In this week’s episode, I collected tips from the speakers and experts at Digital Dealer in Las Vegas. Check out the amazing insights and learn how to be even better at marketing and operations…
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. This week, I’m sharing some ridiculously awesome marketing tips from the speakers and experts at Digital Dealer Las Vegas.
It’s the end of the fall conference season, and if you’ve been watching this series, you know I’ve pretty much been at a conference every week since the beginning of September. I was in Las Vegas for Digital Dealer a few weeks ago, and as always, I grabbed some of the speakers and experts and had them share a quick video tip. I’ve compiled all the tips for this week’s episode, check it out:
Here’s a quick tip for you, just to help you out. Make sure that you do have a defined process that is customer-facing. Make sure that you have it clear, you have it able to be pointed to, and be able to be understood by the customer going through your process, whether it’s on the phone, make sure that it’s described. And when they show up, make sure that it’s shown to them exactly what it takes for a customer to go from beginning to end at your store, so that they understand what’s happening, and the expectation is set, so that they can go right along with the process.
The biggest tip that I tell all dealers, is to be a customer. You want to make sure that no matter what you’re doing, whether it’s processing your website, or processing your showroom, or your service drive, go in and be a customer, and find all your pitfalls.
So, dealers, check you CTAs. Where do they go? How many do you have on every VDP? If you have like schedule a test drive, and it launches into a chat, or if you have What’s My Payment, and it goes into a DRT, you’re losing customers, probably like 150% of your opportunities go down when your CTAs are directed in the wrong direction. Make sure they match what the consumer wants to do. Nice little litmus test, have your wife, have your daughter, have somebody, have your kids click the boxes, see where they go, and how they feel about it. Do you want to click something where you’re not expecting to talk to somebody, and then you end up talking to somebody? No. You’re going to blow those people out. So check your CTAs, make sure they’re right.
Stop relying on your OEM feeds to talk about APRs, even if they’re low. Quit depending on everybody else plugged in on your website to deliver your message. This is not a branding tip, this is, get down to what makes people buy cars right now. Especially if we have another interest rate before the end of the year. Especially as affordability gets tougher, inventory might get more scarce. Tell them your message. Tell them your value proposition. Tell them your why buy. Quit being reliant on your OEM, and everybody else around you, for lead and phone call generation. Sell more cars because of how you do business.
My tip is simple. If you’re not looking at your inventory, and paying attention to how much you have in stock, what your close rate is, it doesn’t matter how much you spend in marketing. You can only sell the vehicles that you have, and the number of vehicles. So you can get all the leads in the world, but if you only have one car, and 50 leads on that, you can only sell once.
So my pro tip is, if you are at this conference, or you’re in a 20 group, or you have somebody here that is coming back to you, to not just sign up for a product and enforce the implementation immediately. Go back, get your CRM ready, if it’s going to integrate, get the tools ready that you need, and then start the onboarding process. Even if you signed here, you can in fact ask for the time to be able to do that. But if you don’t do it, the product’s likely to fail, and then you’re going to blame the person that sold it to you, and the truth is, that’s not usually why products in our space don’t work out.
The big tip I would have for dealers, is to not look at anything that you’re doing digitally as set-it-and-forget-it, especially Google Business Profile, or your SEO, uh, the technical SEO on your website. I mean, simple things like a server failure, and a reboot, they might reboot and reinstall your website using the old version of it, and none of the new changes you have. So you have to constantly review it, and analyze, and make sure it’s on track.
One of the things that we see all the time in ad account audits, is the failure to use correct targeting exclusions. And we see dealers spending a ton of money out of market. So one tip that we recommend for everyone is, look at the market that you’re trying to serve with your dealership, and exclude every other state, every other country around the world, so you can avoid wasting money on bot traffic, driving traffic from people that are out of area. You can save up to … Or, or make your SEM budget about 15% more efficient, just by doing that.
So I think a hot tip for right now is making sure your pixel is tracked singled across all your websites, and if you have other vendors with pixels on the websites, because it’s so important to have clean pixel data. Especially with, um, having Comply Auto on the site, and multiple events firing. So track singling your pixel events is super, super important for data, data integrity.
One of the most important GA4 checklist items for dealers is to set up their custom dimensions for the ASC Standards. The ASC is the Automotive Standards Council. Standards for GA4, what does that mean? You’ll be able to now pass vehicle VIN numbers, stock number, make, model, engine, whatever you like from that vehicle page, you can pass through the events. So now, instead of reporting on our lead forms, now we can look at our lead forms broken out by new, versus CPO, versus used, versus over 60 days, or under 30 days. You get the idea.
But, first, you have to have those dimensions created, and you need to choose a partner that can do that for you. There’s a few website companies that are dabbling with it. I know SearchLab will do it for all their customers, you just have to ask. And, uh, once you get those set up, now all the data will flow, and you’ll begin, uh, you’ll be able to start reporting on that. So, ask about it.
Okay. So here’s your quick tip from Digital Dealer in Las Vegas, maybe we don’t waste $3,000 to $4,000 on extra software to actually manage our own customer database, and just clean and customize our CRMs, that we’re already paying for, instead of wasting money, and our team’s time and effort.
Um. One of the things that we’re really paying attention to right now is seeing what Google Tag Managers are on the website, and what tags they’re firing. Because with GA4 and everything, if you fire an event without the proper tracking into GA4 before the actual website company does, your traffic comes in as not set, you don’t get the data.
So we’ve been using a tool called GTM Spy, where you can go and see what, um, Google Tag Mangers are on your website. On top of that, you can download the JSON file, and see exactly what triggers and events they’re firing. You can import into your own Google Tag Manager, to see exactly what they did. And from there, make some adjustment. Because if you have additional pixels, or Google Analytics Scores that are messing with your data, it’s really important. Like, for us, Facebook pixels, if we have extra events, we can see a Cost Per Click increase of by 20-30%, just by having extra viewed content events.
So getting rid of those, seeing what Google Tag Managers are on your website, is super, super important. So check out GTM Spy.
I love free advertising, so I recommend every dealer go out and check out their Google Business Profile. Make sure you have three departments, fill in all the categories, and take full advantage of this great free tool.
Hey, what’s going on, everyone? If I was to give you just one tip, a, a small tip that can really help you elevate your employee game, it’s change your marketing when it comes to how you are going out there and trying to find employees. A lot of times we get on Indeed, and we ask for car people, “Hey, car salesmen, come see us if you want a job.”
Let’s take that vocabulary out, let’s put stuff that we want. Let’s put in titles and objectives that we want them to do, and job stuff that they actually will complete with, that we want them to complete at the store. So if you do that, and you put a really good description about what we expect out of them, instead of what they do, it’ll change everything, and you’ll get better employees coming in.
Pretty amazing tips, right?
That’s all the time we’ve got left for this week’s episode, so you know what that means.
Put your hand on the screen right here:
We totally just high-fived ‘cause you learned something awesome.
Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.
