While researching, I came across Brian Pasch’s article on DrivingSales.com titled, “Is Your Advertising Strategy Based on Fear, Data, or Blind Faith?” In his article, Brian builds a good case around the thinking that TrueCar is more of a symptom or product of an addictive  tendency repeatedly displayed by auto dealerships. I agree with Pasch’s point.

What Brian is getting at is something I believe is true. I built my business around it blogging for car dealers. It’s how companies like HubSpot have achieved great success. It’s the reality that Internet marketing today gives essentially all businesses, including auto dealerships, the ability to establish their own marketing pipelines to drive sales and stop relying on outside sources for all of their business.

To be clear, the argument is not against using third-party lead generators and partners to drive sales, but to build your own sales machine so that you can keep your third-party partners selective and minimal, and ultimately avoid the dilemma of feeling forced to work with businesses such as TrueCar.

Build Your Own Inbound Marketing Machine

The idea here is to build your own inbound marketing system. Inbound marketing is a term coined by HubSpot that refers to the practice of using content and advertising to educate and inform your target audiences through free and easily accessible content persistently over time to establish and build trust and ultimately sales of your product.

This, as opposed to traditional marketing practices of splattering your name and logo everywhere with the hope and expectation of it magically turning into sales, is necessary today primarily due to the role of search engines and Internet marketing. You can still advertise your business using traditional media. The problem is the cost and the ROI of it if that is your primary or only approach. When you do the math it just doesn’t add up.

Google AdWords vs. Traditional Media

Refer to Brian’s example in his article where:

• The cost per visitor for their Adwords was: $1.50
• The cost per visitor from their Traditional Media was: $18.65

Technically, Google AdWords is not inbound marketing but it is search engine marketing.  If you look at Google’s ZMOT (Zero Moment of Truth), one thing you will see from the research is that the primary stimulus points for auto shoppers IS NOT traditional media. It’s the Internet and search engines are the gateway to the Internet.

It is easy for Internet marketers to challenge why you would invest the majority of your advertising dollars into traditional media. We are bias. But traditional advertising sales reps will argue that if you want to reach the masses then you need to spend on traditional media.

I understand that dealers continue to spend on traditional media because it is what they are familiar and comfortable with. But as Pasch suggests, that is fear-based thinking and eventually it will be to your detriment if it isn’t already.

How Blogging Benefits Your Dealership Digital Strategy

I am not here to convince you that traditional media is not the best use of your advertising dollars. I am not here to tell you that TrueCar is bad for the auto business either. What I am here to share with you is why and how blogging is an important part of your marketing strategy, and how it can help dealers that feel forced into a corner about using TrueCar.

Blogging is about producing content for two primary purposes:

1. For SEO
2. For Relationships

In my early days of blogging for car dealers I would say that you are blogging for people (relationships) and for robots (SEO). Blogging still is about these two things and it’s important not only to understand this but to have a strategy for it.

A blog marketing strategy is tricky. There are numerous aspects to it.

• The strategic aspect
• The technical aspect
• The executive aspect
• The analytical aspect

All this is a lot to juggle for most auto dealerships, but not all of it needs to be managed by the dealership. Some of this process can be outsourced, and quite frankly some of it should be.

Download Free White Paper

Details can, should, and do not need to be outsourced by dealers that want to blog are outlined in my White Paper Blogging 101 for Car Dealers. In this white paper we explain the role that content marketing plays for auto dealers and we introduce 5 different types of content that auto dealerships can produce to promote their blog and website. We also dive in to why auto dealerships want to have a blog marketing strategy and which parts make sense to outsource.

The challenge dealerships face today is how to form a process around blogging that produces all this type of information in a way that is profitable for the dealership by being efficient and effective at selling cars and driving new business from current and non-existent customers. Blogging does not close deals and sell cars, but it certainly contributes to the process of driving the best traffic to your website and building trust and loyalty with potential and existing customers.

Download your free copy of our white paper by signing up for our site. If you are already a free member and have not received your copy then contact us at 1-877-873-0583.

In a stunning address to the Innovative Dealer Conference in Denver recently, Automotive SEO expert Brian Pasch called for auto dealers to get serious about training their management teams! Themselves too.

This something Pasch has been championing in the automotive marketing community. It’s a noble cause, but one I personally approach with caution.

Brian’s comments before several hundred dealers called for them to stop using “your budget” as an excuse for not getting yourself and your key managers up to speed in all areas of today’s car business. He said that you need a “strategy” not a “budget!”

Couldn’t agree more. We all know that dealers will spend thousands upon thousands of dollars in advertising on things that don’t work, but only because they are familiar with certain things. It is what they know.

On the contrary, dealers can be reluctant to spend even a fraction of that on new media, which has proven affect. Dealers can also be reluctant to invest into training and educating themselves in new media, which is what is at the root of this issue.

Brian’s company, as many of you already know, advises dealers on digital marketing implementation in the dealership setting. During his speech, he related how a dealer recently told him how he would avoid calls from Brian’s company and other digital marketing advisors; he simply would not take their calls. When asked why that is, the dealer said, “Because I don’t know what the hell you are talking about!”

Brian then suggested that this dealer is simply fooling himself into believing that educating himself and his managers is not necessary. Possibly he is just hoping that the new marketing landscape that is being defined by the Internet and its major players, (like Google), will either simply go away, or that in some way he and his team will learn everything they need to know by some mysterious type of osmosis.

This is where the rubber meets the road. Dealers have been selling cars the same way for nearly a hundred years. The past decade has seen more change than the all the previous years of marketing and advertising. You can not expect things to change so quickly.

