• Overall daily digital advertising spending is up 8% in November
• Average daily spending on social is up 97% in November
• Average daily spend on video is up a whopping 162% in November

How are dealer advertising trends different today versus pre-pandemic?

• Legacy media mix modeling is no longer relevant and dealers are shrinking their appetite for traditional ad buys in favor of newer digital advertising platforms.
• Being nimble and geo-focused are more important than ever.
• Customer expectations have changed. Online retailing is now becoming the “new normal” and many customers are quickly adapting to a digital experience of car shopping. As such, advertising and engaging with customers online is also becoming more important.

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TIP #1 OPTIMIZE YOUR GOOGLE MY BUSINESS PAGE

Many business owners search for their own businesses and are surprised to find that they aren’t in the top handful of businesses listed, let alone page one. What’s worse, they aren’t found in the all-important #Google search “local 3-pack” which is in that map box just above the fold on the results page. Some can’t even find themselves in #AppleMaps, #Waze, #Siri, or any other typed or spoken search apps that provide directional and listing information. It drives many business owners mad.

What makes matters worse is that if you’re not on page one, you are virtually and literally cloaked. Few people searching for businesses make it past the first page of search, and 89% of them are ready to buy when in search mode. YOU HAVE TO BE ON PAGE ONE! There are several reasons for lack of ranking, but over time and at a relatively low cost, you can become visible north of the fold in the Google 3-Pack search block.

#SocialOrdeals has mastered the technique for business ranking using a suite of products in their platform that SMBs from Veterinarians to Car Dealers, Restauranteurs to Attorneys, Carpenters to Retailers, Franchisers and Associations of all shapes and sizes can utilize to grow their business’ visibility and sales volume. There are other companies out there that offer platforms with a similar suite of services but few are as affordable and for lack of a better description, credible in the execution as is Social Ordeals.

Tip #1: Google My Business is responsible for 25% of your ranking in search. The days of a dominant webpage are over. It’s Google’s plan to control as much of the web as they can and want you on their property for as long as possible – so we need to play by their rules.

Step 1: Claim the page as your business and make sure all information on it such as Business Name, Address, Telephone #, and Web Address are 100% correct. Google will send you a postcard verifying the location at the outset of claiming your GMB page.

Step 2: Load it up with your businesses specialties so people can see what differentiates you from competitors. If you’re a medical specialist, make sure prospective patients can see what you focus on, laser therapy, surgery, MRI machine on premises, etc. I suggest the most profitable products and services be spotlighted. If your a restaurant, post some of your specialty dishes, so on and so forth. Post pictures of the facility as well, along with smiling employees and customers if they oblige but not in the business’s products and services section.

Step 3: Pre-load popular questions and answers in the appropriate section given so the public can research you right then and there, and click to call instantly. The Q&A section is public so if you don’t answer any questions that come up without warning, someone from the public will, and you may not like the response. Keeping a vigil on this section is crucial because it’s so forward facing to a public likely in buying phase. Putting revised hours of operation here is a good idea because so many governments are vacillating on who opens and who doesn’t. Some only offer curbside so…you get the idea.

Step 4: Drive as many positive reviews to your GMB as possible. Reviews account for 15% of your search ranking score so make sure to have a review generation and reputation management strategy bought and paid for before you open your doors OR, get one in place if you currently aren’t employing one. Almost everyone looks at business reviews before making a decision. If you aren’t pulling 4.5-5.0, you are a B business in the eyes of the public. But it’s not just high scores that count, rather the volume of reviews that will lift you on any of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) of which Google gets 70% of the traffic.

Step 5: Drive all of your social media posts to your GMB page. Consider it a crucial social media element to your businesses positive visibility to the public. After all, the GMB page is one click away from the customer’s search engine operation so put your best content forward. Hashtag all of your social media posts (as well as your specialties) as you would on any social media platform because those hashtags WILL help you rank in search on Google. It may be a lesser known fact, but we’ve seen it applied.

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For businesses, the truth is that most don’t realize the amount of conflict of interest that exists in their current agency relationships. Can you handle the truth?

This conflict, while not malicious in nature, is the result of a legacy agency model that continues to affect your marketing spend. Ultimately, it’s sucking the life out of your opportunity to build brand value that surpasses your paid media spend.

The good news is that you can still do something about it, but only after you understand it. I’m writing this article as a summary of a three-part podcast series I recently released to call attention to the conflict and offer a way forward.

