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http://www.internetsales20group.com 856-546-2440
Jim Ziegler Is A Featured Speaker For The Internet Sales 20 Group 6 In Boston / MSADA

For those of you who are not familiar with the word ”automation”, it’s the act of setting something up to respond naturally to a matter change.  So in the terms of social media, it would be the option of setting up content to be posted at the change of the clock. Give us a second… we’ll make more sense of it. The purpose of social media is still, and always will be, to engage with customers, but now there are options to have engaging content appear on your fans newsfeeds, all while you’re cooking dinner. Automation is a feature built into Facebook, but is lacking on most other social platforms.  Fortunately websites like Hootsuite,  SproutSocial, Fanpilot, and others exist to allow a streamline automation process.  It is definitely a pro for businesses to be able to schedule when posts go out, especially when a business finds their “sweet spot.” Let’s check out the pros and cons of social media automation and then you can be the judge of whether this is good for your business or not.

 Pros: You save A LOT of time. If you have multiple clients like we do here at Dealer Synergy, each client deserves the same amount of attention. Automation allows us to prepare each post ahead of time and give the proper amount of time of research to each client before scheduling a post in advance. And If you use a social media management app (like Hootsuite, SproutSocial, etc.) You do not have to log into each social network individually.

Cons: There is no human touch, and managers that use automation have a higher chance of missing direct interactions and risk losing a customer. Sometimes scheduling too far in advance can cause you to miss things that are very relevant at a specific moment.

 In our opinion it should be a combination of both. What do you think? For more of the “Good, Bad and Ugly” you can check out more in the original article here. Good, Bad and Ugly

http://www.dealersynergy.com 856-546-2440
http://www.internetsales20group.com
Make Money Mondays with Sean V. Bradley - Special Edition - Joe Cala - "The Value of People"

For the record, I am not part of the Dealer Synergy team. This is not my conference and I will likely get blacklisted by other conferences for coming out and saying this. However, it's important to me that the industry knows about the one conference that is truly a "must attend" for dealer principals, general managers, and anyone who has a vested interest in the success of their dealership.

I've attended every Internet Sales 20 Group since its inception. In the beginning, it was much like other conferences in that it was geared towards the digital personnel at dealerships. Internet managers, BDC managers, eCommerce directors and the like could come to the event and learn best practices that could help them do their jobs better.

Things have changed. It was most noticeable at the last event in Atlantic City earlier this year when around 200 attendees learned more than just "how to pick good keywords" or "why you need to be on Pinterest". Things really started coming together as the conference followed a theme. It wasn't a bunch of talking heads promoting their products. It was a truly engaging learning experience where dozens of attendees became part of the event, sharing their own best practices and molding the direction of the discussions.

It was at the last event that I realized that this event, while still powerful for the internet people, truly matured into the exact type of conference that dealer principals and general managers could use to guide the direction of their dealership. From the marketing composites that gave individual attention to everyone's unique situations to the flow of the event that kept an orderly but aggressive training schedule, the Internet Sales 20 Group demonstrated that it was different from anything in our industry.

We are proud to sponsor the upcoming event in Boston, not just because of the exposure that it will bring to us, but more importantly because we will be helping the leaders at dealerships come out of the event with a better understanding of how they will succeed through the rest of 2014 and into 2015. This is a competitive industry, but we're in a growth market right now. Some dealers are content with doing better than they did last year. For those who feel that success is never truly attained to its fullest and that there's always room for improvement, this is the right event to attend in September.

You can't expect to see an increase in overall sales if you're afraid to put money towards your advertising budget. Freeing up budget is easier than it sounds, especially if you know how your current allocation of funds should be laid out.

On this week's Hard Facts, Samantha helps you crunch the numbers and offers opportunities for aligning your sales goals with your advertising budget.

How does shopper NOT take action?

http://www.tysinger.com/new-Hampton-2015-Hyundai-Genesis-5.0L-KMHGN4JF8FU021962

                                                                                Executing For Increa$e

Each day that passes dealers are more inundated with what seems like an endless road of options directing us toward the common goal.  More sales are what we are promised by today’s technology, internet development and abundance of vendors and programs.  It seems we will inevitably be “beaming” customers into our showrooms as this technological race continues.  However, regardless of our success when it comes to driving traffic into our showrooms, the question looms.  Are we executing at a level that matches our advertising budget?  We continue to spend countless dollars at the drop of a hat to obtain more prospects while our sales staff struggles to play catch up with their skill set.  As our concerns for accommodating our customer’s desires increase, our closing ratios have plummeted when it comes to first stop shoppers.  As an industry we seem to have abandoned the ability to create that all illusive sense of urgency with our customers. This typically leads us to spend more dollars for more prospects that we continue to be less effective with.   In our zealousness to provide the “ultimate CSI experience” we continue to emasculate our sales force at the expense of our dealership, our personnel and ultimately the customer. 

