Automotive Marketing

eBay has sold its 2.6% of Autotrader to confirm the end of the relationship the two companies have shared since the year 2000. Next month, Autotrader will launch its own vehicle auction service.

When I found Autotrader’s official statement about the launch of auctions, I was surprised to read this quote from Autotrader’s Chip Perry:

“Now consumers have the option to not only buy and sell their cars via classified advertising but also through our unique Auction-Style Listing product, which allows conditional, local market bidding – unlike anything currently in the industry.

Touting the uniqueness of a car auction online is odd to me. The more effective here message is “it is free.” No listing fee is a good idea, and I like the way they are pushing it. While Perry is correct that this blend of an auction and a free listing is one of a kind, (the same NYT article says) eBay is the most popular automotive website and Autotrader is the seventh.

Six months ago I explained why I think Google will soon become a serious competitor in automotive classifieds, and I also expect the Goo to continue free listings as most of their services are delivered free with a side of text advertisements.

Will Autotrader make a splash in the auction market with free listings? Can Google seize the market by placing their own car ad listings in search results before links to Autotrader? How did Speed Racer defeat the mammoth car?

The hardest part of my job is to break some of the traditional thinking that dealers want to bring online. The car industry is traditional by nature; new flavors of the same cars arrive annually, dealerships are branded with family names, and the jingle-based commercial is a dealership classic. I will never forget the jingle that Century 3 Chevrolet of Pittsburgh uses in their commercials. Ever. Really, it has been more than 5 years since I have lived within their reach.

Domain names

I like to suggest using a three word domain with “usedcars” in it instead of “familymotors” as the primary location for a website that sells used cars. Sometimes dealers include a city name in their business name, which is fantastic. ClassicMotorsOfSomewhere.com is a great start, but length becomes an issue. Now, I am aware that this website resides on a domain name that is not short or easy to spell, but this site was not designed to sell things.

Website and advertisement copy

Dealers insist on writing sentences, even when embedded in properly-cased paragraphs, in all capital letters. THIS IS A TECHNIQUE USED IN PRINT ADVERTISING TO GRAB ATTENTION. While browsing the web, writing in all capital letters is perceived as shouting and takes longer to read than lower or mixed case. The most effective print on the web has a personal touch that reads like a conversation would sound.

Presentation

I prefer not to wrap text around a picture of a wheel. I do not think that drawing an ugly “burst” around words will make a message more effective. Instead, I very much like to guide the reader’s attention from the top left corner downward. I see no reason to disorganize a page to the degree that a message needs to jump out at the reader in order to grab their attention. Websites are advertisements, but to design them like ads severely dilutes their effectiveness.

I am a big fan of playing fair. Arguably, I have been in the car business for 0 years. Here are some challenges that I have faced since I started building websites for the car business.

• Using very vibrant colors instead of a blended palette. Most of the layouts and logos I designed prior contained more colors to cover a range of tones. Most dealership logos and signwork are cheesy and very brightly colored. Adapting to this change has expanded my versatility greatly, and now my designs have less bland, washed-out colors in them.
• Privacy-sensitive input. No one wants to get a call once a week from a dealership asking if they found a car yet. Email inquiries between a dealer and a shopper are very different than emails between a shopper and a private seller. Car shoppers (and dealers shopping the competition) are very discrete when they fill out contact forms, and massaging this data on the way into a database is a challenge.
• Creating an animated neon sign in flash. The glowing look is fairly easy, but animating light is a severe challenge that I still face. The signature flicker of a neon sign is something I have not yet been able to digitize.

What challenges have you encountered? Are there any you still struggle with?

One of the reasons I started this website was because the automotive marketing magazines that dealers read every month contain articles that are piss poor. This month’s Dealer Marketing Magazine is no exception. The cover story offers incorrect information and quotes an “expert” from Autobytel that helps reinforce the inaccuracy.

Search engine marketing is not paid search. Why this is not obvious is beyond me. Marketing does not equal “buying ads,” so how could something something marketing mean buying ads on something something? I expect a trade publication to conduct the small amount of research required to ensure they are not fabricating definitions and misleading their readers.

You might be thinking, “Ok, but are you being a little picky about one word, Corey?” No, this is not about one word. The article claims that SEM is an “elevated level of search optimization” that gets you placement in the paid results sections of search results. This leads readers to believe that some mystical “elevated” skill or knowledge is required to make a site appear in the paid spots, and this is exactly the type of bullshit that convinces dealers that they have to pay a search engine company to appear at the top. It is simply not true. Anyone with $5 and the will to learn can open an account and begin advertising on a search engine.

This mistake might have started with one of the “experts” that were consulted for the story. Autobytel’s senior vice president of dealer strategy and operations, Mark Garms, is quoted rather awkwardly on the following page. His statement only makes sense after you have learned the bogus definition of SEM. I do not think that Mark is an idiot, and it is obvious (to me) that he is talking about pay-per-click advertising costs. It is unfortunate that he has been quoted saying something goofy like dealers are not trying to increase their traffic from search engines, but is that the worst part? I think the largest oops here is the fact that the writer of this article, Jim Leman, took his quote and multiplied the mistake, and none of the editors of the magazine knew better to sort it out.

Search engine marketing is the act of promoting a website to (increase search engine traffic, whether that means buying ads, optimizing content or a employing a strategy to) improve rankings in non-paid, organic search results. Anyone can get into the paid spots, even if they have no “elevated level” knowledge.

If you would like to receive updates from this website, click any of the subscription icon links below to start that process. I have redirected the RSS feed to FeedBurner, because the default Wordpress feed could not handle flash animation insertion via JavaScript in my last post. Fake it ’til you make it.

These buttons go to RSS feed readers. Feed readers aggregate all of your favorite websites on to one screen by allowing you to subscribe to RSS outputs of each website’s content.

Here are a few links to add this website to your favorite bookmarking services: