Why Car Dealers Have a Hard Time with Internet Marketing

Can You Find the Ball?

Automotive Digital Marketing Shell Game

The automotive digital marketing space is now the wild west of the auto industry and represents the best opportunity for dealers, who have the ability to make informed decisions, to promote their dealerships and inventory online. Unfortunately for most dealers they rely on recommendations from individuals or companies that have a back end motive in recommending products and services to them. Like the scouting reports that General Custer had before “the Battle of Little Big Horn” and are being lead to the slaughter.

Carnival like atmospheres and gee whiz presentations with recommendations from people who have not changed their game plan in relation to digital marketing in several years is a recipe for disaster. In this space with enhanced consumer awareness and online trends changing at an alarming rate cookie cutter products with declarations of how well they did in 2005 should tell the dealer to be weary.

This problem is not only presented by consultants and agencies who are trying to carve out a space in a niche that they do not understand it is compounded by the fact vendors that operate in the digital space make recommendations that only serve them and not the dealer.

Today there are so many different flavors of cool aid that is being served up to decision makers it is easy for the dealer to become paralyzed and choose to do nothing. Another big mistake.

The list of terms, tools and disciplines in itself can be confusing to a lay person. Automotive digital marketing, online best practices, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, micro sites, landing pages, CRM, ILM, SEO, PPC, websites, process, conversion ratios, email templates, social media, social networking, dealer ratings, click to call, online chat, online classifieds, twitter, linkedin, plaxo, leads, online merchandising, pop ups, pop unders, text advertising, banner advertising, online directories, blogging, squidoo, consumer generated content, have you got lost yet?

Now you have vendors pitching these individual products or combinations of them in packages as the answer to the dealers online marketing effort. Not to mention the training that must be performed for the use and implementation and process development.

Here is the typical situation. A dealer attends a conference and hears buzz words such as social networking, web 2.0, blogging, seo and sem. Currently they have a website and are sending their inventory to classified sites such as cars.com and autotrader.com and realize that they are not getting the best return on their time and investment.

So they contact a SEO vendor and a SEM vendor to help deliver more traffic to their website and realize that their process is broke after examining their lead handling. In comes the process consultant that gets them signed up with a state of the art ILM and CRM system and buying every lead in a 200 mile radius of their store. However the dealer has set a budget for expanding her Internet presence and soon realizes that all the based are not covered so she starts exploring more options. The SEM vendor tells them how they are going to deliver traffic to the stores website through an intelligent PPC campaign and the traffic will be almost instant and the leads will pour in through the site and they don’t need to buy leads and give them more money to drive traffic that closes at a higher ratio.

Now the SEO vendor explains to her that SEM is not permanent traffic and gets is more expensive over the long haul and tells her that she can buy leads for half the price that most lead vendors charge by buying direct from the lead aggregators while they establish a permanent search engine presence.

Now the autotrader rep and cars.com rep are waiting in the showroom to discuss the cancellation letter that was sent in because the process consultant told her not to waste money there to free up more budget so she can access discount credit leads that have been sold to six dealers already in the last 90 days.

Finally after three weeks of this circle jerk she has decided that she has tried the Internet and it is not worth it because it is not working in her store. She can’t find the ball no matter how hard she searches for it.

All the time her inventory data feed has been down because the modem for her DMS is infected with cockroaches where the parts manager dropped a burrito behind it in the parts warehouse where he hides to take breaks during the day and every email from the store is going into a spam filter because they have a local mail server and the F&I manager and title clerk are sending porn and the email around that says microsoft is going to give them $286 for every time it is forwarded to their 800 person contact list putting all the email address in the to field and the person who did online sales two years ago has an autoresponder set up to send every person who has ever submitted a lead through the website a daily email to call him on his disconnected cell phone to get the best damned service and because they need a car today and it is time for them to step up.

And people wonder why dealers have such a hard time getting it. It is not their process that is broke it all the processes going on around them inflicted by the vendors who ply their trade in the niche or people who are trying to figure out a way to stay in the car business in a consultave role when they do not even know how to set up an email client.

The good thing is for people who are serving the dealers with integrity and for the dealers that operate with integrity and own a franchise other that one of the big three there is hope. Current market conditions are going to rid the industry of posers and carnies at all levels. OEMs, Dealers, vendors, consultants and dealership employees who have been faking it for years.

Now is the time for the dealers to act to own their competitive markets and make rational choices. This can be done through education or finding consultants that can guide them who do not have an interest in pushing a certain vendors products.

Transparency is a buzz word that vendors and consultants use in their pitches to dealers telling them they need to be transparent with their ionteractions with consumers now dealers need to hold them transparent as well. If a consultant or vendor that is recomending other widgets for the dealer to use in their online marketing efforts will not provide full disclosure as to ther relationship with these other parties the best thing the dealer can do is tell them to play their shell game at down the road motors and seek education and non biased recomendations.

Now that you are ready to leave and go back about your day take a minute and leave a comment and let me know what you think.