would of been providing value for the fees they were changing the dealer for their search engine optimization services they would not of had to respond in a reactionary way to try and cover their tracks. In my interactions with BZ Results if they would of been my website provider they would of been fired on the spot just as an employee that I pay $100,000 a year would of been when I was told it would take three days to fulfill a simple request.
Dealers have been force fed this for years now and with all of the education being delivered to them they are starting to see through it. Some things you can do to to insure you receive value for your car dealer website spend or to use during your research for a web site provider:
- Is your traffic increasing - While dealership website traffic is also affected by many variables but your search engine traffic should be increasing relative to market conditions if it is properly optimized.
- How many other same franchise dealers in your market area do they represent? If they represent even one how can they represent you without a conflict of interest? You need to ask them if they will give you an exclusive in your marketing area before buying from them.
- Other than design what are the cost? Design is cheap and CMS licensing should be as well. That is all you are really paying for. hosting costs are more of a nuisance than an expense.
- How many other on same server? - With dedicated server cost available for less than $600 a year you should be on your own server with your own IP address not a server crammed full of other dealer’s websites.
I predict over the next year the current dealer website offerings will see a drastic overhaul. Here are some changes that I feel like will take place because car dealers will demand it and other market influences will dictate:
- Long multi-year contracts will disappear - Dealers will look for design services on various CMS platforms and push their cost down. With a full fledged highly custom design and content running in <$3000 range and hosting as described above.
- Dealers will need to leverage multiple online properties to win on the search engine optimization front with the current changes being made in search engine algorithms. Dealer micro sites and mini sites will have more value if implemented properly.
- Mass deindexing of some providers platforms by Google. - Dealer.com and Vinsolutions platforms spam the search engines with individual inventory listings without taking the steps to remove these listings from the search engine results pages. This goes against Google’s webmaster guidelines. Both platforms have a very distinguishable footprint which means they will be easy for Google’s search engineers to detect and ban. I know that one of these providers are in the que for a manual review by Google based on another post I did about Indexed Car Dealer Inventory.
- Small website providers will flourish and the big providers will lose market share because they can not adapt fast enough to meet the ever changing algorithm changes marketing paradigms.
- Automotive websites will become publishing platforms versus static content with just a few customizable pages.
Please feel free to add your coments and predictions -
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Dec
The Dealer Micro Site Alternate
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I have been working on an alternative for dealers to be able to launch campaign or vehicle specific dealer micro sites. I am using wordpress blogging software as the CMS to create these microsites. The first protype is for a Cincinnati Ford Dealer for the Escape Hybrid. I really hate to use the term micro site for them but car dealers have been beat over the head calling vehicle specific two and three page site a microsite.
These wordpress based site will be mini sites that can be tailored to what ever the marketing push the dealer is running or around specific models. With the current changes in process with Google’s Universal Search the static aberrations created by others micros site vendors will no longer be able to have the search engine relevance they once enjoyed. It will take regularly updated content to win or they will have to rely on dealer search engine marketing or automotive pay per click for traffic.
The automotive online marketing space is about to be turned on it’s head. Will these sites help dealers reach more people via the search engine without spending a to of money? I seem to think they will.
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Dec
I have been ranting for ages that wordpress blogging software could be used as a platform to create dealer micro sites and provide a greater SEO value than a static html one or two page site. I just created a page the the 2009 Ford Escape Hybrid and made a couple errors in the process. Nothing that will hurt long term just a few things that will need to be tweaked over time.
We will use that format to create pages fro every vehicle in the Frod line up over the comming two or three months and learn from the mistakes as we go. One thing I do not like how that page was created is that it was created as a page and not as a post and I did not have all of the archetcture in place when it was published. As time goes on it will not matter though.
Eventually this blog site will be an authority site for every thing Ford related. I do not particularly like the domain it is on but that can be overcome with a strong enough automotive search engine optimization tooling and process. What is good is a blog can serve more than one purpose as time goes on and once the content base is built it will ranks for thousands of keywords.
