Pub. 1 Issue 4

22 www.glancda.org T here is one thing the economic downturn was able to firmly establish - email, search engine optimization, social media and online marketing alone were never going to fill your service drive or showroom with customers. As sales and service revenues tanked, managers skewed quickly to these new emerging media be- cause they were considered to be a more cost effective way to advertise. But along with that change in marketing strategy came a sharp decline in both Sales and Service Department customer traffic. Five or six years ago the potential of this new media, especially email and online marketing, was wide open. A dealership was going to be able to touch a customer almost instantaneously with a targeted message at the exact moment that customer needed a vehicle service or even a whole new vehicle. It was going to be great; a new age in automotive marketing. The problem with this new mode of advertising was that it never had the ability to engage but only the smallest fraction of the potential pool of customers in your PMA and more impor- tantly, they all require a potential customer to perform an action, to actually do something. It does not matter if a customer must open an email (open rates for automotive related emails run at about 18%), find your website, go to your Facebook page (you’ve got 2,367 “Likes” – which translates incidentally into zero revenue), scan a QR Code, opt-in for text messaging or enter a PURL address. If a potential customer has to take any action at all to point them in the direction of your dealership, the odds are heavily in favor of no action ever being taken. It’s not to say that any of these media are bad business practices as long as you can source the business generated from them and they provide an acceptable ROI, but they will never fill your Allocating Your Dealership’s Marketing Budget -The Fog Begins to Clear BY DALE BECKER, WESTATES AUTOMOTIVE PROMOTIONS