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Amway co-founder, Rich DeVos, is number 88 on the 2016 Forbes 400 list of richest people in America. After several failed business attempts his Amway days started with selling all day, and bottling liquid soap by night in his garage. Now at over 90 years old, he’s worth $5.1 billion.  DeVos was once quoted as saying, “All our secrets are visible,” implying that the success he and his company have achieved are transparent and easily copied.  He went on to say something to the effect of: there is just no one willing to go to the extent required to copy it exactly, to experience the pain, the struggles, the failures, and do the work. Everyone wants the results, but few are willing to do what it takes. Most think they can do it faster and easier so they cut corners, and then fail. 

Years ago I was at a 20 group meeting (as a dealer) and, industry veteran, the late John Wyckoff was there as a guest speaker. He asked the group what the most successful marketing they had done in the last year had been, and then went one by one around the room and had each dealer answer. Going around, dealer after dealer cited some type of Event or Open House as their most effective dollars spent. As he got closer to me, my mind was racing trying to think of what type of advertising we’d done that had actually been effective at all. This was in the internet infancy days, so websites weren’t really in play yet.  

I first thought of the Yellow Pages. While it did work, I wasn’t a fan because most of my direct competitors had huge full color ads, and we only had a wimpy quarter page black and white due to the monthly expense. Then there was the Cycle Trader magazine which was sold in every convenience store in the nation back then. It was outrageously expensive because we paid for display ads weekly rather than monthly, plus classified ads. Like the Yellow Pages, all of our competitors were prominently displayed, especially the big discounters. I had a secret disgust for the Trader because it seemed to only harvest hard core price shoppers and create a discounting war amongst us dealers. We’d tried TV, radio, billboards, supercross sponsorships, etc. but nothing stood out. I mostly got a sinking feeling about how many hundreds of thousands of dollars we’d wasted over the years. But then I thought of our annual open house event that we’d promoted with direct mail, flyers, phone calls, and word of mouth. While it was quite the success, it had conveniently eluded my mind because it was such a heavy lift each year that I nearly dreaded it.  So when it was my turn, I too, said it was our Open House that had been the best return on investment. 

Then Wyckoff said, raise your hand if you’ve done another event since your original one, or if you do events on a regular basis. No hands went up. “Well if it’s what works best, why in the hell aren’t you doing it regularly?” he asked the group. After a brief uncomfortable silence, one dealer finally stated, “Because they’re a big pain in the ass!” Turns out I wasn’t alone, and the group laughed out loud together, but Wyckoff wasn’t amused. He called us out, and for me, a young dealer at the time the point was well taken. 

When I returned to the dealership we committed to an event every 3rd Saturday of the month. Starting out it was a heavy lift because I was disorganized and didn’t have systems in place or any regular repetition. I was trying to do everything myself from picking up coffee and donuts to putting out balloons and grilling burgers.  Eventually, with the help of a simple pre-event manager’s meeting and a checklist which assigned responsibilities by department and employee, we began to systematically execute successful events that weren’t a heavy burden on any one individual.  The repetition led to improved systems, which led to efficiency, which led to less expense and less pain to promote.  In other words, the reason events are so much work for many dealers is they never practice, staff expectations haven’t been clarified and they don’t know how to be efficient. 

Holding events provides a great excuse to market to your existing customers which increases retention and referrals, and is also great for marketing to conquest customers to grow new market share. 

Fast forward nearly 20 years to 2017 and while a lot has changed since then, a lot has stayed the same. The internet is on the scene but this is still a passion-based industry, and events remain one of most effective marketing tools in the box. The secrets of the most successful dealers truly are visible just as DeVos described, but far too many are looking for the shortcuts or have executed half ass in the past and declared events as unsuccessful.  

Don’t take the easy way out and waste money on mass media that doesn’t work. 

If you want a proven turnkey system used by over 800 of the top dealers nationwide that is guaranteed to generate a quantifiable list of leads for every department in your dealership, then call us today at 

877-242-4472.  Spring will be here before we know it, it’s time to start planning now. 