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Dec
Dealer micro sites can be a great marketing tool if deployed properly. They can bring additional traffic to your website and more customers to your showroom. There are some caveats they may actually cause you more harm than good if you launch dealer micro sites in a haphazard fashion.
Certain types of promotions can be delivered faster and more effectively than using a two or three page microsite, especially limited time promotions like Nissan Delivers or Ford Employee Pricing Plus. Promoting limited time promotions on the web would be better served using a publishing platform so your marketing collateral could be archived and as new promotions roll out you can add them to the home page of your site.
If you are looking to drive credit leads using landing pages at places squidoo.com will provide free traffic and search engine optimization benefit and the cost is very cheap. I have a few squidoo lenses delivering daily leads through lead aggregation services and they rank very well for terms related to Tulsa bad credit car loans and Jacksonville buy here pay here car lots.
Because static content can fall out of favor with the search engines you can also use blogs to drive traffic to your main site or lead generation property. This will allow you to rank for more keywords faster and offer multiple points of entry and dominate localized search terms. This blog about New Jersey bad credit car loans is ranking for over 500 keywords in less than 60 days and drives an incredible amount of targeted traffic in a geographic area.
Using unbranded dealer micro sites to generate leads for a car dealer does have benefit if you have an outlet to dispose of leads that are not in your market area. Most dealers do not wish to make this type of investment of time to facilitate this or really understand how it works. Having model specific microsites that rank nationally really have very little value especially if they are unbranded unless you have a way to dispose of these additional leads. A car dealer would be better off to have a multi page secondary website that ranks in competitive market areas to drive email leads and phone calls and deliver a branding message.
Before making a huge investment you need to explore all of your options and look for the most cost effective ways to deliver additional leads. You can have very sticky content created on a regular basis that does not require a dealer to invest in search engine marketing and own the search engine result pages using very evergreen search engine optimization techniques.
If you would like a no cost consultation please give me a call at 912-266-1629
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Dec
Google.com is making some serious changes to its search engine results and one would think that search engine marketing and pay per click advertising would be a way to help deliver more traffic to a dealerships website once these changes are fully realized.
Some are even claiming that the changes they are implementing will even be the death of search engine optimization as we know it. This is true to an extent. What these changes will accomplish is create a need to have more than one website as a marketing property to reach buyers at different points in the buying funnel in your marketing area.
In addition to their main website they will need additional properties to have total control of the search engines to become a dominator in their marketing areas. If executed properly dealers will be able to compete with manufactures sites for product searches. As a test I was able to win some great search terms that are generating national traffic and very localized traffic for automotive terms buyers use, generating 5-7 leads a day with around 20 clicks a day to ebay.com. Granted this site is not used for a dealer, it is geared to affiliate conversions and not much effort has been put into it. You can contact me direct to get more info. A good affiliate marketer does not give away his niches and I have given away to much now.
Even if not full developed dealers should own as many variations of their products with regional descriptions. IE:
- citybranddealer.com city-brand-dealer.com
- citymodeldealer.com city-model-dealer.com
- dealernamemarketareadealer.com dealername-market area-dealer.com
You could use these domains to create landing pages, blogs, product brochures and use them to provide others search benefits to your main website and drive traffic.
This coupled with maximizing local listings in the major search engines will provide more traffic than any PPC campaign can and attract targeted traffic if the additional assets are optimized for the correct point in the buying cycle.
The algorithmic changes that Google is making will not have near the impact on automotive SEO as it will on broader niches. Personalized search for consumers will not disrupt the search engine results pages nowhere near as much as it would other sites competing for consumers clicks.
Consumers do not perform searches for car information anywhere near as much as the general web public search for other terms. Let’s face it people only look for car information when they are close to making a decision on purchasing one, about every three years. Personalized search will not even come into play in the automotive industry, for marketing purposes. Where as localized search results will.
