Automotive Marketing

Google Blogoscoped has a screen shot of a new Google feature that allows users to skip flash intro pages. This is cool because flash intro pages are useless time wasting pieces of crap.

The point of an intro page is to mesmerize website visitors with a flashy cover page so they become impressed with your website and your business. This makes little sense to me because regardless of how fancy your intro page may be, the underlying website still either has what the user wants or it does not. If a website is a piece of crap, it is still a piece of crap with an intro page.

Give users the information they are looking for. There is no need to waste someone’s time when they have given you the opportunity to inform, market and sell them something on your website.

The February 2008 issue of Dealer Marketing Magazine has been shuffled around the office all month. Since I have settled into my new desk, this issue and I have become entangled in a love hate relationship.

The best article in this issue is on page 22. Mark Bonfigli of Dealer.com writes, “Five Simple Website Strategies You Cannot Do Without.” There are two ways you can read this article online. You may view the whole magazine online for free here, or read the text version here.

The overall message of Mark’s tips is to cater to the user; give them what they want and nothing more. I like the article especially because of Mark’s final tip. Tip #5, Forget the glitz, is valuable advice even for the likes of DealerMark and NIADA.

Market research is 100 percent clear: Customers do not care about fancy website effects unrelated to their car-buying decision.

Similarily, dealers do not care about fancy website effects unrelated to their car-selling-research decisions. Two of the major industry publications, Dealer Marketing Magazine and NIADA’s Used Car Dealer Magazine, have implemented fancy magazine viewers based on “page-turner” flash animations.

I first saw this approach to displaying online publications on the Arctic Cat Powersports websites. See one here.

The effect is neat, but I think the time and money sunk into these presentations could have been spent more wisely. Dealer magazines, it is time to take your own advice. Here is why these glitzy flash viewers are hurting the effectiveness of your publication and your business:

Flash animations require a browser plugin to be installed

Any extra steps required to access content increase the chance that individuals will never reach your content.

Search engines cannot crawl your content

Your magazines show case some successful and talented people. You owe it to them to increase their visibility online by promoting their writings in a manner that can be easily found and properly referenced as a magazine source. DealerMark does provide a text version of each of their articles, and I applaud them for that effort. Used Car Dealer Magazine’s flash version is the only place online that its content can be found in the aggregate. Some articles can be found elsewhere in the event that the author republishes them, but becoming the primary source for this content a missed opportunity for the association.

• Search engines help other people find your content, reference it as a source, or call you and inquire about advertising
• Search engines detect how often a website is updated, but they will not find 30 new articles each month if they cannot crawl the content that is updated because it is embedded in a fancy animation
• Search engines detect duplicate sources and attempt to eliminate dupes in search results, and only one site can be the authority

Other websites cannot link to your magazine articles

While I am typically negative (I’ll be nicer after you begin publishing me), you want people to talk about your articles and link to them from their own websites. The world wide web is based upon the hyperlink, the method that documents are linked together to create a virtual web. Search engines calculate website popularity based on the number of links to a website and where those links are coming from. This means that any publicity is good publicity as long as it contains a link back to your website. Also, linkable content increases the likeliness that it will be used as a reference in some other article. There is a substantial opportunity for these magazines to be used as sources in Wikipedia, a very large and very respected website in the eyes of search engines. Not to mention that Wikipedia ranks for everything.

Almost any solution other than the one you have chosen could greatly help your websites to gain traffic and your publication to reach are larger audience. The results would be more advertising dollars and more subscription dollars, and step one is to forget the glitz!

The hardest part of my job is to break some of the traditional thinking that dealers want to bring online. The car industry is traditional by nature; new flavors of the same cars arrive annually, dealerships are branded with family names, and the jingle-based commercial is a dealership classic. I will never forget the jingle that Century 3 Chevrolet of Pittsburgh uses in their commercials. Ever. Really, it has been more than 5 years since I have lived within their reach.

Domain names

I like to suggest using a three word domain with “usedcars” in it instead of “familymotors” as the primary location for a website that sells used cars. Sometimes dealers include a city name in their business name, which is fantastic. ClassicMotorsOfSomewhere.com is a great start, but length becomes an issue. Now, I am aware that this website resides on a domain name that is not short or easy to spell, but this site was not designed to sell things.

Website and advertisement copy

Dealers insist on writing sentences, even when embedded in properly-cased paragraphs, in all capital letters. THIS IS A TECHNIQUE USED IN PRINT ADVERTISING TO GRAB ATTENTION. While browsing the web, writing in all capital letters is perceived as shouting and takes longer to read than lower or mixed case. The most effective print on the web has a personal touch that reads like a conversation would sound.

Presentation

I prefer not to wrap text around a picture of a wheel. I do not think that drawing an ugly “burst” around words will make a message more effective. Instead, I very much like to guide the reader’s attention from the top left corner downward. I see no reason to disorganize a page to the degree that a message needs to jump out at the reader in order to grab their attention. Websites are advertisements, but to design them like ads severely dilutes their effectiveness.

I am a big fan of playing fair. Arguably, I have been in the car business for 0 years. Here are some challenges that I have faced since I started building websites for the car business.

• Using very vibrant colors instead of a blended palette. Most of the layouts and logos I designed prior contained more colors to cover a range of tones. Most dealership logos and signwork are cheesy and very brightly colored. Adapting to this change has expanded my versatility greatly, and now my designs have less bland, washed-out colors in them.
• Privacy-sensitive input. No one wants to get a call once a week from a dealership asking if they found a car yet. Email inquiries between a dealer and a shopper are very different than emails between a shopper and a private seller. Car shoppers (and dealers shopping the competition) are very discrete when they fill out contact forms, and massaging this data on the way into a database is a challenge.
• Creating an animated neon sign in flash. The glowing look is fairly easy, but animating light is a severe challenge that I still face. The signature flicker of a neon sign is something I have not yet been able to digitize.

