Automotive Marketing

Here is a conversation that occurred today between Cars.com support staff and a dealership that pays them hundreds of dollars a month.

Dealer: Hi. I am calling to find out why only 28 cars are displaying on my 30 car advertising package.

Cars.com: You should ask the company that delivers your inventory to us.

Dealer: I just got off the phone with them. They send you all the vehicles that I have for sale once every day.

Cars.com: Ok, let me see how many we received from them on the last transfer.

Cars.com: Ok, it looks like they sent us 41 vehicles, 2 without any photos.

Dealer: Right, and I want to know why only 28 with no photos are showing on cars.com

Cars.com: That’s something you should ask them.

Dealer: Why? You just told me that you received 41 vehicles from them, and that all came with pictures except for two. Why are there no pictures on any of my cars?

Cars.com: You’ll have to ask them.

Dear Cars.com,
I do not lie about your company or your service, yet you will openly blame my company for your own shortcomings. Please accept any of our many invitations to discuss these persistent issues in a conference call. I will continue to equip our mutual customers with log files that verify the service that we provide to them. Unfortunately, said logs are not enough to keep you from training your support reps to blindly blame the other guy, even when these lies contradict what can be easily seen on the screen in front of them.

Strategies can not be templated. There is no substitute, no automated gimmick that can replicate what can be achieved by people that share a comfortable and open line of communication.

A local luxury-used outfit approached me two weeks ago because they were unsatisified with their website’s page 4 rankings. Today they are front-paging for half of the searches the dealer identified. The difference was no trick. Instead, a five minute conversation and less than five minutes of work on the site. The search engine, Google in this case, has recrawled the site and adjusted its rankings for the first time since the change.

A lack of communication was the reason for the previous positions, not any technical error. This business has an address in a small town that is not easy to spell. More people search for the county name, which is also the name of the closest large city. There was no mention of the county name on the website, and no links to the dealer’s website on the web contained or were close to the name of the county. Search engines do not volunteer this keyword association to websites; they organize information that already exists.

Machines and readymades will always be tools that are as good as they can be manipulated by a person. One of the most important questions that I can ask a dealer is, “What are you searching for?” Every search marketing campaign I begin has to start with at least one keyword phrase.

The February 2008 issue of Dealer Marketing Magazine has been shuffled around the office all month. Since I have settled into my new desk, this issue and I have become entangled in a love hate relationship.

The best article in this issue is on page 22. Mark Bonfigli of Dealer.com writes, “Five Simple Website Strategies You Cannot Do Without.” There are two ways you can read this article online. You may view the whole magazine online for free here, or read the text version here.

The overall message of Mark’s tips is to cater to the user; give them what they want and nothing more. I like the article especially because of Mark’s final tip. Tip #5, Forget the glitz, is valuable advice even for the likes of DealerMark and NIADA.

Market research is 100 percent clear: Customers do not care about fancy website effects unrelated to their car-buying decision.

Similarily, dealers do not care about fancy website effects unrelated to their car-selling-research decisions. Two of the major industry publications, Dealer Marketing Magazine and NIADA’s Used Car Dealer Magazine, have implemented fancy magazine viewers based on “page-turner” flash animations.

I first saw this approach to displaying online publications on the Arctic Cat Powersports websites. See one here.

The effect is neat, but I think the time and money sunk into these presentations could have been spent more wisely. Dealer magazines, it is time to take your own advice. Here is why these glitzy flash viewers are hurting the effectiveness of your publication and your business:

Flash animations require a browser plugin to be installed

Any extra steps required to access content increase the chance that individuals will never reach your content.

Search engines cannot crawl your content

Your magazines show case some successful and talented people. You owe it to them to increase their visibility online by promoting their writings in a manner that can be easily found and properly referenced as a magazine source. DealerMark does provide a text version of each of their articles, and I applaud them for that effort. Used Car Dealer Magazine’s flash version is the only place online that its content can be found in the aggregate. Some articles can be found elsewhere in the event that the author republishes them, but becoming the primary source for this content a missed opportunity for the association.

• Search engines help other people find your content, reference it as a source, or call you and inquire about advertising
• Search engines detect how often a website is updated, but they will not find 30 new articles each month if they cannot crawl the content that is updated because it is embedded in a fancy animation
• Search engines detect duplicate sources and attempt to eliminate dupes in search results, and only one site can be the authority

Other websites cannot link to your magazine articles

While I am typically negative (I’ll be nicer after you begin publishing me), you want people to talk about your articles and link to them from their own websites. The world wide web is based upon the hyperlink, the method that documents are linked together to create a virtual web. Search engines calculate website popularity based on the number of links to a website and where those links are coming from. This means that any publicity is good publicity as long as it contains a link back to your website. Also, linkable content increases the likeliness that it will be used as a reference in some other article. There is a substantial opportunity for these magazines to be used as sources in Wikipedia, a very large and very respected website in the eyes of search engines. Not to mention that Wikipedia ranks for everything.

Almost any solution other than the one you have chosen could greatly help your websites to gain traffic and your publication to reach are larger audience. The results would be more advertising dollars and more subscription dollars, and step one is to forget the glitz!