The Current Legacy Model

Let’s begin with what I’m including as an “agency”. I’m talking about ANY vendor who is running any portion of your ad spend. This includes spends like SEO, PPC, programmatic, social, pre-roll, and anything else that costs you money to reach a consumer’s eyes or ears.  In many of these popular ‘agency’ models; a client’s fees are based on a percentage of their ad spend. Frankly, the model was created for a different generation of media placements and is way out of balance. This is the foundation of the conflict.

For those who are unaware, these types of agency fees are typically between 15-30%. So, if your budget is $100,000, they are taking $15-30,000 of that money to place the actual ads and only the remainder is spent driving your campaigns. While this makes a really clean model for vendors to price services, common sense tells us that it would be unwise for an agency to ever tell you to reduce your ad spend. In fact, it is more beneficial for them if you raise your ad spend. Conflict.

Why do you think a standard first question during the sales process is “What is your paid media spend?” This is the number used to qualify the business relationship for the agency. Take note that the question is not, “What is your marketing budget.” We’ll get back to this in a moment. But first, you should understand why you’re paying more than you should.

You Are Paying the Brand Tax

I consider all paid media a brand tax. Strong brands do not need to buy ad placements to sell enough products/services to meet their objectives. They are paying zero brand tax. Conversely, if your brand is so weak that you need to spend most of your budget on ads to push buyers to your products, then you are paying very high brand taxes. Most businesses are somewhere in between. But how do you know what level of the brand tax your business is paying?

Try this litmus test: What would happen to your business for the next 3 months if you completely turned off your paid media? The answer to that question will give you an idea of how strong your brand is and how much of your marketing spend is actually ‘brand tax’.

When you invest your marketing budget on brand-building content and not sales content, you are building equity that outlasts and ad spend. (By the way, it IS possible to drive actual sales with brand content, but we’ll get to that in a moment.) Now that we are clear on that, let’s get back to the broken agency model.

The Metrics to Nowhere

Now, let’s talk about the metrics that the old, percentage fee-based model is directing your attention to. The emergence of digital marketing has allowed us to measure on an entirely different level, but that doesn’t mean we are automatically better off. If I learned anything from the statistics class I took in college, it was that you can make numbers say just about anything you want them to.

Giving weight to the wrong metrics can result in an incredible amount of wasted ad spend. The number of impressions based on a street’s traffic used to be a great way to sell a billboard, but I bet most people these days can’t tell you what billboards they drove by this morning. Many digital agencies will report on campaigns by communicating how many “impressions” (or times shown) the ad had and, like billboards and television, this doesn’t measure the actual business impact of the ad itself.

Regardless of what you measure, the percentage of fees you pay for that wasted ad spend remains consistent. This is why focusing every metric on a measurable, attributable business result is the only way to go. Let me give you an example with one popular metric, cost-per-click or CPC.

I’ve seen many agencies openly sell and celebrate the fact that they focus on achieving the highest Quality Scores for their clients. Sounds awesome, right? High-Quality Scores usually mean more traffic more relevant to the keywords being searched and lower CPCs. Who doesn’t want lower costs?!

The problem lies in the quality and relevancy of all those cheap clicks. Did your ad display first because the algorithm deemed the keywords relevant, but actually it was out of context? How’s the landing page experience? Did they connect or did they bounce? Is the agency telling you if they bounced or is that your developer’s problem? The twenty-five cent clicks might be producing zero buyers while the three-dollar clicks are translating into $1000 sales. Now, which is the better value? In this example, your focus should be on avoiding those cheaper non-producing clicks and focusing more on connection with the $3 ones.

Let me talk about one of my favorite metrics in all of the digital advertising at the moment.

It is Facebook’s “Relevance Score”. The reason I love this so much is that it rewards those who produce content that people actually like and it is solely judged by the USER’S interaction with the ad. If your ad has a low relevance score, it means nobody wants to look at it. As an incentive to get you to make content that doesn’t annoy their users with your garbage sales content, Facebook charges you way more to display this ad.

On the contrary, if you invest your budget creating empathetic, fun, and engaging content, users enjoy it, like it, comment on it, share it, or otherwise interact with it. As a reward for your highly relevant content, Facebook charges you way less to display it because it is bringing value to its users. Think about it… the ONLY asset Facebook has is the attention of its users. Entertain them, and you get rewarded. Annoy them, and it’s going to cost you big.

In both of these examples, the conflict in the current agency model doesn’t incentivize excelling in the metrics that show relevance or direct correlate to business objectives leading to wasted time, money, and most importantly, the attention and psychological impression of those your business desperately needs to connect with.

So what are we to do in this era of conflicted agencies, savvy consumers, and information overload? We relearn what it is to form and measure “connection”.

