First off, I want thank Dan for his post. It's a great topic to discuss and something that many dealers have overlooked or simply don't understand the importance of.
Getting back on task; should dealers have an in-house Internet Marketing Guru that manages all your dealers Internet marketing efforts as Dan mentioned (SEO and SEM but also analytics, reputation management, video SEO and social media)?
I believe 100% that a dealer should have this guru at their disposal. I would also lean towards the idea of having this person in-house.
Are dealers ready for this??
They need to be BUT it's the age old view on how you pay your employees. Anyone that makes real money at a dealer, their paycheck usually directly corresponds to their output. Cars sold, gross held, wrenches turned, service RO's written and parts sold.
Dealers have been paying commission based for years now and all of a sudden they have to pay someone for something they have no undertanding of...
How do we pay this Internet Marketing guru?
How to we measure the success and ROI for this position?
This becomes a huge stumbling block and is another reason why many times Internet marketing managers and the ISM is the first to go when it's time to "cut back".
This stumbling block is why many times these duties are pushed onto a sales person, who eventually becomes the "Internet Sales Manager". BUT in order to survive they MUST continue to sell as well or at the very least, handle ALL internet derived leads while managing the CRM duties and scheduling appointments. Handling all of this on top of any online Marketing initiatives quickly becomes overwhelming, the ISM feels under appreciated and under paid (especially since they spend 3 hours a week fighting for the skated sales).
Imagine if you will; taking photos of a car, writing the description, managing the upload of your dealers inventory, listing the cars on Cars.com, Autotrader, ebay and cragslist. You get a call from one of your listings, schedule the appointment for later that day. Meanwhile manage the existing leads, follow up with customers via email and phone, schedule a few more appointments for the weekend. Then you jump on your website to build out a content page for the new model coming out, optimize the page for the SERPS (if you know how), check your RSS reader for any Online Reputation alerts, call the CRM vendor cause leads aren't parsing right, convince the GM that the $4,000 your spending with an ad source still have a good ROI, Update your dealers myspace page, write a new post for the blog.
You're knee deep in building out the Used cars specials on your dealer website and ALL of a sudden your appointment shows up early. You quickly switch gears, shake hands, demo a car, close a sale, deliver the car and then start all over again. I know there are many reading this and know exactly what I'm talking about
Joe is right..."Finding this unique person is quite a chore." Finding a "car guy" (or lady) that has a full understanding of Online Marketing, SEM etc. and can also sell cars or at least understand the car business is a rare find. You almost need someone with split personalities. And if you are luckily enough to find this person, holding onto this person is even more of a chore. Ask anyone of my former employees. Ha!
Unfortunately this is how many dealers are running their operations and managing their online marketing efforts. And what efforts they have in place are many times outsourced. Not saying you can't outsource but dealers are always getting burned because no one on staff knows any better. Another reason to have someone in-house that at the very least can hold a vendor accountable and track the effectiveness.
