Why Dealers can No Longer Afford Mediocre Marketing Practices, from Driving Sales.
As I approach the completion of my first full year on the vendor side of the car business after spending the previous several years at dealerships, I can say with a certainty that the timing could not have been better. It has nothing to do with me. My circumstance happened the way it was supposed to happen and I’m thankful for that.
The reason that the timing was so important is because of what we like to call the “checkbox item” factor. There was a time not too long ago when many of the digital marketing practices could be classified as checkbox items – those portions of your overall marketing strategy where pretty much any solution was perfectly acceptable. Whether it was PPC, social media, chat, SEO, inventory management, content marketing, or any of a dozen other aspects of a dealership’s digital marketing, having any product or service was good enough to be better than most of your competitors.
Those days are fading away. Today, the gaps have shrunk to the point that most of your competitors have a solution to fit. For example, it wasn’t very long ago when most dealerships weren’t taking advantage of search pay-per-click advertising. Now, the majority of dealerships are buying clicks. There are some OEMs that are requiring it.
