This week I met with Stan Sher (aka RedNumbat) and his passion for providing car dealers with a new way to generate quality sales leads was very clear.  His willingness to step out and join an entrepreneurial endeavor is just what the car industry needs.   Innovations in the car industry could not come at a better time.  Car dealers are eagerly searching for ways to lower advertising costs and still drive quality leads to their website.

The idea of a “RedNumbat” or a “Twitter” or a “Facebook” innovating car dealer sales just a few years ago would have been met with frowns. The Internet is creating new communication tools and channels that can deliver messages to thousands of “followers” in seconds.  No wonder why the idea of an instant car price quote from a Red Marsupial has traction in the marketplace. 

I look forward to testing the RedNumbat technology on a few client websites in the coming months. I’ll report my findings on this blog as soon as  we collect enough data.  www.rednumbat.com

Protecting Your Dealer Name

In the past few weeks I have been talking with dealers across the US and Canada that were inspired by a free webinar I conducted with Dealers Edge on March 10th.  From the calls, it is clear that the economy has reignited a passion for car dealers to compete on the Internet.   Dealers want innovators to step up and shake up the old establishment; they are just cautious about spending money.

Significant interest from callers was focused on protecting their dealer name from third party lead collectors.  This is one of the easiest things that car dealers can do to increase consumer direct leads; get third party leads collectors off of Google page one for searches on their dealer name. Dealers should roll up their sleeves and use free web publishing tools like:

• www.merchantcircle.com
• www.vox.com
• www.blogspot.com
• www.squidoo.com

to create “dealer name” branded web assets that they can use to share content about the cars that they sell; talk about promotions, rebates, safety or third party reviews.  The key is to “name” these web assets with their dealer name so they appear for dealer name searches.  Think of these web assets as your free blogging tools without expenses or the need to know HTML programming.

What About Facebook

This week I was speaking with a dealer that said that their Facebook project sold three cars this past week.  This was exciting to hear that car dealers are testing and measuring some of the latest trends in social networking.  It is too early to definitively say how to use Facebook efficiently. Anyone with experiences with Facebook I encourage to share on this forum by sending an email to me at brian@paschconsulting.com.  Your feedback will be welcome since Facebook is hot topic of conversation amongst marketing professionals.

What About Twitter

I’m still waiting to see the results from using Twitter, so if anyone has some data to share, please send me an email.

If you would like to join me on my next Webinar on April 2, 2009, click here:  SEO Webinar

Reader Feedback – March 25, 2009

Brian,

I have just started using facebook for marketing. I think it is going to work well. I have sold cars for 20 years. I have a data base of  over 2,500 customers. I have started inviting each one to be my friend on face book. I am surprised that 50% of them are on facebook. If they  are not I invite them to join. They often do and it is great to be the one that introduced them to facebook. if they are on I send a personal message. I ask how their car is and what have they been up to.

Once  they accept me as a friend, I look at there pictures. I find something I am interested in. Art work, or a fishing trip and ask a question about it. I also invite people that buy a car from me to be my friend and they almost write something about their new car. I take a picture of them with their new car when they buy it. I email it to them. I am asking them if I can post it on the dealerships facebook page, which I  am a fan of.

I really hope they will post the photo I email on their facebook account. Some have but it too early to see what the results 
will be. I mix friends and work on facebook. I get lots of comments from customers that they like the way I blend this and am real and that I use marketing, social networking and friendship the way it was designed to be used.

I think this is going to be great.

Chance Black
Internet Manager
Subaru of Georgetown
www.chanceblack.com

Automotive Car Marketing Websites

Over the last six months I have been testing the value of publishing car inventory listings to a group of free websites. The idea behind this test was to measure the effectiveness of the efforts needed to post cars based on the increase of:

1. Car Sales
2. Web Traffic
3. Inbound Links

This is Part One of a series of articles that I plan to write tracking the success of various free listing services.  This is the introductory article and some initial results for our testing which is showing a clear front runner.

We were also interested in this project because it would give us some data on consumer interest and behavior on social networking websites and stand alone car marketing portals.   To keep automotive marketing budgets as effective as possible, we want to know where to invest time and resources.

Dealer Owned Car Marketing Portals

As a side note, we see a growing trend for car dealer groups to create their own regional car sales portals, to compete with sites like Cars.com and Autotrader.com.   Specifically, larger dealer groups that have multiple brands under their management in any given state can build very effective direct car marketing website at a reasonable cost.  There is a debate out there that questions why any dealer would create their own used car site even if they had multiple locations.

 Each dealer project has to be evaluated on a case by case basis.  Our experience has demonstrated that a strong domain name and a good inventory platform can be an effective in-state lead generation tool for a larger dealer organization or a friendly group of dealers.

Car Websites Included in Testing

Our testing has included a number of websites, listed below:

1. Vast.com
2. Google Base
3. Craigslist
4. BackPage.com
5. AOL Autos
6. MyRide.com

We have created a tool that can post automobiles from existing car dealer inventory feeds to these sites.  To date we have some clear winners and some clear losers but testing will continue.   To see the impact of this added traffic on PageRank and Inbound links is not something that can be immediately measured and the initial data is somewhat vague so I will have to create a second update.

Craigslist is the clear front runner by a mile for generating web referral traffic.  The effectiveness of Craigslist for generating inquires is undeniable but some of our clients feel that the quality of the leads is not great.  I have also noticed that the bounce rate is higher for Craigslist that other web referrers.

 Internet lead quality is often a reflection of the clarity of your ad and the information you provide.  We suggest that your Craigslist ad be as specific as possible so as to minimize the chatter between consumers and your Internet sales staff for basic things that should be included in your free listing.

Second in traceable traffic is Google Base, but this is not consistent across the country.  Traffic from Google Base comes into Google Analytics as a “Google.com referral”.  This is not a clean measure since there are a few other referring sites that can come in under this category.  We will be doing some better tracking on this matter.

The traffic from Backpage.com has been insignificant and disappointing.   The VAST.COM network of listings is looking promising and may in fact be better than Google Base, but more testing is needed.  There will be a second part to this article as more data is collected.

Craigslist.com is the clear winning for generating extra calls and traffic to your dealer website to date. If car dealers need help posting their cars to Craigslist, please give us a call.