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I have continued to get a lot of questions on how a solid foundation for an online marketing build would look. In response to those requests I am submitting this post.
The very best way to conquest new customers and brand your dealership is and will continue to be online leveraging multiple layers of content to match your customer’s world view.
THE MASS MARKET IS DEAD…REPLACED BY A MASS OF NITCHES. You will either connect with them on their terms or continue to get a 3% conversion rate.
At the heart of this stack of applications is the Landing Experience (Landing Experience Management, Core Microsite Network and Website Management). This is where the rubber meets the road, as it gets more and more expensive to drive traffic to your online efforts you will need to get smarter about getting more out of less. We’re already doing that moving more marketing spend to digital and cutting budgets, but you’re not the only one, creating more online competition and the guys outside the industry have been doing it longer and have more experience.
Google continues to commoditize the buying of traffic, pushing key word bids higher and higher. Affiliates are getting smarter on targeting the right customers and that business too will get more expensive to you as it gets better. This is the same phenomena that happened in the late 70’s and through the early 90’s as dealership continued to spend more and more on advertising to drive more traffic and close smaller and smaller percentages.
GET GOOD AT THE FOUNDATION OF MARKETING 2.0 NOW! Focus on matching the experience the customer gets with the ad you place or the messages you send don’t fall into the TRAFFIC TRAP again.

1. Online Ads – PPC Campaigns / Banner ads / Affiliate Marketing and Listing Sites – The keys here is managing low in the funnel keywords, strata key word buys across top performing areas and keywords, local banner ad and affiliate placement. Organizing ads, placement and optimizing keywords by conversion ideally across all ad networks. Supporting applications here are keyword discovery and generation, call tracking software and landing experience software.  The output is paid clicks driven to targeted landing experiences and deep-links to your main random access website.

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2. Email Marketing and Management – Here you are marketing to both known prospect and customers. This is just another channel under your control to generate clicks; the question is where are you going to send those clicks to get maximum conversion rates? That is further down in the build and it’s not your main random access website.
3. Landing Experience Management – Landing pages, Conversion Paths and Microsites all fall into this category of “Landing Experiences” – this is where respondents go post click this space is emerging as its own separate from website management for 3 reasons:
     a. Scale – focused on campaign and micro campaign marketing with dozens, hundreds or even thousands of variations.
     b. Flexible format – this network is not constrained by the architecture and exact look and feel of your main random access website, but does share the same brand message.
     c. Speed – with new landing experiences created and optimized at the same pace as your online and email marketing, the benefits here are “message match” between your pre-click and post-click marketing efforts (creating much higher conversion rates and a stronger brand).   This is more of a pure marketing role than your main random access website can play, being more specific to each campaigns customer segments and allowing for quick and easy multi-variant, split testing and quick and easy changes and redirects on the fly. Depending on the type of campaign you are running you can send leads directly into your CRM tool or pass respondents to your core website for transaction based conversions.  More permanent “Core” landing experiences will enhance organic SEO, although this is not their main purpose.
4. Core Microsite Network – This is a collection of more permanent microsites that serve specific elements of your business and allow respondents to quickly and easily get what they want, when they want it, the way they want it without have to hunt and peck around your main random access website.
5. Website Management – or as many who have read my blog have heard me call it…your dealerships random access website. Your main website should be reserved for your existing customers of your dealership and constructed with 2 main focuses in mind:
     a. Helping customers quickly and easily make service reservations (not a request, the actual appointment).
     b. Helping customers quickly and easily find AND BUY the car they want.
Everything else you may think you need to accomplish with your random access website is a distant second.
6. Web Analytics – Test…Test…Test everything you do, the best package is FREE Google Analytics, you can connect it to all your Landing experiences, microsites and website and manage all from a central location.
     a. Your Landing experience management platform should also have its own built in analytics to allow for A/B split testing and smart enough to direct PPC and Email traffic to the highest converting conversion paths.

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7. CRM – CRM in the auto industry has taken 2 paths:
     a. Proactive digital and direct marketing – this has been a focus of many CRM systems, putting tools in the dealerships hands that would allow them to do their own direct email, direct mail and broadcast voice marketing. The biggest issue I have with this is that the data and privacy laws and compliance are constantly changing, issues surrounding the opt out / opt in, black listed IP’s I could go on and on but the reader’s digest version of this is if you can’t afford a team of at least 3 people dedicated to this you shouldn’t try it yourself, and if you can then there is the whole issue of internal cost vs. outsourcing. Whatever you are doing here PLEASE stop email blasting most of your messages are not making it, you’re killing your email list with opt out’s and your brand with it.
     b. Lead & Contact Management – this is probably the most effective and immediate impact for a CRM system in a dealership and the least used. Your dealership would benefit more by using your CRM system as a lead management, call and floor follow-up system than trying to use it for marketing.
8. Social Media Network – Facebook, MySpace and a Twitter account for sure other sites not as important for now. After you set up your Facebook account you will want to set up a Fan Page this is where you can encourage people to join you. Twitter is a great way to communicate with fans and MySpace friends for a list of ways to use Twitter see my post “What place does Twitter have in your dealership”. An update on Twitter, you can now create several lists within your Twitter followers eliminating the need to create several accounts! It would seem that segmenting your Twitter followers and sending them more relevant messages is not such a bad idea after all.
9. Relational Marketing Database – Ultimately this is where your proactive marketing comes from. A Relational Marketing database will allow you to market to households instead of individuals and track all transactions across the many touch points of your dealership. Most CRM systems are setup to track and market to individuals and individual transactions, that’s I prefer to set up a Relational Marketing Database than to use a CRM system for marketing. More on Proactive Marketing 2.0 in another post.

This is a solid Reactive Marketing foundation. You don’t have to be perfect at it all at once… jump in with both feet keep working on it, Test…Test…Test everything, track everything. Most of all keep in mind that if you don’t match with your respondent you won’t get the conversion 97% of the time and that’s unacceptable. Customers are looking for something you have or they wouldn’t have found you or clicked your ad if you aren’t getting 10% to 20% conversion its probably because you’re respondents experience didn’t match what your ad said and they had to work to get the info they want…in the end it’s easier for the respondent just to go to another site.