There is a startling way for most dealers to double their business – fire their advertising agencies. Dealerships spend an enormous amount of money on advertising for new customers. Unfortunately, often that money is wasted. The money is wasted because the agencies are strictly placing ad dollars in media and doing production. Often, the ad dollars are spent without any knowledge and use of direct response marketing, and the game plan that will be used towards keeping those…

The San Antonio Spurs played not to win and wound up losing. The Spurs gave the power and control of the game to the Miami Heat and Miami took the power and control of their destiny and won. The Spurs will forever regret the position they took. Business lessons learned: Play to win instead of not to lose. Never give away your power or control of your destiny to the competition. 

I was consulting with a potential client yesterday and started looking at their Facebook and Twitter pages. Once a day, every day, they would post a question that had very little to do with anything at all. "What was the last movie you watched?"

Once a day, every day, they wouldn't get a response from anyone. It was awkward…

 Google has been testing what they call their "Local Carousel" for the past couple months, and today it is officially going live. It's the same top of page scroller you've been seeing on tablets for the past year, but now it's on your browser for your local related searches. Lets take a look at what it is and what it means for your local …

Your digital showroom is the best source for quality leads and lead generation. Your consumers are not going to third party sites to search for your dealership, they are going to search engine sites like Google. And in those search engine sites, your potential customer is usually typing in the model of the vehicle they are looking for or they use search terms like…

  The unintended acceleration scandal that rocked Toyota's world spread like a dreaded MRSA virus from the front pages of newspapers to local late night news. It turned out to be much ado about floormats, not so much the throttle system.…

Whether you asked for it or not, your customers are talking about your business online. Ask yourself: what do my potential customers see when they search for my business online?…

For a few months now, I’ve been discussing the idea that local businesses should never fall into the trap of trying to be funny or interesting through the use of irrelevant pictures and memes. “No cat or dog pictures” has become a mantra of sorts with the concept being that businesses should try to stand out, not fit into the mix on Facebook and other social media sites.

As some have argued, there are definitely…

Unless you have been hiding in a cave somewhere, you have heard that the U.S. economy is doing poorly. Housing starts are down, the value of the dollar is down, car sales are down, real estate is down, retail is down, gas prices are up, food prices are up, bankruptcies are up and the sky is falling. What is a person to do?

1. Don't Drink the Cool Aid

The news is sensationalized and fear sells. Things are rarely as good as they seem and things are rarely as bad as they…

A few months ago, we confronted one of our dealers that had our website solution about why they were putting a watermark of their logo on irrelevant pictures and posting them to social media. Apparently, their social media vendor had a theory.

It was a process, really, and it went like this:

1. Find viral images on sites like Reddit, 9Gag,…

Despite NADA’s landmark victory in getting most auto dealers exempted from direct oversight by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), it looks like the agency has found a back-door way to make life more difficult for dealerships. The Bureau recently announced that lenders that offer auto loans through dealerships will be held responsible for…

Some say that a dealer doesn’t need overnight chat operators because some research shows that only 10 percent of dealership web traffic occurs between midnight and 8 am. They estimated that with a 3 percent chat rate that would extrapolate to only 15 chats per month with 5,000 visitors. Here’s why even if those figures are accurate,…

It’s Saturday! Blow up the Balloons, blow up the squiggly air man thingy, get your game faces on and get ready. Barely anyone will walk on to your lot today. Any ideas why?

Before you continue reading this article, do me a favor right now and go grab your local newspaper. Open it up to the first auto dealer…

From day one, owners Ted Rubin and Todd Smith built ActivEngage to be employee-focused. In addition to providing free medical, dental, and vision benefits, ActivEngage proves that it truly values its employees with free gym memberships to promote workplace wellness, an on-staff licensed massage therapist to relieve work-related stress, bi-monthly food trucks, and a lounge…

Look, I get it. I understand that it’s hard for vendors and OEMs to produce a social media solution for their dealers that scales properly while still bringing in good content. I do not, however, understand the concept of not even trying to mix things up. There’s an easy road and a hard road for automotive social…

Some infographics are long for the sake of being long. They take up way too much space to make very few points or to present data in ways that simply don’t make sense from an graphic perspective. Then, there are those infographics that are long for a valid reason. This is one of those.

Social media is ever changing.…

As social media gets more and more entrenched in our daily lives, it’s becoming the easiest and most visible place for one of the most important things your company can have but can’t buy – word-of-mouth marketing.

You can have your customer experience down pat, a loyalty program that rocks and customers lined up to do business with you; but does that mean…

This article brings up so good questions. For discussion here do you think that, excluding the Mega Dealers, the big data lies within the databases of most dealers? And that the main objective of most dealers should be to concentrate on their own market area for trends, Do most dealers have within their own market areas the keys to their marketing success?

Instead of focusing upon the concept of big data, organisations should…

I have been in the car business for close to five years now, and I still find it horrifying when I hear customers talk about previous purchases and visits to Car Dealerships. For anyone to really make a go at a career in the car business, The first thing for them to understand is that service is still senior! People who are making or considering making a purchase that size still deserve a certain level of service. And by what I have heard, it is also a great way to differentiate yourself in…