“Believe us we’re the biggest.”
“Believe us we’re the least expensive.”
“Believe us we’ve been around the longest.”
“Believe us because we spend the most with our publishers.”
“Believe us because more dealers use us than any of our competitors.”
“Believe us because we have more awards and trophies than our competitors.”
Good grief! Truthfully this marketing vendor chest beating is getting out of control.
What ever happened to: “Don’t believe us, test us to grow your market share!”
When it comes to marketing Mr. Dealer, it’s important that you think with experienced marketers, and yes for many good reasons you should think with Google too, but I would argue that it is more important to your sales and profitability that you don’t just think with Google but you in fact “believe Google.” Believe what Google is proving with respect to automotive online shopper behavior today. Believe their studies, believe their data. And while you’re at it, please believe in your own common sense. Before I go on to the points about why you should believe Google and how you should act (market) accordingly in 2017 let me take a moment to thank you and recognize a fact that many of my fellow vendor colleagues have forgotten or seem unwilling to admit:
Mr. Dealer were it not for your hard work, your vision, your persistency and your common sense in building a successful automotive enterprise… we as vendors wouldn’t be here. THANK YOU Mr. Dealer for creating the opportunity to build an ecosystem of marketing, technology, training, and services around the business and opportunities that you, your employees, and your peers created. You took the risks. You made the investments. You created this space, not us. We’re just along for the ride. Sadly too many of us “vendors” get that part of the relationship confused. Without a doubt your zeal, energy, and common sense got you to where you are today and you’d be here still with or without us. Some might argue maybe not as easily, some might argue maybe not as profitably. Those arguments may be true but you and I know that your passion, hard work, and good old-fashioned common sense would have ultimately gotten you to the destination and goals that you aimed for.
Years ago I was in a car in New York city with a good friend of mine, a dealer, and I asked him about the challenge of potentially adding a new franchise to his group. Today as I listen to all this vendor chest beating I’m reminded about the point that he made that day… he said: “it’s not the club, it’s the guy swinging the club.” He was right, us vendors, us media companies, us “products and services” we’re just the club and we don’t matter nearly as much as “the guy swinging the club.”
Call bullshit Mr. Dealer on any and every vendor claiming sales or service attribution from their marketing efforts if their supporting data includes any of the following: website traffic volume, clicks, sessions, impressions, cpc (costs per click), ctr (click through rate), video plays, direct mail pieces or emails that are in anyway whatsoever related to any transactions in your DMS. Just call bullshit; I’ll explain why.
Not only are those metrics aged and irrelevant with respect to how car buyers shop today, those data elements are all about visitors/shoppers in your market that were going to get to your website or dealership regardless of any of the marketing tactics that drove those metrics. You wouldn’t give credit to your local City Planner for the traffic light timing that turned the light green at the intersection so that your customer could get to your dealership no matter how pretty his analytics reporting or mobile app was would you? Of course not. Because the light turning green, the customer getting to your dealership who was already headed there, and then ultimately buying from you are all “correlation events.” Not one of them is a “causation event.” Correlation is not causation. Unfortunately too many marketing vendors conflate correlation with causation so often that even their employees don’t know the difference. Even worse far too many vendors conflate correlation with causation to at best make themselves look good, and at worst to take advantage of you.
Use your common sense Mr. Dealer. If I execute a marketing tactic to an audience that has a statistically high probability of buying or servicing with you in the next 90 days, then there is also a correlating high probability that I will find a significant number of transactions from those audience members in your DMS after I execute the campaign. Why? Because that audience in fact already had a high probability of being there! The marketing tactics (ppc, mail, email, etc) and the transaction events (visits, clicks, opens, purchases, etc) are merely correlated events.
Let’s say I went further and built a fancy easy to use mobile app for my marketing and reporting. Then I use that app to show you that the audience members who were already going to be in your DMS were the members that I marketed to, and therefore I should get partial credit for the transactions. Question: because of my mobile app, did my marketing tactics now cause those transactions that had a statistically high probability of being there anyway? Of course not. All I did was take credit for correlation by confusing it with causation and simultaneously putting lipstick on a pig: bad analysis.
