Hopefully this is the right category to vent, but I feel after being on DR and DS for 2 years now, I feel I've embedded most, if not all, internet marketing tactics and strategies as outlined on these forums as well as the 2011 Digital Marketing Conference guide. I'm a college grad 25 year old one man internet department working for my father's used car dealership in an area of thousands of dealers. I'm not a car guy at all. I've successfully managed to pull this dealership out of the 100% radio advertising ideology and create an Internet presence. We're on so many networks, so many microsites, I created 480 pages worth of SEO content for our new website that i'm still waiting on Google to crawl. I handle the merchandising, color correcting photos in Lightroom and photoshop, make live video walkarounds, spam the shit out of classifieds and our wordpress blogs, pricing, email blast, reporting, and all the works! We went from a couple hundred hits a month to receiving almost 5000 visitors a month to our website. Competitors send their salesmen to work for us for a day & try to question how we do our internet advertising. In four years, look what i've done, i've done so much!
Out of the 60-100 cars we keep on our lot, we still average 30-45 sales per month since last year. This month is lower.
Whenever things are slow, my managers love to point fingers at everything: the ISM, low lead traffic, 'because we dont advertise on [insert low end vendor that runs a spanish mag or radio saying x dealer sells y cars a month from it', because we dont have good banks, because bla bla bla. Whenever numbers are up, no one seems to give a ^%*@.
The constant speculation of what ifs and remember whens and this dealer does this and thats always find a way to keep me down and feel absolutely no sense of accomplishment for what i've created. What the *@^% do I do wrong?
The day I came into the dealership in late 2007 was when they were selling 50-70 cars a month just from one lower-end radio station, like 4 or 5 from the internet. It's completely reversed now. I just constantly think, through a pricing strategy or creating micropages or upping our ATC budget or anything else for that matter can bring our numbers up to where we were. But it just doesn't happen.
Technically I'm only responsible for bringing the traffic, making the phones ring, etc. So its possibly the sales force, possibly our financing, maybe the product, etc. But I really don't feel it's what I do that's bringing in slow sales figures.
Add on managers with the 'ive been doing this for 32984 years' ego, dealership drama, me being somewhat underpaid, trying to get my father and management to acknowledge my efforts, and having DSL, i dont know how much longer of this I could take.
I love this business, I've met some amazing people and gotten the best help from vendors. It's so easy and fun to handle the merchandising of this dealership. My ATC rep tried to get me to work with their marketing team. My HomeNet rep told me I belong in a vendor rather than a dealership. TK Carsites asked me how I know ASP. All of them tell me 'All dealers run like that'. I think I just expect too much and beat myself down when the dealership doesnt deliver on my visions.
Any other internet comrades of my generation share a similar frustration?
Out of the 60-100 cars we keep on our lot, we still average 30-45 sales per month since last year. This month is lower.
Whenever things are slow, my managers love to point fingers at everything: the ISM, low lead traffic, 'because we dont advertise on [insert low end vendor that runs a spanish mag or radio saying x dealer sells y cars a month from it', because we dont have good banks, because bla bla bla. Whenever numbers are up, no one seems to give a ^%*@.
The constant speculation of what ifs and remember whens and this dealer does this and thats always find a way to keep me down and feel absolutely no sense of accomplishment for what i've created. What the *@^% do I do wrong?
The day I came into the dealership in late 2007 was when they were selling 50-70 cars a month just from one lower-end radio station, like 4 or 5 from the internet. It's completely reversed now. I just constantly think, through a pricing strategy or creating micropages or upping our ATC budget or anything else for that matter can bring our numbers up to where we were. But it just doesn't happen.
Technically I'm only responsible for bringing the traffic, making the phones ring, etc. So its possibly the sales force, possibly our financing, maybe the product, etc. But I really don't feel it's what I do that's bringing in slow sales figures.
Add on managers with the 'ive been doing this for 32984 years' ego, dealership drama, me being somewhat underpaid, trying to get my father and management to acknowledge my efforts, and having DSL, i dont know how much longer of this I could take.
I love this business, I've met some amazing people and gotten the best help from vendors. It's so easy and fun to handle the merchandising of this dealership. My ATC rep tried to get me to work with their marketing team. My HomeNet rep told me I belong in a vendor rather than a dealership. TK Carsites asked me how I know ASP. All of them tell me 'All dealers run like that'. I think I just expect too much and beat myself down when the dealership doesnt deliver on my visions.
Any other internet comrades of my generation share a similar frustration?
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