I was in Tampa for Digital Dealer a few weeks ago, so I collected quick marketing tips from some of the speakers and experts at the show. While it was an automotive conference, these marketing tips will help any business out there – watch and learn how to be better!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. I spoke at Digital Dealer in Tampa a few weeks ago, and I grabbed some of the top speakers and automotive experts to share helpful marketing tips for car dealers in 2021.

I used to collect marketing tips from speakers at every conference, but thanks to COVID, we haven’t had any in-person events for almost a year and a half… So of course, at the first conference back, I had to collect some tips to share with you. We got some awesome ones, check it out:

So here is a quick tip on Google My Business excellence and best practice. When is the last time you’ve audited all the categories in each of your Google My Business listings? And when I say each, that would be your sales, your service, your parts, your body shop. Oftentimes, dealers ignore the admin section of Google My Business, but there’s so much goodness and so much good information to be found. So go in the info tab, click on categories, and then look at the categories for each of your GMB listings. Be sure that you delineate, and that means separate the sales categories from the service categories, from the parts, from the body shop, and make sure none are overlapping. Your goal there is to make sure that Google has a really good idea of what your sales GMB is all about, what your service GMB is all about and so on.

And so as you do that over time, you will increasingly win on non-branded category search. You also need to of course, pay attention to reviews and other content that you would add to it. But that’s a good quick tip.

So, this is my tip for businesses, mid-year 2021 is, are you benchmarking and how are you benchmarking competitors? Competitively? Search engine optimization and paid search, how are you measuring that, and how are you compensating for market share losses? How are you capitalizing on market share gains? One of the biggest things happening in search right now is focusing on core web vitals and overall SEO health. So how are you doing that? Make sure you’re focusing on the most important parts of your business for growth in search. And then how are you measuring what is the results from that? Your phone called generation, your leader form generation, your contact generation, visits, et cetera. Make sure you’re being savvy, growing opportunities in your area, and capitalizing on those going forward.

So one of the most important things when you’re talking about internet sales is to make sure you’ve got a strong cadence for your BDC or your sales team. When we have a good schedule for phone calls, email and texts, day one, day two, day three. And even if there’s not a text task, I 100% recommend every salesperson be the professional, follow up with a text message. It’s the modern day thank you note, it puts you at the top of the queue. So when they’re texting their mom, their cousin, their boyfriend, girlfriend, or their bookie, your name’s showing up there at the top as Jimmy from ABC Motors and a great opportunity to get their next vehicle.

Okay, so I’m going to give you guys an easy tip for communications. It’s going to be really simple. Anything that you talk to a customer about, any voicemail, any text, any email, you end it with the question. So if you do it like this, come here, come in my video for a minute. Okay? So I tell everybody this. Do you like the color red?

I do.

Do you like the color blue?

I do.

How do you feel about glitter?

I don’t have a feeling about glitter.

Would you eat a dead squirrel out of the middle of the road?

No.

That’s ridiculous question. Why did you answer it?

Because you asked.

Because your whole life you were taught that the polite thing to do is to answer a question when you’re asked. Even a stranger will ask you a question in a store and they’ll be like, “Do you not hear me?” It’s automatically assumed. So everything that you do, you end with a question, not a thank you, and then I want to earn your business and blah, blah, blah. Just end it with a question. That’s my pro tip for you, super easy for the day

Quick tip. Log your damn leads. Right now, people aren’t logging phone call leads right now in this high inventory environment. Those are your leads for tomorrow. Get them logged. If you’re not logging them, get Foureyes Safety Net so we log them for you.

Hey everybody, here’s my quick tip. It’s all about getting the customer opt in for texting. When you have a customer that is in the showroom, or you have a customer on the phone, ask this question. Bobbie.

Yes.

Are you a texter?

Absolutely.

Great. What’s your cell phone number?

(989) 672-9945.

Great. Hey, I’m going to send you a text opt-in, please reply back yes so we can make this process so much simpler through texting. Sound good?

Why do I have to do that?

Because it’s a requirement for the dealership.

Everybody always asks that.

That’s right, but that’s okay. It’s a requirement. Keep it simple. Tell the customer what you want the path of least resistance to be, and they’ll answer the question with a yes, so you can have texting. That’s the number one form of communication. You’re talking to the customer, ask the question.

One of the tips that I would have for dealers today, we’ve been in this price war for decades where everyone’s trying to be the lowest price and losing money on cars. So I would suggest stop advertising with price and let the car be the star. Start focusing on selling the car because consumers typically are shopping for a specific car, not a specific price. So let the car be the star and you’ll find that you’re attracting more customers.

Automotive sales consultants need to take this car sales thing more seriously. If you’re not building your brand within the dealership’s brand, you’re leaving money on the table. Simple, quick tip is that you should be using obviously paid social media to be able to drive traffic to your website if you have one. If you don’t have one, let’s start there. But if you have your own website, one thing is this. Instead of using basic stuff like cars, do something a little bit different, certain demographics like the LGBT community, or females, or law enforcement. So yes, you can drive specific ads towards demographics, not just cars, prices, et cetera. Again, this is SVB.

Right now, interesting times. If you’re not thinking about vehicle acquisition in your marketing, you’re missing a big opportunity. For the first time ever in auto, the playing field is leveled and you have the ability to slingshot your dealership by going after several different ways of marketing from vehicle acquisition, customer retention and customer acquisition. So rethink the way you’re doing marketing.

All right guys, we want to give you a tip today. Have five people that are not in the automotive industry go through your service scheduler and try to schedule an appointment. A lot of service schedulers have bottlenecks because there’s too many op codes. It gets confusing and we’re relying on a consumer to tie their problem to an op code. So have people outside of the automotive industry go through your service scheduler, get with your service scheduler companies, and really clean up those op codes and make that process easy for your people.

Pretty awesome tips, right? That’s all we’ve got for this week’s video, 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.