Digital marketing manager wishlist

[NickCybela]

I'm seeing more dealers, and dealer groups hire a digital marketing manager that doesn't directly sell cars. For those that have hired a person, or those people executing something like this-- what do you think your greatest challenge is?

For example...

- Improving and optimizing the search engine marketing strategy
- Getting more people to the site
- Providing an intelligent report quickly and easily, to measure success of digital efforts

Looking forwards to your feedback.

 

[JD Rucker]

Pinging to top as this is an important question.

I'm not a dealer but I did play one on television for a while. We have seen buy-in as the biggest roadblock for a handful of our clients that have full-time marketing managers. I only know one (a mutual friend, Nick) who really has full control over spend and strategy. It's not a coincidence that they're rocking and rolling with a pair of top 10 dealers within the group. She has buy-in from the owners and most of the GMs and is able to initiate strategies that work. To me, that's the biggest obstacle today.

Again, I'd love to see feedback from dealers on this one.

 

[cmjerry4531]

It's been a couple years since I was the Marketing Director at a dealer group, but I talk to them pretty much every other day about internet marketing. I also fell into the Joe Webb category of having the best sales team in the county surrounding me.

Definitely agree with JD, buy in is the biggest challenge. Internet Marketing, and marketing in general, is complex. At some point the marketing manager needs to be given some slack in order to prove themselves or fail. This takes a level of trust from higher ups, which is hard to come buy when you are talking about sizable chunks of money leaving their dealership. In the past I would create a sales pitch and demo to sell upper management on an idea. The dealership had fairly digital friendly owners, so it wasn't so bad for me. Still, I had to sell them on ideas, but they would give me free reign once I did.

The other thing that I think is challenging is getting enough buy in to get source and sale information. Marketers need to know their customers path to the sale, but this just ads another step to the sale process. The Marketing Manager needs to get buy in from the Sales Managers to implement data collection, and to help hold people accountable. Otherwise, part of your marketing spend will be a little like throwing money at the wall. More sticks because you are a great marketer, but not as well as if you had more data to make better decisions.