Four years ago, I anticipated that blogging and social media would be more mainstream for car dealers in about 2-3 years. This has turned out to be the case and there is plenty of product out there for car dealers now, but the rate of change is so rapid that most of us don’t know which way is up or down any more, and a few short years is not enough time for a majority of people accustomed to doing business a certain way for so many years, to simply adapt as many of us would like to see.

Pasch is right. The “budget” excuse is a cop-out for those that want more than is realistically feasible and do not know how to monetize Internet marketing.

If you and your management team are not doing what is necessary to educate yourselves in a fast changing world; then you will be left behind. If you are not encouraging training and re-training for your key managers, they will quickly become ineffective. How will they be equipped to meet the challenges of a new and changing retail landscape?

Mandatory continuing education is a staple in many fields. Lawyers, doctors, accountants, engineers and even nurses and school teachers must…get that – MUST… demonstrate that they are keeping up with the changes in their professions. They can lose their licenses and certifications if they do not.

While this is true, we must remember to keep an apples-to-apples comparison. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers must continue their training and education, but not to become marketing experts in their fields. Rather to become thought-leaders in their fields in the context of their work.

I do not believe that dealers should be reprimanded for not improving their skills in blogging and social media. They should however be held accountable for being ignorant to the importance of certain types of marketing such as blogging and social media. When the decision makers at car dealerships make bad decisions based on lack of understanding, it’s the dealership that suffers from it and their customers pay the price for it. In this light, ignorance is irresponsible.

While car dealers and their managers may not have a professional organization to force them to do so, investing in your own continuing education and that of your managers should be priority. Or…as Brian so vividly commented…”If you don’t, then you are perpetuating mediocrity!”

The dealer business unfortunately is steeped in mediocrity. Staff turnover is completely unacceptable. It’s a cancer. And it exists because of the issues that Pasch is emphasizing.

A few years ago, I believed this would change in the coming decade. It is changing for some, but we have a ways to go. In a lot of ways we are only getting started.

According to their research, HubSpot determined that the average number of fans across all Facebook pages and types was 624. They used this number as the marker for most liked versus least liked. Page types with more than 624 were classified as most liked and pages with fewer than 624 were classified as least liked.

Movies, TV Shows, and books were by and far the most liked types of pages. The other types of most liked, which came nowhere near as liked as these 3 were celebrities, stars, personalities, and public figures, large public venues such as museums and airports, government stuff, and surprisingly local businesses.

In the least liked category were things such as websites, retailers, boring local businesses such as banks and libraries, etc. Also in the least likes category were local automotive dealerships and vehicle services which you can see in the embedded image of this post. In fact, dealership Facebook pages average about 150 fans. Considering that the average dealership has upwards to 20k or 30k customers in the DMS, this number seems too low.

What does this tell us? Does this suggest that Facebook is not a viable place for car dealers to be investing? I am sure that the dealers with hundreds (and in some instances thousands) of fans will argue differently. Maybe this tells us that the approach dealers are taking with Facebook isn’t cutting it. Or maybe that’s just the way that it is.

In my experience using Facebook for car dealers I have found that it is a stretch for an outside party, alas a vendor, to make Facebook an impacting leg for dealers when no one at the dealer level is involved. Between the nature of the car business and the nature of social media, it is a tough mesh.

But when someone at the dealership gets behind the idea and drives it home, utilizing the content marketing services of an outside firm, the results are much different. These dealers are able to concentrate on the conversation, engaging with individuals or groups of individuals in regards to not only their automotive needs and interests but other personal interests too. After all, people buy cars from people, not companies.

To make Facebook a success, I argue that you must find a unique and distinctive role for it. Using Facebook to create a replica of your website does not eliminate the cull de sac syndrome that car dealer websites are subject to where the visitor experience is limited to give me all your contact info and I’ll give you moor product info or let’s get married on our first date together. Essentially you must find a way to use Facebook to add value to customers in ways the website can not accomplish.

For instance, your website is effective at generating leads of in-market buyers. That said, leveraging Facebook to cultivate prospects farther out in the buying funnel could be an ideal approach, thus plastering your Facebook page with OEM specials probably won’t do the trick because it’s not unique content. The OEM sites have that information and so do the dealer sites. The edge in social media is unique and compelling content.

Research like this need not be a deterrent for dealers to get off of Facebook. Quite the contrary. The challenge remains for dealers and automotive vendors to seek viable strategies. Success must be defined which may require performing an analysis of how much a website visitor referred from your Facebook page is with, then putting together a plan to achieve that which meets the targeted budget to satisfy the ROI. Some known ways to accomplish this include giveaways, contests, and polls.

Auto industry experts on ADM build their presence by uploading their contacts and sending invitations to their community, or by placing links to their ADM Profile Pages in their blogposts and emails. There is also an ADM Community Badge that members can put on their websites, blogs and in email templates. All of these activities have  served to encourage the collaboration of people in the car business within an open and unmoderated or censored online environment.

What’s Coming in 2010

Several ADM Administrators are working on a major sponsorship from a highly respected automotive supplier which will provide the NON-PROFIT ADM Community with the budget to have member receptions, such as they did at Digital Dealer 6 in Las Vegas, which was sponsored by ADP
Dealer Services.

About Ralph Paglia, ADM Community Founder

Ralph Paglia is responsible for establishing ADP business partnerships and alliances with Automotive OEM’s, enterprise class National Accounts and eBusiness organizations in the automotive vertical. He specializes in business development focused on defining and providing Digital Marketing solutions to car companies and dealers that accelerate and expand success in selling vehicles, parts and services using Internet based channels, strategies and tactics.

Ralph has over 20 years of leadership in information-technology-enabled automotive strategy and tactical implementation. He is a recognized expert at development requirements, CRM and Digital Marketing value propositions along with requisite performance measurements.

For more information about Ralph or ADM, visit http://www.automotivedigitalmarketing.com/