OBJECTIVE: 

Jaguar Power Sports is a fast-growing powersports dealership in Jacksonville, Florida.  Owner, Shaun Jakrel, is like most owner-operators in the Powersports industry. He wears many hats to help successfully grow the business that he is so passionate about.  And, while Shaun and his team take great pride in offering exceptional, high-quality products for fair prices, at the end of the day it’s Shaun’s passion for the industry and his customers that set Jaguar Power Sports apart from the other dealers in the area.

Conveying that kind of enthusiasm to customers is hard to do when a majority of customers are doing their pre-purchase research online instead of visiting the dealership. So, Shaun needed a way to turn his contagious enthusiasm into a lead-generating outlet.

SOLUTION:

Shaun chose email marketing as part of the mix to get the word out about his quality inventory and his passion for the industry.  He gradually switched from using Constant Contact to sending emails out of the Firestorm email system included for FREE in the Local Web Dominator program. His switch was partially due to the industry-specific, themed templates in Firestorm.  The templates allowed him to add some killer creative to his emails without having to have a graphic artist on staff.

He’s always been a fan of email marketing as an avenue to generate leads for Jaguar Power Sports.  But, thanks to the hundreds of incredible themes in Firestorm, he can make a huge impact in his email marketing with very little effort.  Each email can be loaded down with current inventory, specials, new arrivals, and package the message in such a cool-professional template that makes customers much more likely to open and click within the emails.

Shaun was skeptical about Firestorm at first.  In fact, he often split tested emails that he sent in the new Firestorm email program with the same email sent in Constant Contact.  Understandably, he didn’t want to abandon a system that was working well for him unless he had a very compelling reason to do so.

RESULTS:

The results from his email campaigns in Firestorm are pretty compelling, to say the least. Jaguar Power Sports sends out about 2 emails per week to their customer list.  Every email they send out includes links back to their website, specifically to their current inventory page.  Shaun knows that his email marketing is meant to share his passion for the industry with his customers and to generate leads.  

Thanks to those links in the emails, for the month of November, the click through rates for each email were exceptional. The Click Through Rate (CTR) ranged from 17% on the low side all the way up to 29%.  A strong email click through rate across all industries is between 3-7%.  

After such a large percentage of folks click on the emails from Jaguar Power Sports, the real magic happens on their website.  More than 13% of the total website traffic is from email marketing.  Plus, 12 Finance Applications, 10 “Make an Offer” and 46 Quote Requests just from the website traffic that came from clicks in their emails.  

It turns out when you have an incredible passion for powersports, and you consistently use quality email marketing to reach out to your customers, you will drive substantial leads for your business.

Want to have an email marketing program that was created exclusively for the Powersports industry, has pre-populated images and ad copy, and generates killer results?  Firestorm is a FREE component of the Local Web Dominator program.  Give us a call today at 877-242-4472 and we’ll be happy to show you around.

Something that has really been interesting to see this Christmas season is that shopping via mobile devices has pretty much become mainstream. I’ve seen several reports on television in the past two months advising that mobile sales are up by as much as 30% over last year. That’s a pretty big deal.

With mobile beginning to play a big role in retail, a lot of dealers have questions about how the technology works, and how they can capitalize on it.

One of the biggest questions I hear is about web sites being “mobile ready” and what does that mean?

There are two main schools of thought: Adaptive design and Responsive design.

Before we get into those two design methods, let’s clarify who they actually apply to. 

Devices basically fall into two big camps: Desktop and everyone else. When you think about everyone else, that includes all of the different mobile devices out there, plus all of the different tablets, and anything other than a desktop. (Anything that browses the web.) As you can imagine, that’s a lot of different sizes, resolutions, and display capabilities.

The adaptive school of design takes the approach that the site has a specific design for each screen size for potential visitors. In other words, a layout is programmed for each device that could be used to browse the site: a layout for iPhone 6, 7, Samsung Galaxy 6, 7, Kindle Fire 7HDX, etc.

If a specific device shows up that doesn’t have its own layout, the site displays what it thinks is the closest. This means the visitor may have to do a lot of scrolling – both up and down as well as left to right. In any case, there is potential for a visitor to have a less than excellent experience on the site which could lead to people leaving.

Adaptive is not particularly ideal, in that it involves a lot of up front programming to try and account for all the different screens and devices that exist – and new ones are being added every day.

The responsive design school takes a different approach. Rather than creating screens of fixed sizes that correspond to a particular device, it can best be thought of as elastic. All of the elements that make up a page are based upon percentages of available screen size. 

When a visitor to a responsive site first arrives, the site checks to see what the visitor’s screen size and display capabilities are and displays the pages based upon what it finds. In other words, the code for a page might say that the header width equals 100% rather than 650 pixels. A screen that is 400 pixels wide would display the first header just fine.  But, because the width of the second is dictated to be 650 pixels wide, the visitor would have to scroll left and right to see the whole thing. If there were links across the entire header, the second would be pretty clumsy. 

This is the big difference between responsive and adaptive design. Adaptive designs pages for specific devices using fixed element sizes (like images, headers, borders, etc.), and if it doesn’t have the exact one required, it serves the closest thing it has.

Responsive sites don’t care what device you use to browse. It checks what is available display wise, and uses predetermined percentages to create the page drawing the elements according to what percentage of the screen they should take up. Other things may happen as well, like if the page has three columns, as the available real estate gets smaller (like viewing on an iphone instead of an ipad) it may display as two, or one column. (All dictated by the code up front.)

Responsive design really is the better way to design a web site, although it might take a little more up front planning to accomplish. The end result is a better overall user experience.  

The good news is that most of the major players in the web provider world are now designing using responsive design.  A big reason for this is that Google announced a few months ago that after the first of the year, sites that weren’t responsive wouldn’t be as visible in search results. In other words, if you aren’t delivering the optimal user experience you’re going to have a harder time showing up.

If you’re concerned about whether or not you have a responsive web site, or would like to talk about Google Adwords or Reputation Management give us a call. We have the best digital marketing department in the business and would be happy to help.

Talk Soon,

Brad

If you cut through the clutter of your dealership, there are only 4 ways to grow your business.  

1. Improve Your Closing Ratio 

2. Raise Your Average Value per Customer 

3. Generate New Customers

4. Increase Visits/Purchases from Your Existing Customers

The first 2 are a matter of training, the second 2 are driven by marketing. 

I often write about 3. Generating New Customers and 4. Increasing Purchases from Your Existing Customers through our Sharp Shooter event based marketing program, and the Local Web Dominator digital marketing program. If you haven’t given them a try at this point, what’s holding you back?  Call 1-877-242-4472 and get started with the industry’s most quantifiable and ROI generating advertising.

In this article, however, I want to focus on the first 2 ways to grow your business in a more indirect manner than usual. As I previously mentioned, 1. Improving Closing Ratio and 2. Raising Your Average Value per Customer are both a matter of training. The following are strategies to get more from your team than you ever have, while improving the culture of your dealership. 

EVERYONE IS IN SALES

Every person who could ever talk to or work with a customer is in Sales. Even your grumpy Office Manager. 

The attitude that everyone is in Sales raises the ante on what’s expected out of your staff, and one thing I’ve learned over my years of managing is that people tend to adapt and fulfill what’s expected of them.  Change your culture to one where the wants and needs of every prospect and customer is the chief responsibility of ALL of your staff members. 

INVEST IN YOUR TEAM

In most dealerships, the investment in training is small or non-existent. Training is a journey, not a destination. You can get more from your top-performers, the average salespeople, and those in the bottom third. Although it is important that your training isn’t dumbed-down to be catered to your new guys or those at the bottom of the list,

good, steady training has a way of turning some poor performers into average, and ultimately top performers.  While it’s difficult and time-consuming, it’s the best way to of getting more out of your team. 

At Powersports Marketing, we spend 45 minutes to 1 hour in training EVERY DAY. Yes, you read that right. Every. Single. Day. We cover everything from product knowledge and looking at the numbers to role playing how to handle objections. It’s a big investment of time and money, and it’s a big part of our growth. It will be for you, too. 

