However, a powerful website is one investment that will differentiate your car dealership from all your competitors.

Over the years, we’ve worked with a number of car dealerships and have found that 5 key elements make all the difference.

1. Remarkable Design

As they say, it’s all in the details.

Leaving dirty cars on your lot sends the wrong message to potential customers.

It’s the same with websites. A mediocre website will literally scare customers away.

Many of your competitors have mediocre websites. You don’t have to.

We’ve been developing car dealership websites for years and have a staff of industry leading designers. We know exactly what it takes to make your website stand out.

Take a look at the website we recently built for Palm Springs Motors.

Now compare it to the competition.

Which car dealership do you think customers flock to?

2. Your Inventory, Online

The way people buy cars has completely changed.

The first stop in a car buyer’s journey used to be the car dealership.

Now, every customer starts his search online. They’ll first research the cars they are considering, and then search for dealerships in the area.

If your inventory is not accessible through your website, you are losing sales. Many customers won’t even contact a car dealership if they can’t see what cars they have on the lot.

We’ve developed amazing systems that allow you to easily upload information and images of your inventory.

And best of all, it’s search engine optimized so you attract the RIGHT customer looking for the EXACT car you have.

3. Mobile Friendly

Another shift in consumer purchasing behavior is mobile computing.

Many customers now do much of their car purchasing research from a smartphone or tablet, such as an iPad.

Therefore, it is imperative that your website be mobile friendly.

Many websites are not mobile friendly. They are difficult, if not impossible to navigate by touch screen.

If a potential customer visits a car dealership’s website from their phone and can’t navigate, they will lose that customer.

Don’t let the same thing happen to you.

4. Easy Contact

How easy is it for your customer to contact you?

When a customer is ready to purchase from you, they’ll want to contact you at that moment.

But if it’s difficult from them to find your phone number or email address on your website, you may lose that customer.

When we deal with car dealerships, we make it imperative that any customer can quickly and easily contact you from any page on the website, without any hesitation.

5. Map & Directions

Lastly, you want to make it easy for your customer to find you.

Simply including your address may not be enough. Many customers now want to be able to SEE where your car dealership is located.

That’s why it’s important to include a map with your location.

On the car dealership websites we build, we always include an interactive map that allows customers to get directions from their location.

Do you want to stand out from your competition and increase your sales?

Then it’s time to make an investment in your car dealership and improve your website.

Image Credit:  Some rights reserved by cjalallian

On Feb. 2, the four Tweet Race teams will leave New York, L.A., Chicago and Tampa in specially outfitted Mercedes-Benz vehicles, and head to Superbowl XLV in Dallas. They’ll be directed and fueled by people’s tweets along with help from team coaches who have large numbers of Twitter followers. Fellow tweeters are invited to join a team and help tweet to them with race clues and tips.  V.I.P. trips for two to numerous MB sponsored events can be won by these tweet helpers, along with other prizes. Winning is more than just getting there first. It’s also the largest number of active Twitter helpers and a few other social media measurements. Oh, and the winning team? They each get a 2012 C-Class Coupe.

The team coaches aren’t just people with a large number of Twitter followers either, they’re celebrities from various industries. Musicians, athletes and TV stars. If their team wins, $25k goes to their favorite charity.

So, while the main media platforms (Twitter and Facebook) are free, let’s add up what this whole campaign will probably cost MB USA. Celebrity involvement, an easy $400k. Putting four MB’s into the race, at least $200k. Two winning C-Class coupes, $80k. Winning coaches charity of choice donation, $25k. Cost of coming up with the idea, developing and managing the entire campaign, probably $1 million. Paid online advertising banners to help promote the campaign, around $500k.  Total cost of this FREE Media campaign that will probably involve 8 million active participants for 7 days, about $2.25 Million. Will it ultimately do better for Mercedes-Benz than their $6 million dollar Super Bowl ad planned for 4th quarter of this year’s game that has an anticipated 150 million viewers? Time will tell, but that’s not the point of this post.

The point is that marketers should start thinking differently about how they will be paying for online campaigns in this new world of free media. Historically, an ad campaign followed its own 80/20 rule. 80% of the campaign costs would go toward buying the media (TV, radio, print, outdoor, etc) and 20% would go toward developing and producing the creative. Although that 20% could be more or less, depending on the agency and the production value, the idea is that the majority of the expense would pay for the media.

In the new world of social media, that 80% is either substantially lower or gone completely. It’s obvious how advantageous this can be for smart marketers, but the challenge of creating a campaign using social media that draws interest and interaction takes a whole new level of brain power and creativity, a skill that a lot of agencies today don’t have, be they digital or traditional. Brain power and creativity that can succeed in taking a non-intrusive form of communication and make the right people want to view it, hear it and get involved with it is the greatest challenge in this new day. And that has a few Clio award-winning creatives asking for early retirement.

