Let me tell you about 7 key things you are likely doing that is costing you hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. These are the real budget killers, the ones that keep you up at night. I assure you that this is an episode of Think Tank Tuesday you cannot afford to miss!
Want to learn how to benchmark your throughput time? Dennis will show you how in this week's HARD FACTS.
What does over 50% of the US population and 70% of Canada do every day? To find out, watch this week's Think Tank Tuesday!
Make sure you keep an eye out for a special offer on how you can learn more about increasing leads and sales. See Paul speak at DD15 October 15-17.
You don’t want to miss this as Dennis Galbraith shares the hard facts about our industry on September 20, at 1:37 PM. Subscribe to the Hard Facts here!
Dealerships need good reviews to sell cars, or do they? Are you confused about the discussions surrounding the importance of reviews? When you read reviews are you reading about the product or about where you are buying the product? Be Honest (I won't tell).
This week on Think Tank Tuesday, learn the truth behind all the effort you've given to working on your dealership's reviews.
Watch the video below and find out the truth behind dealership reviews.
In a continuing effort to bring on the best new talent, Potratz has hired on dealer research and business intelligence expert Dennis Galbraith, founder of Dennis Galbraith Enterprises, Revenueguru.com, former vice president of Cars.com and former executive director of Automotive Internet Practice at J.D. Power and Associates. In his prior position at Drivingsales.com, he served as a leading resource for dealers and auto groups offering research-driven blogs and information. As new chief marketing officer for Potratz, Dennis carries more than 21 years of experience in operations, marketing, and market research along with him.
During his tenure at J.D. Power and Associates, Dennis ran the automotive Internet division of J.D. Power and Associates from 2003 to 2006. At Cars.com, he was responsible for over $300,000,000 in advertising products. His proven track record of successful business start-ups and leadership roles has made him one of the go-to dealer research and marketing experts in the automotive industry.
To add to his accolades, Dennis is an accomplished writer and the author of two successful books entitled Sales Integration and Online Vehicle Merchandising. He is also an award-winning speaker who has been featured as a keynote speaker in many of the largest dealer events nationwide including, Driving Sales Executive Summit, J.D. Power Internet Roundtable, Digital Strategies Marketing Conference and has been featured at dozens of other dealer events.
Dennis’ ability to share his wisdom is what separates him from others in the industry; he has a knack for delivering insightful and invaluable lessons. Having facilitated marketing trainings at Revenueguru.com and taught marketing courses at both the graduate and undergraduate level, he is no stranger to teaching and is sure to be an influential addition to the Potratz team.
Potratz employees have taken kindly to his friendly demeanor and founders Paul and Christy Potratz embraced Dennis as a valuable asset to the team and “a person who will help edge Potratz ahead of the competition in the automotive digital marketing industry.”
Learn how you can double your income digitally by choosing a positive attitude. Find out how you can market yourself with out any cash. Stop waiting for outside forces to change your future use your positive energy and develop your own personal marketing strategy. Watch this week's Think Tank Tuesday and learn how to focus that positivity into productive leads.
Watch Think Tank Tuesday this week to see the final key touch points to keep your service bays full and clients coming back for more!
http://www.internetsales20group.com http://www.dealersynergy.com
Sean V. Bradley & Internet Director, Matthew Sears Discuss Autotrader & Conventional Marketing / Advertising...
Automotive Internet Sales recently had Internet Sales Director, Matthew Sears at corporate headquarters in New Jersey. We sat down with Matt and answered some of his questions about "Traditional" Marketing and Advertising. Sean talked about the importance of Internet advertising. When 92-99% of prospects are going online BEFORE they step foot into the dealership... It becomes a no-brainer and combine that with the fact that Internet advertising is LESS than $200 per car, where as traditional is over $600 per car in advertising as per NADA.
For more information and training videos, goto http://www.automotivedigitaltraining.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=nOMGN2jIQvs
This week's Think Tank Tuesday dissects Service Retention, and reveals to you the 6 key touch points discovered to raise your Service Profits and keep your service bays full.
Can you think of what marketing opportunity has low competition, high ROI, a lot of traffic, and will build customer loyalty? Many dealers are ignoring this aspect of their marketing strategy, and you need to start paying attention to this opportunity.
Potratz was selected as a member of the inaugural Auto Remarketing Canada Power 100, an elite collection of the most influential companies in the used-car and remarketing business. The businesses selected as members of the Auto Remarketing Canada Power 100, will be featured in the fall issue of Auto Remarketing Canada Digital Magazine.
“We at Auto Remarketing Canada are very excited about the chance to highlight some of the remarketing industry’s biggest players in our upcoming inaugural Power 100 issue,” said Publisher Bill Zadeits. “These top companies make the remarketing industry what it is today”
Potratz, an automotive advertising agency located in Schenectady, New York, represents auto dealers across the Unites States and Canada. While the agency’s reputation is based in digital marketing, it’s philosophy is to help dealers connect with people.
“We’re very aware of the temptation to depend on statistics and metrics to measure the success of a digital advertising campaign,” said Nan Mossey, Potratz’s director of digital marketing. “But the real measure of success is the number of cars sold. We help dealers to think like customers, and deliver what customers really want. It’s proven very successful.”