 Successful dealers recognize trends in the industry and position themselves accordingly.  Thankfully, this one is not going unnoticed.  Training and execution is what is truly beginning to separate dealers in today’s market.  Dealers that are focused on building professional sales teams are cashing in on sales and CSI as a result of having a highly trained effective sales staffs. This creates new and more pleasant problems like, looking for people to hire in order to handle increases in sales volume.  Dealers that justify the absence of a disciplined training plan in order to create a better shopping experience and are held hostage by the CSI expectations are subscribing to a counterproductive theory.  The result is that they are forced to spend more money to be less effective while competitors are distancing themselves with highly trained sales teams.  When a sales professional can execute properly, he or she can lead the customer to a decision that they feel great about on the first visit and CSI scores will follow.  

 The challenge for most dealers today is where to begin when it comes to training. The key is ACTION.  The truth is that it has never been easier to implement professional training within the dealership.  The irony is that once again technology (the very thing that in part is responsible for us straying) can be our greatest ally in selecting and implementing professional training.  With such things as webinars, podcasts, youtube, websites and trainers at our techno savvy fingertips.  We can also go the old fashioned route consisting of daily training led by our management team.  Whenever in doubt as to what to train on remember, yesterday’s deals are today’s training.  Dealers that develop a professional sales force position themselves to sell from a position of strength.  True selling begins when people meet people.. People will always be your best ROI.

 Are your people prepared to “Execute for Increase”?  

If you read our blog post from Tuesday (if you haven’t yet, you should) you had a chance to get familiar with native advertising. To recap it is basically just a form of advertising that is used to promote your ad without your audience knowing it is an ad. Essentially it is an ad that blends into your newsfeed, twitter feed, or instafeed by looking like a picture a friend of yours would post.  Typically this form of advertising is paid for in order to reach more people, but content and creation are key. In today’s podcast we take an in-depth look into what this form of advertising is and why it is so great!  We break down the essential facts into numbers and try to convince you, it's something you should be looking into.

Also, we clear up some of the confusion for those of you who have a spinning head right now. Enjoy, and if you want to read further into this topic you can check out the sources for this podcast here. http://ow.ly/zxcHE http://ow.ly/zxcLB

PODCAST - Native Marketing

Today's Women’s Wednesday we are focusing on the new top reason women are buying from their sales advisor. Trust has always trumped price when it comes to buying from a sales advisor, but now, in our latest mid-year #bigdata report directly from women's reviews, “trust” no longer has the top spot.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T! Aretha Franklin couldn’t define it better. Respect is now the #1 prerequisite to trust in the formula to selling to women.

The top 5 reasons women buy from their sales consultant are ranked as follows:

1. Respectful
2. Trustworthy
3. Likeable
4. Knowledgeable
5. Understanding

Want to Sell More Cars and Distinguish your Dealership to Women?  Click here. 

Did you receive a Free copy of the 2014 Women’s Car Buying Report? Click here.

http://www.dealersynergy.com 856-546-2440

Still not making more money?

Have you tried everything but still can't increase your profits? If you're struggling to bring in more money--even with all of your current marketing tactics--then the problem may run deeper.

On this week's Think Tank Tuesday, I explain where your problem is coming from, and how you can correct it to bring in more profits.

More often than not when a business is developing their social media strategy they assume “likes” and comments on various platforms are the tell all for how much success they can expect, but engagement doesn’t equate to ROI.  Just because someone likes or comments on something you have posted for your business does not mean they are going to run to your website and sign up for your newsletter or purchase your product.  The sole purpose of “social” media is to remain social and present.  So when the time comes for a consumer to purchase something you sell, they have your brand on their mind. Time and time again we will tell you; these networks are SOCIAL for a reason, you need to socially engage clients in conversations. 

People often try to use social media as a second form of direct advertising. Unfortunately that’s not the way to win in this game.  The reason social media became popular was because it was a clean form of entertainment, clean of advertising that is.  In the early days, Myspace, Facebook and Twitter were private companies that did not rely on advertisers dollars; therefore all of the content was social.  Slowly companies took notice of the large audiences gathering on these social sites and jumped on the opportunity to spread the messages of their brands.  There was a golden era where advertisers couldn’t pay for ad space and had to rely on being social and engaging, unfortunately those days are behind us and now to get your message seen you’ve got to “pay to play” but to ensure you don’t waste your money, you’re going to have to look into Native Marketing. What is Native Marketing? You’ll have to check out our blog / podcast on Thursday. See You Then. 