Although this post is not meant to be a self-promotion for Brandtailers, it is interesting to understand why we have more easily adapted and succeeded in this new world.  Over our twenty plus years in business we’ve had more clients with small budgets than not. We’ve rarely had the luxury of letting the media weight do the job. For us, it’s always been the need to flex our creative idea muscles to help make something come alive and work without a lot of media support. It’s kind of like we’ve been training for the Olympics for a long time and it’s finally here.

But back to the purpose of this post: Let’s all help each other understand the new opportunities as well as the realities of what is truly needed in today’s marketing. Big media budgets may still be around for the recovering 10% of advertisers, but the other 90% is demanding success without major media dollars. Is it possible? We think so. We’ve been doing it for a long time. Our mantra has always been, “It’s the idea, stupid.” Feel free to use it.

Most people know what OnStar is. Or even Lo-Jack. They’re computer and satellite driven resources that know how to find your car in case of trouble. Take that concept and put it on your mobile phone. Then look at your phone as having the capability of being OnStar or Lo-Jack headquarters, where you can see where everyone in your network is. Real time.

But say you have a lot of friends. And you only want to know where those geographically closest to you are. Just use your phone to “check-in”, sharing where you are (i.e. Kung Pao China Buffet). The technology Foursquare offers lets your friends see that you’re there. You can also see which of your friends are there, or at another place close by. Like maybe within four square blocks of where you are. Get it?

Then get the restaurants, movie theaters and retail stores involved and allow them the opportunity to entice you in. They’ll offer free food, special coupons, and even ego-centric virtual power trips like making you the “Mayor of Kung Pao China Buffet” with extra little perks. All because you frequent that establishment more often (or just first). There’s more to it, but this is enough to give you what you should probably understand.

So, who cares you ask? For now, only about 2% of America. But think about the implications of this technology being at everyone’s fingertips. Very Big Brotherish, but also very convenient. Now, think about what will happen when Facebook takes it and runs with it, which they intend to do very, very soon.

Stand by. It’s only just begun.

Good Will vs. Media Dollars. Hmmmm…. So, I thought to myself, how can a business like Kragen take this concept and make it a home run online brand marketing success?

What if they had some local customers following them on Twitter and, when it started raining, they sent out a message offering FREE wiper blade inserts to the first 100 visitors. Do you think they’d have a huge line at the door? Marketing history says they would.

But wait, how can a store give out 100 sets of wiper blade inserts and justify the expense? At $10 a set that could add up to $1,000 in product! Yup. It sure could. But how much did it cost in media expenditures to get 100 people in the door? How much would it cost if they tried doing this on TV, or some other form of traditional media? And how could the message be distributed in such a timely manner, and thanks to Twitter, shared so quickly with friends, coworkers, family and other miscellaneous Twitter followers who get the offer re-tweeted to them? How much good will could be created by helping customers out, free of charge, at a time when they needed something pertinent to their immediate safety?

What’s the biggest challenge with this type of new marketing concept? Changing marketers ways of thinking. Getting out of the old mindset that you spend money on the media, and the creative, not on good will. That’s old thinking. And it’s really, really expensive thinking. Why not take just a tiny piece of all that money to be saved from expensive traditional media buys and instead use it to be helpful. Yes, even use it to give something away. With today’s consumer, being helpful can pay off ten-fold. Seeing those Kragen guys standing out in the pouring rain smiling and helping customers was enough to earn my loyalty.

By the way, did I happen to mention that almost every customer in the parking lot that day was holding a Kragen bag with other things they had purchased?

I’ve never understood this strategy. According to sales reports, neither have most consumers. I think this is just one great example of incomplete thinking in the marketing process. Could a funny industry-degrading ad get attention? You bet. Could it win creative awards? Of course (that’s just a question of money). But does it really change the opinion of the consumer when the “alternative” solution is presented? RARELY.

EM634DFGQD2X

I’ve met many people lately who are unwilling to submit to their lack of social media knowledge. They have the “I don’t understand Twitter therefore it is a joke” mentality. How sad. They will be last in the unemployment line in a few years.

Oh, I’m no poster child for humility. I didn’t really get Twitter until about 9 months ago. I thought it was stupid. Now I’m busy playing catch-up. So I speak as an equally flawed human being, which is why I can attest to the fact that businesses must embrace the power of social media whether they really understand it or not.

My message of hope to you is that you are not alone – MOST PEOPLE DO NOT YET UNDERSTAND SOCIAL MEDIA. But you can no longer ignore its marketing power.

These days, with technology changing so quickly, most of us need to trust and rely on others who know more than we do about these new business tools. The sooner we find them, trust them, and let them help us, the sooner we’ll gladly have our picture taken in a Wonder Woman costume. I look forward to it.