How to Kill the Parasite

I’ve found the best way to curb the conflict and start building a brand connection that drives business is to get back to the basics of human connection. We’ve been conditioned to approach commerce as one business to another (B2B) or a business to a person (B2C). Instead, we should refine our thinking to consider that all commerce is now business to humans (B2H). Once we adopt this B2H approach, the common sense that has been lost in the conflict-laden agency models and metrics can be restored. It begins and ends with cultivating connections.

Getting beyond the transactional marketing inherent in sniping potential buyers at the bottom of the sales funnel requires a shift more and more businesses are realizing. I can’t tell you how many businesses and individuals I’ve had conversations with about this over the past year. In every conversation I can see the light building in the eyes of executives, marketers, and personal brands as I present the following approach which originated in my agency’s values.

When my first business was acquired and I turned 100% of my attention to my agency, one of the first things I did was define our values: Honesty, Empathy, Attention, Connection, and Care. The unique trait of our values is that they must be practiced in order if they are going to work. As we helped more companies build their brands and execute campaigns, the results helped me realize that our values are actually more about human connection than company culture. Because of that, they have been adopted as our marketing process and it’s working.

As you adopt the following process when strategizing, creating, executing, and measuring your marketing spend, you will stop burning through your budget with brand taxes and irrelevant metrics and begin cultivating a real and measurable brand connection with other humans (translated as a growing and healthy business).

Here is an overview of the five values:

1. Honesty: Be authentic, always. In order to do this, you have to get really honest about what you are actually about. What are your unique selling points and why do you sell what you sell. “We sell great products” isn’t enough. Not even close. There isn’t any room for illusions here…it’s really easy to tell who is faking it.
   
2. Empathy: Sure it is becoming a buzz word, but empathy has never been more important in marketing. This is where you do the hard work of understanding what the people you want to do business with you really care about. This isn’t a demographic, this is a mindset. This is psychographic. What do they want most in life? What are they afraid of? How do you help them get what they want and avoid what they don’t?
   
3. Attention: This is the pivot point. This is where the level of your creative is the true variable as you leverage your understanding of who you are and what your potential buyer wants to create content that earns their attention. Notice my use of the word “earns”. This goes back to the concept of the Facebook relevance score I mentioned earlier. If you don’t earn the attention, then you are taking it. Maybe even stealing it by loud, kitschy, disconnected content. Great content will compel the view to pay attention, not demand it. If your agency produces your content for “free” or as a part of their % fee, you should be paying attention. That model incentivizes them spending the least amount of time and money possible on your creative. They get paid off running more ads, remember?
   
4. Connection: This is where it all comes together. This is the goal. Real, genuine, earned connection. Who you honestly are and what they deeply desire come together in a compelling case for why your relationship reinforces one another. We all know that a $700 YETI cooler isn’t needed to keep drinks cold for your backyard picnic. The $100 Coleman will do just fine. YETI, however, through honesty of belief, understanding of what their customers aspirations, and great design, they have earned the type of connection that builds loyalty, identity, and gets those credit card swipes. Can’t you just smell the brand taxes vanishing?
   
5. Care: Care is the ongoing relationship of a true B2H connection; continually listening, adapting, and providing. Just like any real relationship, if you get comfortable and start feeling entitled, you are heading for trouble. This is where community management, experiential, surprise and delight, and proactive brand marketing strategies come into play. Again, ask how these types of activities fit into the current agency pricing model. They don’t.

How to Move Forward

Breaking free from legacy is always challenging, but can also be incredibly inspiring for your team and your customers. Momentum should never be underestimated. I understand that this approach could be considered overly generalistic at times, however, I assure you that it is infinitely complex.

You can’t pick and choose the values you like and forget the ones that are difficult. This builds. If you’re empathetic without being honest, your customers will feel misled and see that you don’t actually care. Not only did you miss the opportunity to connect, but you now made a negative psychological impression. You might close that one sale, but they won’t be back and they definitely won’t recommend you to their friends.

If demographics allow you to get ‘granular’ with your marketing, following this process allows you to bring the psychographics of your consumer down to an atomic level. You can do it, and the promised land of connection is worth it.

A great place to start is to take a look at your current marketing strategy, agency relationships, internal team, and consumer sentiment. If you’re honest, you will know where you stand pretty quickly. Chances are that if you’ve read this article, you already do.

The Parasite Feeding on Your Marketing Strategy and How to Kill It was written by yours truly, Patrick Bergemann. I discuss this and other marketing and human connection topics on my weekly, Clarity Compressed Podcast as well LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. I’m also working on a digital workshop offering that will walk you through the process we use at Congruent so that you can transform your marketing and your business. If you’d like to be notified of updates for that, you can sign up for the email notifications at BrandBeatsTheHacks.com.