Dealerships are facing an uphill battle in the fight to reclaim search rankings from third-party listings, as well as the attempt to win customers through social media. For both automotive SEO and social media marketing, however, content is the single most important factor for overall success.

You can optimize your dealership’s site to compete for certain keywords, but that’s only going to get you so far with Google. In order to truly impact rankings, you need to acquire links to your site. The absolute best way to do that is to produce content worth linking to in the first place. That is the essence of content marketing.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is the art of creating high-quality content for the purpose of building awareness about a product, service, brand, or company. This is typically accomplished without employing sales tactics or openly pushing an agenda, unlike other forms of advertisement.

The idea is to create content that your target audience will find valuable–whether it be entertaining, informative, or both at the same time. This content wants to be shared. It’s so good that every person that sees it wants everyone they know to see it.

How content marketing works for car dealers

Step 1. Create great content.

Step 2. Share/promote content.

Step 3. Users enjoy, share, and link to your content.

Step 4. Google accounts for the activity around your content and increases your rankings.

Step 5. Local car buyers are better able to find your site to research vehicles and submit leads.

Is your content worth linking to?

Imagine you’re looking for information on a car your dealership happens to sell. Is your site providing that information or is another site doing a better job? Your site needs to be the resource that goes above and beyond what’s expected and provides real answers that are presented in an easily-digestible, entertaining fashion.

How Do Dealerships Create Great Content?

1. Understand your customer — What gets the most views on your site right now? What questions are customers asking when they visit your dealership? What are your most popular vehicles? Are customers more interested in new or used cars? Do you get a lot of bad credit customers? The more you understand your customers, the better you can tailor content for the keywords you’re looking to target.
2. Discover what works — As a dealership, you’d probably look to other dealerships to see what works and what doesn’t in terms of content. But your average dealership is not creating original content as part of their SEO strategy. Instead, look to automotive-related publications for insight into what people want to read and view online.
3. Experiment with different content — In order to get an idea of what people will share or link to from your dealership’s site, create at least three different types of content. One might be a vehicle comparison of one of your popular models vs. a competitor, another might be an infographic about the evolution of a particular model, and another may be a list of tips for new car owners. Make sure each piece of content has the same chance for success, but see which one comes out on top and follow the feedback from users to tailor your next batch.

Basic Content Promotion

After the creative process is complete and your content is live, how do you go about promoting it so users can discover it?

Utilize social media sites, along with the amplifying powers of paid promotion, to target users based upon interest. The ultimate goal is to drive traffic to your content to increase social signals through shares, as well as links from other sites.

You start this process by using Facebook’s Promoted Posts and Twitter’s Promoted Tweets to target local users. Facebook has a sophisticated ads platform that allows you to target users by every parameter associated with a Facebook profile, making it a great place to start.

Twitter’s Promoted Tweets platform is new to most businesses, but a great start in going beyond local users. The reason Twitter is important in that regard is site publishers, writers, and editors tend to be active on the site, looking for news and content to share. Targeting an audience with an interest in cars or the automotive industry is a great strategy for building links.

Advanced Content Promotion

If your dealership wants to take its content marketing to the next level, give Reddit and StumbleUpon a try. These two sites require content that is both high quality and targeted. This means you need to understand what the users on these sites are after before you simply drop in to promote your existing content. Because both sites’ users will bounce faster than any other type of user on the web if they’re not interested.

Content Marketing on Reddit 

Reddit users are very particular about the types of advertising that appears on the site. This social news site is made up of mostly young males who are very passionate about the community. If your ads are not highly-targeted and entertaining, it’s not likely to perform and may even receive negative attention or none at all since Reddit does not guarantee views. However, Reddit users love to see advertisers who understand that if you’re going to advertise, you might as well add value to the end user as well.

To accomplish this, the content you market toward Reddit users must be created with the community in mind. Take a look at the top-ranked content on subreddits (niche communities within Reddit) like Cars, CarTalk, and Autos for examples of what Reddit’s car-loving members wants to see.

The infographic idea I previously mentioned–that details the evolution of a particular model–is a timeless idea that  would work well if the ad copy was written in a unique, fun fashion.

Paid Discovery on StumbleUpon

Unlike Reddit, StumbleUpon actually guarantees the views you pay for with its advertising platform Paid Discovery. The service also puts your content on an even playing field with user-submitted content and allows it to receive additional free views if it is shared by StumbleUpon users.

