I've also found that postnig the same message twice is redundant? Sorry about that...

I've found that if we can convince the ISM of the merits of using our services, it makes the sales process go quicker--they can then go to bat for us to the powers that be. 9 times out of 10 we can help make an ISM more profitable which is really the only "sales" pitch we need to make.
--
Andrew Salamone
carsgofaster.com

I've found that if we can convince the ISM of the merits of using our services, it makes the sales process go quicker--they can then go to bat for us to the powers that be. 9 times out of 10 we can help make an ISM more profitable which is really the only "sales" pitch we need to make.
--
Andrew Salamone
carsgofaster.com

Jeff,

You have an excellent forum here, but the people you listed are not going to listen......yet. You have a powerful voice and a car guy mentality, which I very much appreciate. However, they are not going to listen until they have to. They have bigger fish to fry for now and your blog is not on their radar screen….yet.

In the vender world the ISM is insignificant because they don’t sign the contracts or the checks. The dealer and or the GM do, and that’s who they are going to cater to.

Being a car guy web guy like you, I feel your pain. You have a powerful tool and voice here, just keep swinging and you WILL chop down that tree.

BW,
Gilbert

Hey Jeff
Many of us on the Black Book Online sales team read your articles and appreciate the information you and many of your fellow internet sales professional contribute to our development and industry knowledge. Dealerrefresh.com is a valuable resource for vendors and sales personnel and I personally refer all of my new clients and those I meet on the road to this site.

Jeff, I sense a little angst, brother. But that is cool. You run a good thread and as industry grows closer to web2.0, this blog will be a player. Think about the fact that you have a 2-year foundation in this. That is something. Few in the industry have that. I look forward to reading your other recent post

We ARE here.

As a company that has been around in this space for a long time (since 1995) but with a very, very small sales staff (4-5 depending who you ask, we realize that sites like yours are our best opportunity to get the word out to the early adopters who ultimately help influence the masses.

Our CarSpot Solo camera is one of the most innovative products for dealers selling online--and the key is simply making dealers aware of it.

I have just this week encouraged my staff (sales- and non-) to continue to find creative ways to get the word out and am glad that you are not only open to us utilizing DR, but are encouraging it.

Thank you for your time and efforts in maintaining DR (and calling us vendors out as you see fit!)

Andrew Salamone
CarSpot, President

As was pointed out in last week's JD Power event and throughout publications over the last year, a blog is only one of the critical aspects of a dealer's presence online. Just as (or even more) important is reputation management and representation in forums, especially for dealers active in the accessory market.

Anything that drives an engaged, educated consumer to your virtual or actual dealership is a win for your store today. Many website providers used 'blogs' which were just long advertisements over the past couple years to just add content on buried pages for SEO purposes. This is one way that dealers were confused as to what a blog is and how it should be maintained.

If you're a high-line dealership, it should be an active part of your branding. Have a staff member that is web-savvy and can maintain the content? Try that for a while (make sure the content is triple-checked though) and see what happens.

At the end of the day, it is a hard sell convincing dealership management (or principals) that a blog or any other aspect of social or viral marketing can actually get them noticed. Explaining UGC and blogs usually gathers a timid response at best. If you start it, maintain it. Don't do it for two weeks, say it 'doesnt' work' and leave it to die on the information superhighway. That rule is followed so infrequently in the auto world.

I am struggling with the decisions over what to include in my blog. I am an ISM for a large Honda dealership and want to be out there with the technology that is relevant right now. I do not have the luxury that some of my colleagues who aren't in the Internet department do, of a long list of customers and referrals because I am relatively new to the business. I want to be able to use my blog to connect and be relevant to my customers and their friends and family in a way that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Thoughts?

Thanks Joe

Kudos to Alex and his team!

October 29, 2007
Checkered Blog Captures Int'l Web Honors

"...Other winners include Sony Electronics and Wells Fargo & Co. The competition received more than 900 entries in its various categories from across the United States and six other countries..."