Later if you have time and you want to have some fun, go check out this website to get a better understanding of the ridiculousness of correlation versus causation.https://www.fastcodesign.com/3030529/infographic-of-the-day/hilarious-graphs-prove-that-correlation-isnt-causation
Example of correlation to causation
Mr. Dealer, times aren’t changing, they’ve changed. The fact that the shopper is on your website tells you nothing about what other third party or dealer sites they saw before yours or what other sites they’re going to visit next. So why then do the elements of the click path of how they got to you matter with respect to transactions in your DMS. They don’t. They’re simply correlation. Yes those elements are pieces of evidence of how they got to your website, yes those elements should influence your SEM campaign attributes and structure but that’s all they are, pieces of evidence about your campaign; they’re not evidence of stimulus nor motive for their purchase. They’re not causation. Call BS on that aged connection of correlation to causation. Better yet, #AskForThe2017Stuff (credit Sean Stapleton of Dealer Team Work for that gem of a hash tag).
If your vendor’s attribution data is about people in your market getting to your website, then believe Google
- The online automotive shopper studies – even Googles’ about how shoppers behave online today proves that shoppers wanting to buy a vehicle are going to get to your website to find and, or research their next purchase regardless of what you do from a paid search perspective. It is true that you can use paid search strategies to make it easier to find you. It is also true that consumers will search and find all of their options in their given location. Consumers don’t automatically turn dumb and stop searching or comparing other websites just because they found your location online first.
- The vast majority of visitors (according to your own Google Analytics) to your website are organic or direct visitors. Translation: you already have more traffic than your team can handle, traffic is not your issue. It might have been your issue way back in the yesteryears of 2015 but today traffic is not your issue. Website visitor to lead conversion is. Lead-to-Sales rate is. Generating more website traffic is not.
- Google calls it The New Normal: Engagement and converting engaged visitors to leads is the best use of today’s marketing dollars. Again believe Google: “The engagement pyramid isn’t just about retention and growth of our exiting customer base. It’s about starting with the 5% who will be most interested in what we have to say and most willing to speak to us” – Google! https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/articles/engagement-project-new-normal.html
To be sure, search engine marketing in automotive is important. The search engines with the largest most “intent signifying” audiences are Google and Bing, so yes you should devote a good amount of your attention to them, but keep in mind that a more profitable, willing, and perfect audience is on your website and the majority of that perfect audience chose to be there… organically. In the time that you’ve taken to read this article thus far your website hosted approximately 2 highly engaged visitors… did you do anything to recognize and engage with them? Did you know you can?
Again, don’t just think with Google, believe Google. In addition to Google, the person or persons you should believe rather than marketing vendors are your customers. It blows my mind how many times dealers are willing to ask customers what brought them into their dealership or about their experience in their dealership but are not willing to drill down in that line of questioning for quality actionable information. Here’s a question you should ask your customers – even just a dozen of them…
ASK YOUR CUSTOMERS IF THEY SAW OTHER DEALERSHIPS WEBSITES whilst they were in the buying process. Nearly 90% of them will tell you they did. Translation: they were going to FIND you (and the other dealers sites) regardless of your marketing tactics. BELIEVE GOOGLE: your customers in your market, even your competitors’ customers are going to find you whether you like it or not because Google, Bing, Yahoo and their respective search algorithms and search result page layouts have made it nearly impossible for your customers not to.
“your sales process was great, the car is amazing, the price is unbelievable, the only frustrating thing about the whole process was not finding your dealership website in Google.”
– Said No Customer Ever
The way devices work in 2017, the way browsers work in 2017, the way search engines work in 2017 make it so easy for a customer to find every single brand, dealer, vehicle, even price in the market that they’re searching. ” dealers near me” has been and continues to be a popular keyword search term. And according to Google 50% all searchers will make their decision based on proximity to their home or office. Consumers will find what they’re looking for. We’re not talking about a $40 lamp shade here, we’re talking about a $40,000 vehicle! They’re going to find it and your website whether you like it or not. They’re going to find you if you work with a boutique agency of 4 people with 20 years of experience or a large advertising agency with a half dozen departments of 25 year olds out of college. “Today Marketing” is vastly different than “Strategic Marketing” in that what matters most is how your market behaves today (anonymous shopping) versus what used to strategically work yesterday based on how you behaved (interruption marketing). I’d recommend that you integrate how people shop in 2017 into your strategy.
“Today marketing” for automotive dealers requires not that you just think with Google, or simply use Google, but that you in fact believe Google. Your marketing tactics should be built on what is true today, not just what was true years ago. What is true today about automotive marketing is:
- The vast majority of your shoppers use search engines in the beginning, middle, and end of their sales cycles – it’s simply ultra convenient.