Potratz Partners Advertising is a full-service automotive advertising agency specializing in digital marketing. The agency was founded in 2003 by Paul Potratz in Schenectady, NY and received a Dealer Satisfaction Award from Driving Sales for Search and Behavioral Marketing every year since the award’s inception. Paul has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NY Post, and CBS and has been a featured speaker for NADA, Driving Sales, Auto Dealer People, Dealer Elite, and Automotive Digital Marketing. You can see Paul every Tuesday on the Think Tank Tuesday series available on iTunes.
There are 3 types of personalities, and your personality could be affecting your income. Watch this week's Think Tank Tuesday now to find out which of the 3 personalities you have, and how you can make it work for your team to boost your sales.
Is your website constantly asking for or taking information from visitors? By providing information to visitors rather than requesting information from them, you can expect to see a rise in conversions and a decrease in bounce rates. Watch this week's Think Tank Tuesday and find out how to rethink your web strategy.
The next time you turn on your television, do me a favor! Watch the commercials and see if you can identify what target audience the advertisements are intended for, and what calls to action are included to entice that audience to buy.
Once you’ve had a chance to complete this little exercise, take a look at the advertising and marketing materials produced by your dealership. Can you identify the target audience and call to action?
If you take a look back over the articles I’ve written over the past year or so, you’ll recognize a consistent theme. I tend to focus my articles on the importance of creating customer segments and ways that you can reach out to them more effectively.
While I won’t get into it too much in this article, I wanted to show you a cool Audi Australia commercial that I found online that features famous Beatboxer Tom Thum. Take a look at the video and let me know in the comments what audience Audi Australia intended this commercial for and what action they hope is accomplished.
What do you think? Comment below!
Find out what "It" is in this week's Think Tank Tuesday, and how to best use Remarketing Segmentation to help you take steps towards reducing the likelihood of IT happening to you!
Your website can produce up to 600 more leads every month. I'll show you how to get customers who may be on the fence to contact your team in this week's Think Tank Tuesday. There's no reason you shouldn't be using this tool on your website. Don't miss out on hundreds of quality leads and watch Think Tank Tuesday right now!
As Facebook continues its unofficial quest to make the platform pay to play and with Twitter quickly following in those footsteps, many are looking towards advertising as the most important component, but they would be wrong. Others who sell their products would say that strategy can overcome the need to play, but they would be incorrect as well. It’s the third component that plays in both of the other two realms that really makes up about half of the equation.
Social media marketing for the automotive industry is 2 parts content, 1 part strategy, and 1 part spend. There was a time not too long ago that it was even more prominent, but modern social media requires businesses to apply all three in order to have a winning combination.
Content is the beginning. You have to have a nice array of content to post on your social profiles, particularly on Facebook. Twitter has a never-ending flow of content bombarding you every day in the form of the blogs you read, the news that presents itself, random thoughts that make for good Tweets, and random pictures that you take or that you find on the internet. Pinterest is quickly becoming more about search than anything else and Google+ is failing in its mission to be anything more than a search engine tool. This leaves Facebook as the lone component that requires full effort in order to find the appropriate content.
Strategy must be applied once the content is gathered. Some have the time and resources to accumulate a strong pool of content and can plan out much of what they’ll post on Facebook ahead of time. Others must take what they can find in the limited time they have to find it every day or every week. Either way, a proper strategy that plays to both the algorithm as well as the expectations of the fans must be integrated in order to deliver the right content at the right time.
Advertising is the third component. It’s the trap. It’s the aspect of Facebook that seems so easy in the beginning but that can be butchered very quickly to the point that you can no longer effectively advertise. Here’s what happens…
You start off and see the “Boost Post” button on something that you just put up on the page. You click it and see that for $15, you can expose your content to thousands of people. Heck, you can probably reach a couple thousand people by spending $5 if your page is doing pretty well already. You give it a shot and, voila! Your post gets more exposure, more reach, and more engagement than anything you’ve posted in the past. You do the math and you start boosting other posts. It’s all good stuff.
One day, you see that your boosting numbers look different. Rather than spending $5 and reaching 1200-1700 people like you did a couple days before, you see that the same money now only buys you 500-950 views. You might do it or you might even bump it up to $10 for this post. Either way, you hope that it’s just a temporary drop because you’ve been telling everyone how awesome you are at Facebook.
A couple of weeks later, your heart sinks when you see something like the example below. This is a Facebook page that has 1700 fans that we took over recently. They didn’t do anything wrong, really. They simply didn’t go through the steps and monitor their EdgeRank properly to prevent this type of dip from happening. In short, Facebook and this page’s fans have spoken. They were exposed to the wrong content at the wrong times and it ate away at their potential to use Facebook ads.
Thankfully, it can be fixed. It requires content. Great content. Facebook advertising is different from other types of advertising in that the sentiment towards the ads has a tremendous effect on the potential reach and ROI on future ads. If you advertise something that gets a lot of negative feedback, it will cost more to advertise your next few posts. The ads are tied in directly with the organic algorithm. With Google, you can optimize your way to the top of you can buy your way to the top. On Facebook, there’s no distinction between advertised posts and organic posts. Just because you pay doesn’t mean that your posts will be seen.
With the right strategy, properly managed advertising, and a ton of great content, you can master the art and science of social advertising. With any single portion missing, there’s a good chance that you can do more harm than good.
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Originally posted on automotivesocialmedia.com.
What would you say if a customer asked "Why should I buy from you?" Everyone can compete on price, but in order to gain more customers and increase your sales, you need to have a competitive advantage. What's yours?
In this week's Think Tank Tuesday, I'll explain why it's important to set yourself apart from all the other dealers in your market, and how to do so.