I don't know how others feel about this but one of the lamest things I've seen w/rising frequency is online ad vendors or third party inventory company blogs that they start to generate interest in their respective companies, etc. and nobody responds to any of the posts over a period of time and then they still leave the blog up and active one and a half or two years down the line and it still has zero responses to any if not all posts. It comes across as pathetic to me because it shows absolutely no interest in what they have to say. Maybe it's me but it seems tantamount to spending time to build a large public address system that nobody listens to.

Thanks for the plug on the Checkered Blog Jeff. We started it, like you said, to build transparency. We wanted customers to know we pay attention to the community, in fact, we're one of its biggest givers! We also wanted to do these things in such a way that it did not come off as bragging. I judge its penetration on how many comments are being added to posts, and it is just starting to get off the ground. It has taken us about 6 months of daily article posting to get it to a point where we get 1 to 5 comments per day. I could not have done it without outside help though. Goldman & Associates Public Relations deserve most of the credit.

It does take some work to blog. It doesn't have to be about the dealership. Actually, I think having a blog totally about the dealership is boring. You can position things to be SEO and transparent. I've noticed the smart Car category ranks number 1 in a whole bunch of varied Google searches! Most of the traffic to our Hyundai site comes off the blog's SEO clicks. If you had asked me who was going to benefit the most of our brands from this blog, when we first started it, the last thing I would have said was "Hyundai"!

It has been a very rewarding piece of our eCommerce equation...BUT, not rewarding in the $$$-sense...rewarding in customer appreciation. It is a PR piece, and you can't put a price on it.

I started blogging with the Phil Long Group a couple years ago before it was in vogue. It's a great tool for a dealer to use to get out all kinds of information out to their customer base without slapping them in the face with a commercial. I highly recommend it.

John,
You are so right, the skills and time needed to populate a blog are not found among sales staff. It's a lot of WORK. But, blogging for dealerships has SEO benefits worth looking into.

I am working on a new test marketing blog built specifically for Search Engine Harvesting. Give it a look: The Used Car Queen you may get some ideas.

Although it's just a few weeks old, it's already exceeded my expectations.
Over 200 unique visitors (in a rather small market)
5 pages per visit!
8 minutes on avg. per visitor
40% Bounce Rate.

All traffic comes from Search Engines only AND there less than a dozen cars up there. Once we expand the selection the search traffic will follow too.

At this hour this is a SEO harvesting experiment so I haven't worked on any call to action items to work on conversion side. I expect there'll be a lot of easy ways to reach out an touch the visitor.

G'Luck,
Joe

The idea of dealer blogs is a non-starter. After being an Internet Sales Manager for 7 years, I can tell you than no one at the dealership is going to blog - at least not in enough numbers (even in the hundreds), for it to be a viable business for a third party.

As for Full-Service Blogging - there isn't enough news at a dealership to support this. It will be cost ineffective for the dealer and the provider.

There are enough 3rd party Online Service Providers already to help us drive traffic. I agree with the posting that says there isn't the market for this.

Managing blogs can be a very time consuming job, however the net rewards can be huge in terms of SEO for your main site and linking strategies.

Blogs can be used to drive incremental traffic to your website, improve SERP's, decreasing advertising budgets and the list goes on.

A blog network can work wonders for your online marketing efforts.

Alex,

That is a good philosophy. Getting PR and marketing behind it is important. I classify dealer blogging as a tool for CRM which means it could be used for promoting specials and incentives, and engaging with your customer base. This of course isn't their only use, but a useful one.

Something to consider is that you can't just throw anyone into your blogging efforts. Just like you need qualified people to work your specific functions of your business, you need people who understand blogging, the industry, and people, and enjoy writing, researching, and learning.