Photo by Jordan Small

I had the most fascinating meeting yesterday. It was with four men in the auto industry. One of them, an existing client, is more savvy than the other three. The other three were what I would have considered typical dinosaurs in the business. I know this because I had met with the same three men a year earlier. At the time I shared our agency’s belief that traditional advertising was becoming more and more ineffective, and that the poor quality of creative messages being delivered by most of the auto industry were only making things worse.

I made suggestions to move them toward more trust-based communications with car buyers, and noted that putting a little respect back into the selling process wouldn’t be a bad idea either. But my message fell on deaf ears. It was obvious to them that I didn’t know what I was talking about. They said this economic crisis was just causing a temporary hiccup in the automotive world. Things would get better, as they always did.

That was a year ago.

Fast forward 12 months, one humongous recession, a national Cash for Clunkers campaign, and a few million less car sales. I was invited back to “re-address” the situation. This time they listened, better yet, embraced what they heard. With God as my witness, I said the exact same things I had before. The only difference was a little more focus on TRUST. I referred to Chris Brogan and Julien Smith‘s book, Trust Agents, and walked them through how changes in media, marketing and creative will only succeed in today’s world if they have this foundation of truth, transparency and trust. They ate it up.

What’s the takeaway here? Some dinosaurs can evolve without becoming extinct. Make TRUST the goal of every marketing program and you might speed up the evolution process.

But that’s OK. Because I still share their greatest power – and so do you. It’s the understanding that truthfulness, transparency and sincerity work. That’s really it. They know it, they preach it, and they’re creating some of the greatest business success stories in history with it.

How we ever went so far away from truth in marketing and advertising, I’ll never know. But with 28 years in the business I have to admit I’ve probably donated to the dark side. In fact, I can clearly recall conversations with clients over the years where transparency was considered too risky and, besides, did we really need to be sincere when we had (insert celebrity name here) doing our next commercial?

No more.

Thanks to too much media, too much razzle-dazzle, and too much abuse of consumer trust, those days are long gone. We’ve come full circle back to a wonderful place that is the nucleus of social media’s marketing power.

So next time you feel overwhelmed by all you’re hearing, reading and seeing about social media, don’t fall into the insecurity trap of “I don’t know code so I’ll never understand Social Media”. Go to your gut. Think of a world that does business by sharing the truth. Use that as your foundation for learning. Everything else will fall into place.

Most of you reading this know Brandtailers expertise includes extensive automotive marketing. That being said, I humbly defer to our level of industry knowledge when I say, “Wow, the fed sure knows how to screw up a rebate program…even ones they create!”

If you’re not up to speed on the latest federal government fiasco because you’d rather read the obituaries than the automotive trades (actually there hasn’t been much difference between them this year), here’s the short version of what’s happened so far with the “Cash for Clunkers” program.

After eight months in Congress, Cash for Clunkers gets approved. Obama signs it. Three weeks later (last week) it launches. It gives $3,500 or $4,500 rebates to consumers trading in eligible clunkers for eligible fuel efficient vehicles (Don’t get me started on where the money is coming from because I don’t want to use that kind of language).

The auto industry finally has something strong to offer.  Within 72 hours car sales are going crazy. Dealers are gladly taking clunkers in return for federally subsidized rebates. The plan is designed so that the dealer can cover the rebate amount for the consumer and, after submitting the necessary paperwork, get reimbursed by the government. Uh, oh.

The fed sets up one website for the dealers to submit their reimbursement paperwork – about fourteen pages per sale that has to be uploaded, one at a time. You can guess what happens next. The system overloads, the site slows to a crawl, dealers get timed out, the site crashes time and time again. It ends up taking hours per sale, that is, if the dealer is lucky enough to get through the process at all. In less than four days a program designed to last four months is in chaos.

The NHTSA (National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration) is in charge of the program’s administration. They panic appropriately and, after estimating that less than 10% of actual sales have been processed, they send out an emergency alert halting the program. Their assumption is that the one-billion dollars in federal funding is already gone. Meanwhile an estimated 225,000 vehicles have been sold, with millions, and millions, and millions of dollars fronted by the dealers who assume they will be getting the money back. I’m amazed we didn’t hear about the highest number of heart attacks in under one hour when that alert went out.

So where does it sit now? Well, the House generously passed a quick $2 Billion financial increase to the program last Friday. Then they left on vacation for five weeks. They told dealers, “We’ll cover anything you SUBMIT through Tuesday, August 4th at midnight. But after that we  make no promises until the Senate approves the increase.” Meanwhile dealers are left trying to explain this debacle to customers, while they hold their breath to see if they’ll actually get back all the money they fronted on the customers behalf. If the program fails to deliver its promise to the dealers, there will be an all new level of bloodbath in the automotive industry. For once in many peoples lives, it’s time to feel sorry for the car dealer.

The moral of the story? It’s the one we already knew – government and cars don’t mix.