Another football season comes to an end with the crowning of a Super Bowl champion. Are the Baltimore Ravens the most talented team in the NFL?

Maybe... or maybe not.

Love them or hate them, what the Ravens are is a unified team. Separate units of offense, defense and special teams that worked together to accomplish a goal. Each unit focused on their individual objectives, while at the same time, focused on putting the next unit in position to help influence a win.

A high-performing dealership is similar to a championship football team, with individual units or profit centers working as a unified team to deliver a win; an exceptional consumer experience that results in vehicle, service, parts and accessoriessales.

As consumers interact with profit centers within your dealership, their in-store journey is far from linear. There is a beginning in-store interaction that might be in sales, parts or service; but not a defined path towards the next profit center. Each consumer’s in-store journey takes a slightly different path with a different destination, time frame and points of influence. For a successful automotive consumer journey, profit centers must be unified just like the three phases -- offense, defense & special teams -- of a Super Bowl champion.

But what happens when profit centers are compartmentalized; looking to pad their own stats instead of winning as a team? How many dealerships have loyal sales customers that never visit their service department; or loyal service customers that never set foot on their showroom floor?

Sadly... too many!

Becoming a unified championshipteam begins with each profit center acknowledging their co-dependency. Working together instead of individually has a substantially greater influence on consumer behavior; and adjusting in-store processes to reflect multiple points or channels of influence creates wins for each profit center and the dealership as a whole.

Escorting a customer from the service waiting room to the showroom floor for coffee creates an influence channel with the sales department. A salesperson showing the customer accessories on a vehicle creates an influence channel for the parts department. This unified profit center approach helps high-performing dealers deliver an exceptional consumer experience and increased dealership profits.

A unified profit center approach is not just an in-store best practice, but is also a best practice when it comes to your dealership marketing. Just as a consumer’s journey through a dealership is non-linear, a consumer’s digital journey is even more complex, often with no clear path.

A high-performing dealership will translate its unified profit center processes into a unified, multichannel marketing approach. According to Cobalt’s multichannel eBook:

“Rather than turning on different channels at different times in a neat cascading order, high-performing dealerships are ever-present. However, whenever, and wherever the modern consumer chooses to find them, they will be on and active through a compelling mix of media: email, search engine rankings, advertising, reviews, website, etc.”

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There’s research that backs-up the multichannel marketing strategy that these top-performing dealership have deployed. Cobalt’s latest eBook also states:

“According to Aberdeen’s July 2012 Customer Experience study; businesses who engaged in multichannel marketing saw growth in key performance improvements across the board, such as: a 6.8% increase in customer retention, a 5.1% increase in customer lifetime value, and a 4.0% increase in customer satisfaction.”

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In football terms, that means a serious uptick in roaring fans for you.

While you may never get to experience the thrill of winning a Super Bowl, you can experience the thrill of beating your competition through multichannel marketing; an experience that many high-performing dealerships are experiencing daily.

If you were coaching in the 2013 Marketing Super Bowl, what advice would you give your players?

 

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On January 15th, Facebook announced a feature launch that dramatically changes the way consumers use the world’s most popular social networking site. Facebook Graph Search (FGS) is a natural-language search tool which, to date, has only been released in Beta. Currently, not all Facebook content is searchable, and only a small group of people have been allowed to try the new tool. Luckily, on Friday, I had the opportunity to be a part of this Beta group.

I began my experience with FGS by searching for some popular segments, “restaurants my friends like”, “friends who work at Dominion Enterprises”, and so on. Facebook was smart to release this in a limited Beta, because not all of the data is searchable. However, that did not deter me from helping the dealer community get a head start on preparations for this new search tool.

The good news is that FGS offers dealers a huge opportunity.

Right now, many dealers struggle to market themselves well on Facebook. Many dealers still use personal pages (friend profile) for branding purposes, instead of a business page. Unfortunately, personal pages are nearly invisible within FGS.

Why is that?

Individuals search for businesses using categories on FGS. These categories are created by Facebook just like the old-fashioned Yellow Pages. Select them well, and you can create far more visibility for your business.

Here’s an example of a dealer using a personal page, instead of a Business (Fan) page:



Daniels Chevrolet on Facebook

Unfortunately, due to the personal profile used in the example above, this particular dealership cannot be found in any searchable business categories. Facebook thinks this dealership is a person. It is only through business pages that dealers can choose categories to identify themselves. Additionally, many dealerships listed as businesses are only identifiable under a single category. This severely limits indexing opportunities.

A search on FGS for “car dealership” brought back some local results. These dealers have done a good job of setting up business pages which are listed in the proper category: “car dealership”.

Notice in this example that Bob Pulte Chevrolet is not only categorized under “car dealership” but also in a second category for “automotive repair”. This allows Bob Pulte Chevrolet to pull up in another search:



There’s a problem when searching for specifics such as oil changes or tires, as evidenced below:





In the same way that some dealers don’t properly index their websites for fixed ops, I struggled to find franchised dealers who had added categories for “oil lube & filter service” or “tire dealer”. Not surprisingly, the same problem exists when searching for “car parts & accessories” or “auto body shop”





All of these searches on Facebook Graph Search were within fixed categories that Facebook has defined for automotive businesses. Unfortunately, most franchised dealers were only listed under one or two categories. Below is a rare example where three categories were listed for a single dealership. Hudiburg Toyota has done this very well and is prepared for FGS.



Facebook Graph Search will only become more important as the technology is refined and additional users are brought on board. In order to take advantage of this new marketing opportunity, dealers need to follow three simple steps:

1. Check to see if your dealership is listed as a person or business.
   
2. If the dealership is under a personal “friend profile” page, convert it to a business page right away.
   
3. Once listed as a Facebook business page, select the relevant business categories. Identify your dealership in such a way that individuals can find both vehicle inventory and services.

Get it prepared today.

What do you think..will Facebook Graph Search soon become important to your dealers digital marketing investments?