Additional web assets with correct local search engine local directory listings will be the big winner for car dealers in their search engine marketing efforts. Still placing search engine optimization heads above PPC advertising and search engine marketing.
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Dec
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
- # 3 for dealer.com search marketing 8:00 pm 12/12/08
- # 3 for dealer.com seo 8:00pm 12/12/08
- #1 & #2 for dealer.com seo vs search engine marketing 10 am 12/13/08
- #1 & #2 for dealer.com search engine marketing vs seo 10 am 12/13/08
- #1 for dealer.com seo 12/14/08
- #1 for dealer.com search engine marketing 12/14/08
- #1 for dealer.com search marketing 12/14/08
- Going to stop tracking results now, and this page may fall out of favor, it was just a test to see how fast it would be to win search terms and show that it is not an ages long process.
images from Hubspot and MarketingSherpa
Recent post at www.drivingsales.com/blog
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Dec
Fresh Site in the Sandbox
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For the first time ever I think I have a fresh wordpress blog in the proverbial sandbox. The content is unique and has numberous post in place and it updates daily. I have a couple theory as to why it has not indexed yet.
- The Theme - While the theme came from a very well respected designer and I have used some of his other themes this one may not play well in the search engines. I have changed that out now.
- To Many Monetization Points - It is heavily weighted with affiliate offers, but that is the purpose of the site to capture bad credit car loan traffic and make money from it.
- My server is getting weighted - I have many sites are on the same DNS and IP address to try to max out a dedicated box. I have another Hosting Account I could move it to but probably will not.
- Karma - My plans are to build localized traffic and page rank then redirect the traffic later to people wanting traffic for the terms it ranks for. It is easily done and right now it is targeting specific local markets but will scale once nationwide once the traffic builds. The site is soley for the purpose of redirecting traffic to affiliate offers and making money with it later once it owns tons of search terms.
- Not many link and offsite optimization - This I hope is the biggest factor. It has not been submitted to any directories nor have I done a lot of the optimization techniques I use to build links.
- A shady domain name - www.anycreditcarloans.com enough said..
I will give it a few more days before directory submissions and a link building campaign. I really have enough other projects on my plate to really spend much time on this and this is really a low value experiment that I hoped would pay it’s own rent.
Now that I have just broken the cardinal rule of affiliate marketing and exposed a niche I am attacking via SEO I guess my regular readers will try to go after it as well. The good thing is I have other properties in the Automotive Finance Niche that are producing nice incomes and I have not thrown any or that link weight to this property yet. I do believe I could shut out anyone trying to attack my niches if I put my mind to it. Just ask Jacksonville Buy Here Pay Here Dealers of those that specialize in Tulsa Special Financing.
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Dec
Pulling in localized traffic for car dealers or any business can be accomplished using wordpress as a CMS. Currently I have a wordpress them being designed to use as an alternate dealer marketing site. Not to be confused with auto dealer micro sites. The philosophy behind micro sites as a search marketing tool with one or two page landers provides the smallest value to a dealer.
Using a CMS style mini site to push promotions or specific models and tying all of those levels of content together and having the ability to archive contnet will provide far greater value for long term SEO benefit and relevence.
Because most models and more specifically year models of vehicles come and go. Where as a well optimized page on a domain with other layers of content can give your mini site a permanent shelf life. For example I created a simple landing page targeting buyers in looking for a 2009 Mustang Shelby in Brunswick that has multiple calls to action and is tied in with other content about Brunswick car dealers.
The site itself is not designed specifically for a particular dealer. It is geared towards affiliate conversions but once the traffic is monitored for a period of time it will show how well a multiple page mini site can benefit for local search traffic versus a simple one or two page automotive micro site.
Single landing page sites can be accomplished using other platforms or at very low cost. Where as a multifaceted CMS system can be designed for set up for client management or direct marketing management at a cost that provides greater roi for the dealer.
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I provide Craigslist and SEO services to car dealers all over the country. I also own several affiliate properties. I am always looking for ways to help others and myself market themselves and companies online.
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