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In 2011, Jim Licenski of Google put out an industry changing eBook that started the discussion and movement around Winning the ZMOT … the Zero Moment of Truth. It was well written and quite an accurate thesis on the importance of winning the ZMOT and the reality that in 2011 as an advertiser/dealer you weren’t behind your competition, you were behind your consumer. The reason of course is that they have access to hundreds of online pieces of information to inform them once they got into the buying cycle for a vehicle.
The theory then was that once “stimulus” happened you had better be there trying to win their attention at the zero moment of truth. Well guess what happened? Through the work of many opportunistic advertising vendors and your own self interests, vendors and advertisers/you started coming up with every possible way to jump in at the zero moment of truth: Paid Search, SEO strategies, retargeting, contextual/behavioral targeting, integrated email-mail-display strategies, more retargeting, pre-roll, post-roll, facebook, twitter, Pintrest, Instagram Pandora, geo-targeting… and the list goes on. For that interested fish in the water there are now hundreds of hooks in the water vying for his bite. As you can imagine he’s very confused and suspicious of most of them.
“Shoppers visit 15-21 sites before engaging a dealership…” at least that’s what most digital marketing experts and parroting internet managers will tell you. But what they won’t tell you is why that’s true. The why is because of three simple reasons: 1) lack of familiarity or trust in your brand/product, 2) confusing shopping environment, and 3) too many distracting and confusing messages. And guess what created that lack of trust, confusing and distracting online environment… ahem… remember all of those shinny metal objects (hooks in the water)?
You see, once a person gets into the sales cycle – generally accepted to be approximately 90-days – there are so many digital offers and messages (hooks in the water) that drive the consumer all over the internet. Let’s be honest with ourselves; no shopper ever wakes up and says “hey I think I’m going to go surf dozens of sites and links to find a car to thoroughly confuse myself because I have all the time in the world.” As a matter of fact if they could get all of their info at a couple trusted sites that’s the only sites they’d visit. And with all of those hooks in the water – your sophisticated website and landing page has very little to do with their ultimate choice. We call that conversion. Remember they visit 15-21 sites… that most probably includes yours. They did visit. They did leave. They may come back, but they did leave. All sorts of stats including your own bounce rates prove that.
So what’s a marketer to do? Well in the words of my good friend and one of the industry’s top sales professionals, Grant Cardone…“If you’re not first, you’re last.”
That’s right, be first. Condition them to think YOU FIRST. Be the bait that the fish is looking for BEFORE he knows he’s looking. If you’re at all familiar with Bass flyfishing you know that it’s not any fly, not any lure in the water, but a very specific lure that the fish is familiar with. He may not be looking for it now but because he’s familiar with it when he does see it… bam! You’ve got him.
Here’s an analogy: you’re in the market for a new smartphone and you begin shopping. You see and visit the retargeting and paid search of “CheapMobilePhones.com,” Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T. You get to CheapMobilePhones.com and they’ve got a pretty detail page, even Purl’s dedicated to you with cute chat boxes, even offering lowest best prices on their new cellular service CheapWidesSpreadMobileCarrierService. They even promote the lowest prices, the shortest term contracts. They even have good reviews. You know the rest of the story, you’re going to do business with the familiar brand because they’re familiar aka more trustworthy. They did all the trust/brand building to you BEFORE you were in the sales funnel. And with today’s available technologies as a dealership you can do that too. You can condition your customers to choose you BEFORE they get into the noisy sale funnel.
This is why ZMOT is TOO LATE. Once in the sales cycle or the proverbial sales funnel there are too many distractions, too many hooks in the water. In today’s noisy online market it’s more important then ever for you to brand early and brand often.
Brand BEFORE the funnel. Then win easier by being the brand sought out in the funnel. That’s how you get most favored nation status in the sales funnel. That’s how you increase your conversion. That’s how you have an unfair competitive advantage in the sales funnel. Intelligent early effective branding reduces your overall marketing expenses, increases your sales, service, and retention numbers by dramatically increasing conversion and close ratios.
When it comes to branding, in today’s noisy online market you should maintain only two rules:
- It makes more sense to persistently drive your brand to all of your customers, and
- It makes the more sense to do so sooner rather then later.
If traffic, sales, service business, and retention are what you’re after then in today’s noisy online market your most effective tool is early and persistent branding. Where and how you brand is important too. Remember, more people today spend more time online infront of their laptops and browsers then they do in-front of their television or in the newspaper on in the mailbox. They’re online. Brand to them there, before they get into the sales funnel, because advertising at the Zero Moment of Truth is too late.
I hope this article is helpful to you in your marketing planning and initiatives moving forward. Now here comes the sales pitch…
If this article makes sense to you and you want to have a real world discussion about how your dealership can gain an unfair competitive advantage BEFORE the sales funnel shoot us an email or give us a call and we’ll walk you through it. You can reach me directly at ronmorrison@pureinfluencer.net or give me a call directly at (408) 218-6407.
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