In this week’s episode, I share a quick recap of the Ignition Automotive Conference, as well as tips from the speakers at the event.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
The first thing that you need to do is make sure you’re in the right lane. Not the auction lane, your service lane, when you’re looking to do acquisitions. And you don’t need to pay for super expensive software. With a couple of customizations into your CRM, you can pay one time and have a better return on that investment. Lower acquisition costs. There you go.
Hey, dealers, we are at our conference today and we’re talking about AI. That’s what I’m talking about today, so pro tip for your guys, processes, new things that you have going into place, awesome app called Scribe. Love it. Free trial, super cheap. Takes everything that you’re doing for a process that you put into text and turns it into visual guides for your teams.
Hi Greg and audience. My tip for today is to get in your Google Analytics 4 and inspect your events because just about two or three weeks ago, Google, unknowingly to most customers and most dealers, went in and turned on a number of events as conversion events in almost every dealer account we’ve looked at. And so, there’s a couple steps. One, go into your Google Analytics 4, click on the gear icon, go in the middle column and click on Events, and look at those events and make sure no new ones have been turned on.
Scroll through every single event. If you find ones that have been turned on as conversion events, of course turn those off, but then go into your, go into your Setup Assistant. Again, that’s the same settings, middle column, set up a system for GA4, and make sure you hit the little buttons to say we’ve already marked conversions correctly, we’ve already got data flowing. You’ll see little green check marks fire up. Check mark all those and you won’t have Google messing around with your conversion events again, and you can go forward in a clean way. Hope that helps.
If you don’t already have a first party data plan and strategy in place for your dealership, you need to right now. You’re really only able to target about 30% retargeting for your customers because of cookie deprecation, so if you don’t have a plan to uncover your future audience from your website down to the household level, and you, you don’t have a partner that can help you do that, find one quickly, layer all that data, segment it, and activate on it.
So viewers of Local Search Tuesday know a whole lot about local search, particularly on the SEO side. When it comes to paid search side, there’s not such a thing as a local PPC subset. You have to define exactly what does local mean when you go about advertising in your own market for your dealership or for any kind of local business for that. So beginning to be able to map out specifically where it is that you want to reach people and do the math of how you reach these people.
When we talk about radius targeting, radii are a confusing thing because although it’s a circle and just expanding it out reaches a larger group, going from a five-mile radius to a 10 mile radius is actually increasing your reach four-fold. You could be increasing your budget four-fold as well. So with that, wanna make sure that we’re focusing back on fundamentals and about how you reach your local audience.
Don’t forget that the car business is a people business. And when people come to your dealership with their kids, well, you need to steal this idea. When I sold cars, I would go to Walmart and Target and buy Hot Wheels and Matchbox Cars. And every time somebody came into the dealership with their kids, I immediately went to those kids and said, “I don’t know if your mom and dad are getting a new car tonight, but you are.” That was the way to build rapport for me.
It was comfortable, let me, uh, show that, uh, I cared about somebody’s kid, which they care about more than anything in the world. And it allowed there to be a great piece of rapport built, as I then tried to help that person or that couple figure out how to get into the right car. So don’t forget it’s a people business. Do all of the things that you can to make people really comfortable once they come to your dealership.