In my opinion, a dealer blog requires a somewhat unique situation for success. I think a single-point store that does not engage in what their market might consider exciting is going to have a tough time attracting readership. If you're a Porsche store with heavy sponsorship in Porsche Club events, and invite a popular Porsche Club member to co-author, you will have a better chance for attracting a reader-base.

The dealer groups have a better chance for pulling things off, but they're going to have a tougher time managing things. Dealer groups with exciting brands - brands that have a following (Porsche, BMW, Mini, some Honda models, etc.) can also invite co-authors.

We are going to set up a blog, but it is a combination venture with our public relations firm and marketing agency. We are the kind of dealer group that throws the full investment behind an "experiment" to know whether it will definitely work. I know most dealerships do not make these types of investments. Hopefully this one will work because I love the idea!

I'm glad to see some discussion on this topic. I am a long time proponent of the web 2.0 technologies. fyi - here is another dealer blog - phillong.squarespace.com - from the phil long group.

With so few blogs out there, i think it still remains to be seen where dealers will find value in them. and dealers should not be discourage from thinking of creative ways to use them.

The most important thing, is that the blog provides value to the reader of some sort. this could be a fresh list of coupons (like the fry's ad), articles that provide some kind of expertise (like articles from a senior technician, how-to's and other tips), articles from an individual voice, brand news and information, community news/events/info ... any other ideas?

Also, what i have not seen mentioned yet is blogs used as an internal tool. Other industries have taken to using them internally for any process that requires journal logging of some sort. any ideas here?

That Ward's article was good. One of the site's referenced, Earl Stewart on Cars, had a great vibe to it. I am an advocate of dealer blogs like that, because they capture the essence of blogging. The Fiesta Ford blog was set up more as a conventional website but with fresh content. That is not a bad way to go either, but a lot of work.

Truly dealer-centric blogs are pre-mature right now and are difficult to justify. However, consumer niche-centric blogs make sense right now. I suspect that come NADA 2008 in San Francisco, blogging will be a timely buzz and the gate will be opened for dealer blog products.

Do you know that we both posted on this same topic, same article even, and on the same day?

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Our dealership uses iMagiclab and I do like their feature of checking for duplicate leads although it is far from perfect. The problem I have with any tool that automatically checks duplicates is that it is not accurate.

For example, what if you have a walk in customer leave your dealership on Monday morning and then submits a lead on your website that same evening? Do you count that lead as a duplicate? If so, ileadcontrol does not work for you. What if someone types their name with and without a typo so are these two different leads or one? What if you have a lead come in today and the guy buys a different brand instead. Now 2 months from now he submits another lead. Is that a duplicate? Some people shop for months while other buy within a day. Maybe this guy is interested in a second car or maybe he is still interested in the same, because he really did not buy yet. These are just 3 examples.

What you really need is to manually input your scrubbed data in to a tool that shows it to you. Yes this means manual data entry, but it sure is a whole lot more accurate. Good things do not come cheap!

How do you guys check your closing percentages per vendor? Do you simply use the reports that your CRM/ILM provides? If so, your numbers are wrong no matter what tool you use. Of course on the other side, you also have the problem of data integrity when you manually enter your data, because in most cases the person creating the report is the one that gets paid based on the results.

I have develloped an Exell spreadsheet that graphs and tabulates things like:

-Cost per vehicle sold by vendor
-Cost per vehicle lead by vendor
-Average gross by sales person
-Average gross by vendor
-Closing ratio by vendor
-Closing ratio by sales person
-Vehicle Model Mix MTD or YTD
etc...

This really helps us determine which vendor to keep or to renegotiate with. Which sales person needs more help or the axe...

Anyways, sorry to get sidetracked on this post. LoL

How many lead providers charge on a per lead basis vs a flat monthly fee regardless of the number of leads?

Allan,

Two things. First, you're right about the bad leads and this is something we're addressing, and secondly, the $399 is not a monthly charge. That's the one time set up fee. For successive months our business model is performance based where we only charge you a portion of what we save you.