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As a kid, I played a game called “Mike Tyson’s Punch Out” on the original NES (Nintendo Entertainment System). In real life, Mike Tyson was an insane boxer to watch; a man full of power and antics. A real entertainer out of the ring and straight-up vicious inside the ring, often knocking his opponents out in seconds.

“EVERYONE HAS A PLAN UNTIL THEY GET PUNCHED IN THE FACE…” 

I’m paraphrasing a quote that Tyson made during an interview that says, in its simplest form, you can plan all you want, but when that first blow lands, you find out what you are really made of. You find out the TRUTH.

These days I hear people talking about the concept of “your truth” and I feel like it is being misused in many ways. While it’s not good to not live under the judgment of others, it is dangerous to think that “your truth” IS reality in every area. It isn’t.

THE truth is what you find out about your level of preparedness and competency ONLY after that first punch lands. Conflict and friction help us find out where we are weak, as well as where we are strong. They show us what we’re made of. 

This conflict-driven revelation is universal. You can it across relationships, personal finances, athletics, and your brand. Let me show you: 

The truth about athletics.

I’m going to allude to my initial example here. If you think you are ready for a fight and have a plan, the first punch you take will tell THE truth about how ready you actually were.

The truth about your personal finances.

If you think your personal finances are solid because you can pay your bills but have no savings or other available means, you’re one car break down or medical emergency away from THE truth. The truth that you are very vulnerable. 

The truth about relationships.

This is a pervasive and probably the most poignant example. We see examples of this all the time. Ask the husband how his marriage is and he responds, “Things are going great!” Then ask his spouse and you get a totally different…vibe. THE truth is that there is a broken connection that is going to take some honesty and care to fix. 

The truth about your brand. 

We are living in unprecedented “good times” economically in the US. Revenue and profits are up and unemployment is down. Investment dollars are flowing and it seems that there are overnight success entrepreneurs with each passing news cycle.

What is the truth about all of these businesses when it comes to how solid their brand footing is? Well, we are one downturn away from finding out… just like we did in 2008. 

Those who have relied on easy money and easy sales by living off of a well-executed Google Ads spend, PPC, or other forms of algorithm hacking to close a deal will feel real pain when those budgets get cut. 

Those who did the work to built strong brands that consumers connect with regardless of the “sales funnel” will show the strength of their footing and disproportionately win.

What are you lying to yourself about?

My hope is that this community is able to courageously ask the question, “What am I lying to myself about.” My hope is that we are ready to consider and accept what THE truth really is.

Honestly asking yourself this question is always a positive thing. That is THE truth. 

—I talk about this topic and others on my weekly Clarity Compressed Podcast. You can also listen on the platform of your choice: iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or Castbox. Connect with me on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. And if you want to learn more, you can check out my website pauljdaly.com

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Dealership News Interviews Courtney Garcia of the Montalbano Group to discuss how she reaches potential customers for car dealerships as an advertising whiz!

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Customers in any industry, want a better experience. Yet all we do is email, email, email. Engagement rates (responses from the customer) are only around 10% on a good day. Engagement with text is 3 times as great as email, hovering around 30% greater on average. Texting initiatives totally make sense for dealerships, but how do we change the dealership mentality of email as the default form of communication?

Texting is Quick and Effective

Ask your sales team if they had a party, and wanted to invite their friends, how would they contact them? By email? Probably not these days. One person doesn’t make a very good party. Let’s talk to customers the way most people communicate today. Texting is quick, short, personal, and can be effective in getting people on the phone.

Achieve Your Goals

If we know texting creates higher engagement, how can we measure it to ensure salespeople are texting their customers? Below is a chart of several stores showing their texting and email activity in one month. Challenge your team to be at a 1 text to 1 email ratio (1:1). Meaning, if your store sends out 5000 emails, you should also have 5000 texts. Once this metric is practiced, it won’t be hard to achieve your goals. In the case studies below, you can see that some very successful stores are at a 2:1 ratio (twice as many texts as emails).

Effective Communication

As managers, engagement is the key to your success. We need to ensure that all salespeople are using the most effective forms of communication. Remember, the simple question to ask your team is “what is your text to email ratio?” The results will speak for themselves. It’s the 21st century and texting is the new dominant form of communication between tech adaptive people. Embrace it, and use it to your advantage!

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1. Failure to Target the Right Audience – One of the biggest mistakes firms and businesses make is targeting a broad audience rather than utilizing one of the best aspects of the digital platform: the ability to customize and tailor your message. Make sure when you are marketing your dealership that you know the market you’re in, the audience you’re looking for, and you know how to speak to them. Targeting the right audience and knowing how to talk to them is crucial to your success.

