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My guest on this episode of Suds & Search is Lee Manning, Co-founder of Armchair Marketing. Lee is generally considered one of, if not the top automotive digital marketers in the UK. Prior to starting his own agency, Lee had an amazing run at a UK top 20 automotive dealer group. His work quickly garnered attention and the group he was responsible for began winning awards…lots of awards. Over an 18 month span, Lee and his team won 18 prestigious industry awards.

Since 2016, Lee has consulted for some of the largest dealer groups in the UK, helping these dealers generate more inquiries at a lower cost on Google and Facebook. Armed with an incredible amount of data after years of working in auto, Lee is uniquely positioned to understand the automotive market in the UK. We’ll talk a little bit about how Lee uses the vast amount of data they’ve accumulated to make smarter marketing decisions.

Lee’s co-founder affectionately describes him as a “strange marketer.” I think that comes from his truly extraordinary backstory. Lee left school at 14, took a job in auto, and hated it at first. It’s amazing how many times during our conversation Lee’s ability to look at problems differently helped him make a major breakthrough.

I start our conversation by talking about his agency a little bit. If you visit their home page, you’ll notice that Lee and his team do things a little bit differently. Armchair drives visitors to their free educational material like the company’s extremely impressive podcast called The Armchair Show. There’s no pushy sales language at all. The only way you’d know that this is an award-winning agency is a statement that says, “Our sales team told us to say ‘please remind people that we’re also marketing agency.’”

Join me for a conversation with Lee Manning. We’ll talk about how dealerships should allocate their budget properly by channel, we’ll chat about his business operations software tool called Leebot, and London shenanigans with Greg Gifford.