In fact, if you create content that users really respond to, you could receive just as much traffic from user shares as you did from Paid Discovery. This incentivizes businesses to create exceptional content for the StumbleUpon community.

Like Reddit, though, StumbleUpon’s users expect high-quality content and will skip over pages that do not immediately stand out from the pack. There’s no room for error or half-completed work when it comes to social media success.

Measuring Success

When your ultimate content marketing goal is to boost SEO efforts, it takes a few months to see the fruits of your labor. In the meantime, the easiest way to measure success before you see changes in your search rankings is overall traffic to your content, as well as social shares. No matter what you’re paying for, if your audience is responding to the content, you should see a good jump in traffic.

Content marketing is not a race, and relies solely on the effort you and your team put into the end product. The best approach is to always focus on making your target audience happy. Results will follow from there.

This post originally appeared on Automotive-SEO.net.

http://www.internetsales20group.com 856-546-2440

"Money Mind Mapp" Is The Theme For The Internet Sales 20 Group 6 In Boston

http://www.dealersynergy.com 856-546-2440

Jack Madden Ford in Norwood, MA, Is Hiring Internet Sales Coordinators - Call Center - Telemarketers

Recently, certain companies have faced major scrutiny for poor handling of customer concerns. How you treat customers is a reflection on how your business operates as a whole.

This week on Hard Facts, Samantha details proven strategies for handling customer concerns online. Learn how to manage the reputation of your business to avoid a possible crisis.

Etiquette is a very important part of life. You would not just walk up to someone on the street you don't know and ask them to be your friend. The same thing goes for social media! It's  Thursday and we are back with a podcast to help you network by network on what etiquette is acceptable. You can read the original article here 

-- http://ow.ly/zgxjg

PODCAST - Social Media Etiquette

                                                                   LET EM GO it’s not Disney

When it comes to personnel it is not always “happily ever after” and that is ok.  Of course, we would like it to be just like Disney but that just isn’t reality.  As a manager, I believe that our first responsibility is to our personnel.  More often than not we fail our people before they fail us.  When hiring a new person in sales we should have a detailed plan for their success.  That does not consist of having a veteran salesperson shadow them for a few days or week and hope they catch on.  We have to adopt that new salesperson and invest in their success. Why? Because ultimately our success depends on it.  Never subscribe to the theory of let’s see if he or she can make it first before we order business cards or invest in training. Think more about those things in the interview process before hiring a new person.  Only hire those that you are convinced can be successful in your organization and be prepared to make a commitment to them to reach that success.  Building the right team is not an overnight process and patience is a must.  It is better to be short handed for a season than to acquire the wrong people.  Which  brings me to my next point: 

It is a two-way street.  Once we have exhausted every effort to ensure success and we see no fruit from that investment, it is time to cut them off like a gangrene leg.  Learn everything you can from the experience and make the necessary adjustments to better help the next person and your dealership.  When it comes to veterans exercise the “blind eye of justice” meaning that tenure is not what this business is about.  It’s about performance.  If we have built our team properly the veterans will be less “maintenance” and the backbone of our sales FORCE while poised for advancement.  If that is not the case the veteran can be the biggest cancer that the dealership supports.  Remember, this is business and the veteran would not be around if the checks were not cashing. Don’t let the ship go down to protect anyone’s feelings or even livelihood.  LET EM GO it’s not Disney! 

Dave Cribbs @deskingdeals

If you haven't started employing digital marketing then you're missing out on tremendous potential. Digital is generating excellent return for the brands using it to promote their business—your competitors included.

On this episode of Think Tank Tuesday, I explain how you can get started with digital marketing to boost your brand's presence like never before.

Stop Freaking Out; Marketing does not have to be difficult. Sure, it can be tedious and require a lot of trial and error, but it does not need to be hard, especially as the mediums of marketing evolve. Traditional forms of marketing may be different than the fresher forms of marketing on social media, but the premise remains the same. You want whatever it is you are marketing to see a return on investment from your efforts or finical output. According to inc.com there are only 31 words you need to know.

“Marketing, reduced to its absolute basics, is remarkably simple: You figure out whom you want to sell to, and then you determine how you are going to get them to buy.”

That’s it. Of course you can get into the plethora of questions that need to be answered within this quote, because that’s what we do as humans. We complicate things. Of course there will always be more worked involved in asking and answering the questions laced into such a simple quote, but really it’s not difficult once you realize that a good product or service should sell itself.  All you’re really responsible for is making sure people know it exists, aka your branding; enter social media. It’s not advertising, it’s branding and public awareness.  I know you are probably looking for the rest of the article or waiting for some grand advice to show up. The good news is, you’ve already read it.