What challenges have you encountered? Are there any you still struggle with?

“So you can get our website name, our dot com, right?”

Who is Donny Flinnich?

“Donnnnnny! How do you know Donny!?”

Donny owns your dot com.

“Really! Hah! Oh boy, I will have to give Donny a call! Donny is the fucking man. He used to work here and know all the Internet stuff, you know. He is a real good friend of the family and the business, but it has been some time since I have heard from him.”

 Glad I could help.

The vehicle history report scene just got a little more cheesey. When I see the words “vehicle history report”, I think of CARFAX. The Virginia based company has successfully created and branded this concept, and I doubt that it was hard to market a such a useful product.

Experian’s AutoCheck was a carbon copy, right down to the buy back guarantee, until today.

AutoCheck is launching an innovative new feature for the AutoCheck® service that all of our existing dealers begin to use on July 16th. This new feature is called the AutoCheck ScoreSM. The AutoCheck Score is a number between 1 and 100, and we also include the AutoCheck Score RangeSM that provides a benchmark of how similar age and class vehicles perform. This new feature helps dealers and their customers better interpret the data in AutoCheck report.

For those dealer customers that currently have AutoCheck report link for their on-line inventories, we are offering a new implementation mechanism to display AutoCheck Score on the vehicle detail page.

Attached are the instructions for the implementation of AutoCheck Score tile on vehicle detail page. See also a sample “vehicle detail page” that shows how the AutoCheck Score can look on your dealer’s Web sites, as well as all of the creative you need to get it implemented properly.

AkA AutoCheck’s latest effort to outbrand CARFAX. Create a free widget and expand your real estate on websites all over the web.

Click anywhere on AutoCheck’s section of your page and go to the AutoCheck report. AutoCheck ‘owns’ the AutoCheck Score tile, so who knows what else might start showing up as a feature. Widgets are a great marketing tool, and it is no secret. AutoCheck’s new car widget provides a snapshot of the history report that can be seen before the actual report, which draws more interest to their primary product. I like the simplified rating idea, but let us visit the contrast.

CARFAX is not interested in the idea of modifying their product. They disallow custom wording on dealer websites to the effect of “the full report is not available” and deliver only the report or their record check summary page.

Both ideas are interesting. I think CARFAX benefits from not changing.

Jennifer:

I have added the verbiage you requested. There seems to a large number of dealerships in America with names that are similar to yours. To get some more web exposure, try submitting your site to these free directories:

• http://www.autodealerfinders.net/
• http://www.autoguide.net/
• http://www.cardealersnearyou.com/
• http://www.cardealersusa.com/
• http://www.carsearch.com/
• http://carsforsale.classifieds1000.com/links/used_car_dealers/
• http://www.dealerfish.com/
• http://www.motoverse.com/directory/
• http://www.mvdn.com/
• http://www.simplemotors.com/
• http://www.wheelsdirectory.com/

Let me know how it goes,

Corey

…

Thank you very much!

Regards,

Jennifer

Jeff Kershner is talking about using a dealership website to bait and switch customers by keeping typical or accessible (but not on the lot) inventory online.

Bait and Switch: The Oldest Trick in the Book

All auto makers defend their trademarks, but a few issue unacceptable use notices more than the others. I see it as a free web design critique service. If I get the email from BMW’s legal team, the paralegals working for them must think the website I have designed looks like crap.

Here’s my list of car manufacturers that will demand that you surrender any domain names that contain their name..

1. Lexus
2. Porsche

What’s weird is that Toyota seems to have no problem with it while Lexus does.

If your business has a website, be sure you understand who is in charge of maintaining your domain name registration. Anyone can find out who owns a domain by conducting a whois query on the address. Most web hosts will register and maintain a .com or other top level domain name for your website, and some will charge hundreds of dollars to gain or regain ownership of your own domain.

This website is hosted by Wordpress. A whois query for wordpress.org looks like this, and reveals that Matt Mullenweg is the owner of the wordpress.org domain name. The registration and expiration dates are listed in the report as well as the name of the company that can help renew an expiring domain.

Too many car dealer websites have little content other than vehicle listings. In order to engage a shopper, you have to provide them with information they are interested in and a compelling reason to come back to your website in the future. Here are ideas for great website content, and some reasons why these are good ideas.

Written directions to your location

A driving directions page that only offfers satellite mapping services pinpoints your business on the map, but does little else to help someone who needs directions. Serve that new customer thoroughly–you can go much farther to help someone find your business than pass the responsibility off to a third party robot atlas. Provide turn by turn directions from the highway, and use landmarks to describe your exact location. A web page that is strongly associated with a single physical address with lots of supporting content will help your site rank well for “used [car] in [zip code or city]” searches.

Names of surrounding cities and towns

Target your audience explicitly. Shoppers are typically more comfortable doing business close to home. Use the names of surrounding cities and towns on pages other than your driving directions page to identify yourself as local. A brilliant “meet the staff” page can assemble decades of experience in previous jobs (and locations). The majority of car buying searches consist of a vehicle and a location. Defining the geographical reach of your business in text will help search engines link those searchers to you.

Something the customer doesn’t expect

I’d really like to see this classic motorcycle collection in person. You can pick me up at the airport? It’s right next to the miniature golf course? Well yes, I would enjoy some free coffee.