2. Undervaluing Mobile – Internet usage on mobile devices like tablets and cell phones moved up to 62 percent of all digital time spent overall by consumers. It has become the most dominant way to access the Internet, and it is something you need to value as much as a traditional desktop. Make sure your website is built for mobile platforms and does not lag on them, ensure your marketing tools are developed to be as fluid on a desktop as it would be on a tablet. Undervaluing these platforms can undo your campaigns quickly.

3. Failing to do Any A/B Testing – Testing out various philosophies and approaches to your campaigns is the best way to determine which strategies work and which don’t work. Experimenting with multiple ads is crucial in an ultra-competitive digital landscape. A mistake so many firms and businesses make is being too careful and conservative about testing out different campaigns and not wanting to spend the money or time on it. You never know what works or know how to improve upon an idea without experimenting. Make sure you are always testing things out and throwing ideas against the wall.

4. Not Having Clear Goals for Your Campaign – You will not and can not know how to create a successful campaign if you do not have goals for what you want it to be and how you want to go about achieving it. Be aware of what you are looking to accomplish with your campaigns, be it whetting appetites for a significant sale, trying to get younger drivers to buy a car, or increasing sales as a whole. Different targets require different marketing approaches, don’t go into a campaign blindly.

5. Failing to Employ A Consumer-Centric Approach – The best way to attract a customer to a campaign and your business is to be empathetic and relate to where they are coming from. When you step into a customer’s shoes and understand what their issues are and what they are looking for in a product or a service, you understand how to reach them. Sales are about building relationships, and car dealers know that better than anyone. Build a relationship with your consumers through your digital marketing and watch your campaign thrive.

6. Do Not Write Off E-Mail Marketing – You may feel like pushing promotions via email is a mistake or would upset your customers, but in fact, it is quite the opposite. A recent marketing survey revealed that 91 percent of adults in the U.S. enjoy getting promotional emails from companies they have done business with in the past, 86 percent of those respondents preferred monthly emails while 61 percent would like weekly emails. The point is that if a customer has done business with you before – and we know selling cars tends to involve having repeat customers – they are willing to accept and might even enjoy getting marketing campaigns from you. They may seem like the digital age’s version of snail mail, but email is still widely used chiefly by the professionals you are looking to sell to; don’t take it for granted.

7. Not Measuring Your Results – Digital marketing offers you the tools to measure your ads and see what kind of attention and numbers they generate. Pay attention to your numbers and take advantage of the metrics and measurements because they can help you in your campaigns. Your results are always going to be in flux, and your campaign’s success depends on how much you pay attention to the numbers and adapt to them.

8. Sending Automated Direct Messages on Twitter – Businesses and firms make this mistake a lot. Creating impersonal and gimmicky robot-direct messages (DMs) and sending them out. There are a few issues with this. Firstly, it is tacky and unprofessional. Secondly, these robotic DMs can at times generate and send themselves out multiple times if not controlled by a human being, which could annoy your customers and make them unfollow you on Twitter. Keep it personal, keep it human and you will succeed.

9. Buying Social Media Followers – People are savvier than ever about social media, and they can tell when a company seems to have a lot of “friends”. People do not like companies that look like they’ve bought fans, it screams of desperation and is not very transparent. Transparency is crucial in today’s day and age, especially for businesses. Do not start off on the wrong foot with hypercritical and supremely attuned social media users by having more followers than would seem standard on your page. If you let your page and social media campaigns build organic followings, you will be rewarded.

10. Speaking of Social Media…Don’t Be Anti-Social! – So often a business uses social media to broadcast their message but not to interact with customers and users. The beauty of the platform is the ability for companies to communicate with their consumers and to develop a relationship. Creating a social media page and campaign but failing to utilize it by refusing to engage directly with customers is a waste of the platform. Present your business, broadcast your message but, do not forget to be social with the consumer.

11. Failing to Communicate With Your Sales Team – Sometimes in your zeal to be a smart and bold marketer you may forget to be in communication with the one department that is as invested and affected by these new tools as any, your sales department. Your sales team is going to be as knowledgeable about what works and does not work for customers as the digital marketing firm you hired. In fact, getting your marketing firm and sales team to work together and enjoy working with each other could make your campaigns pop.

Digital marketing is both the present and the future, and figuring out how to excel at it is key to ensuring your business can market successfully in this day and age. Mishandling the management of this marketing or falling into common mistakes that many firms and companies fall into is common. These eleven tips can help minimize errors and create a more informed advertising strategy.

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Watch Paul J Daly as he interviews another thought leader on the topic of branding.

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