- The vast majority of people that visited your website and subsequently purchased from you did so because of your dealerships’ location.
- The vast majority of the shoppers that are inclined to stay true to your brand are going to find and visit your website organically.
- The vast majority of traffic on your website “chose to be there” organically or via direct path url.
- The vast majority of the traffic on your website (98%) does not convert to a lead from your website (re-read that).
- The average automotive online shopper has access to over 30 online touch points and visits 8 different automotive sites before making their purchase.
- 20% of your website “sales visitors” are “highly engaged” shoppers visiting multiple sites and intend to buy their car within the next 30 days.
- Marketers cannot “create quality traffic,” they can only redirect it. Translation: hooray, you put a paid search ad unit in front of someone who would have naturally clicked an organic ad unit, you paid for something you most likely would have gotten for free. It’s like hiring someone to open your showroom doors.
- Marketers cannot make website visitors “more engaged.” Your inventory can, your pricing and incentives can, your blogs can, your videos can, your website can, your marketers cannot.
- That last click is not what brought your customer to your dealership. Nor is the first nor any of the clicks in the middle. Those clicks merely correlate with the fact that the customer came to your dealership.
- Traffic is not your issue. Your visitor to lead conversion rate is. Your internet lead to sale rate is. Your sales process and customer experiences are. Your website traffic is not.
- Your website has varying degrees of interested and engaged visitors, you must engage them accordingly.
So what should Today Marketing look like? I’d recommend starting with these five “foundational objectives” for your 2017 and beyond Automotive Marketing Strategy.
One: Relationships: Strategies and investments around customer experiences and relationships. This means focusing on “going deep with relationships rather than going wide in your market.” You can and need to win more of those opportunities that are highly engaged in the market and on your website. Begin to build the foundation not of marketing to people, but marketing between people. People in your market talk and with social media and review sites they do so more often, give them spectacular experiences to talk about.
Two: Engagement: Optimized websites does not mean just for time, load, response experiences, but optimized for visitor engagement. Brian Pasch of the PCG Companies and the PCG Engagement Project is an excellent resource for “Today Marketing” strategies that help you capitalize on SEM tactics and expenditures to win more of the engaged visitors on your website. Learn more about their Engagement Project.
Three: Conversion: Today’s Marketers don’t accept “average” as an acceptable indicator of performance. A 1.5 to 3% average website conversion rate can in every case be improved. You don’t have to accept average. That’s one of the major components to focus on in 2017. Inspecting conversion rates and persistently improving them is another mark of a “Today Marketer.” Remember this important fact: Any 2% increase in conversion rate of engaged website visitors sells more cars than any 20% increase in quality website traffic.
Four: Sales Rate: Specifically your internet department’s internet lead-to-sales rate. Here again, you and your management team must dedicate time and resources toward getting your lead-to-sales rate above the industry failure rate of 90%. A 10% lead-to-sales rate is costing you lots of time, energy, and money. It’s irresponsible to want to drive more website traffic when you’re below a 20% lead-to-sales rate. Fix your lead mix, drive higher quality engaged leads to your internet department so that their time and effort is maximized.
Five: Opportunity Cost: While it’s the last point, I’d argue it’s perhaps the most important point. Consider your opportunity costs in both money spent on marketing tactics as well as time spent chasing down leads that close at only 10%. This is the opportunity cost that you want to watch and recover. Your internet and, or Business Development Center is an expensive resource. They can do significantly more, and bring you greater returns on your marketing investments if you’ll first focus on providing them with a much higher quality lead mix. A 20% internet lead-to-sales rate is attainable, make that your goal and work towards it daily. As your team closes at higher rates they will be more successful and in turn you will sell more cars, more profitably.
It’s your dealership and it’s your money so the only thing that should matter is how you meet the needs of your staff, the expectations of your customers, the requirements of your manufacturer, your profitability… and the amount of marketshare you’re winning over your competition. I’ve known and worked with many of the marketing vendors in our industry and many of them are well intentioned good people. Many of them are hard working, ethical vendors. Some of them are wickedly bright, but their steeped expertise in a digital marketing tactic shouldn’t negate your common sense. Remember, it’s no longer 2015, you have more website traffic than your team can handle, traffic is not your issue. Work on improving the 5 foundational objectives above, they’ll gain you more marketshare and cost you a lot less money which means you’ll be much more profitable.