SALESPEOPLE SHOULD SELL

Your salespeople should be spending as much of their work hours as possible…… selling. Not cleaning bathrooms, sweeping the floor, cold prospecting, stuffing envelopes, filling out forms, reading the newspaper, playing on their phones, etc. They should be selling.

This means relieving them of as much of everything else as you can.

For instance, prospecting should be replaced with marketing, and the manual labor of prospecting replaced with media. Prospects can be found or created, brought forward, asked for their information (including what they’re most interested in) and more. 

As I wrote about a few issues ago, you also want your salespeople selling to the best and highest value, highest probability prospects—not just anyone, the most affluent customers in your market area. Putting good salespeople in front of poor prospects (including those who don’t ride) is simply not smart. There’s a better way. Call us and ask about our Sharp Shooter and Local Web Dominator programs– both of which focus on the best audience, use the right media to reach that audience with a message that get a great response and is quantifiable. 1-877-242-4472

ACCOUNTABILITY

“If the guy is selling and making things happen, I don’t care what he’s doing or how he’s doing it.” 

I’ve heard that from dealer principals and other business owners a lot.  Steve Forbes even said it on TV about the advertising reps that work for Forbes magazine. Steve Forbes may be incredible with money, but he’s off his rocker regarding this.

This is why 90 percent of the prospects that leave a dealership are never contacted again. This is why the sales process doesn’t get followed. This is why leads aren’t appropriately called and followed-up with. And Lord help you if your salesperson makes enough money to be happy by the third week of the month ‘cuz they’ll stop pushing and working hard – they’ll put it on cruise control for the rest of the month. No calling the prospects who visited but didn’t buy during the first visit. The opportunity just dies. 

You just can’t leave your staff on their own to decide how they’ll use (or waste) the company’s resources and opportunities.

You can’t leave them alone with ‘how’ they do it either. Your dealership’s reputation and long-term sustainability and equity are all put at risk by every spoken, written, emailed, facebooked, snapchatted, or tweeted word, and especially by every action of your representatives.

Listen to their calls, watch them as they work with customers so you can coach them to be the ambassador of your dealership you expect. Continue to inspect what you expect. Staff members who are given a good opportunity and want to excel will respond reasonably well to accountability if it’s aim is to help them improve. It’s best if the people who resist and resent this kind of accountability find their happiness elsewhere. 

For more information or questions regarding the 4 Ways to Grow Your Dealership, give me a call at 1-877-242-4472.

- Tory 

Last year Walmart announced it was closing 154 stores in the United States. Macy’s is scheduled to be closing 100 stores early this year. And last July, Sports Authority filed bankruptcy and closed 450 stores. Many blame the ‘Amazon Effect’ for thinning of the retailer’s herd. While The Everything Online Store could be a considerable factor, I feel that it is transaction retailing that is really on the ropes. If this causes you concern, it should. 

Dick’s Sporting Goods, on the other hand, has experienced historic growth over the last 10 years. It’s clear to me that CEO Edward Stack, (son of founder ‘Dick’), is a high performer who understands his customers are his most important asset. When Sports Authority folded, Dick’s was standing on the auction steps and smart enough to scoop up 114 million customer files and 25 million email addresses for a cool $15 million. Why? Because the most likely person to buy sporting goods equipment in the future are those who’ve bought it in the past. The most misunderstood metric in business is the true cost to get a customer, and the waste that goes into mass marketing to those with no interest in the products being sold. 

Here at Powersports Marketing we’ve long preached that your customer data is the number one asset you have, and I’d say that Stack agrees. Yes, it’s worth even more than your brick and mortar. This is why one of the world’s richest men at the time, Andrew Carnegie, once said:

“If you take away all my wealth, my products, my equipment, my staff, in fact, virtually all assets and resources but leave me my customer lists, I will have everything else back in short order”. 

In years past I’ve been a customer of both Dicks Sporting Goods and The Sports Authority and there is no question that Dick’s has invested more in our relationship and in return, has earned more of my business and loyalty. 

Transaction businesses focus on one and done selling and spend all of their time and resources promoting discounts, sales, and going after new customers. Relationship marketers on the other hand, focus on selling to existing customers over and over, generating more and more referrals, and utilize relationship messages rather than discount messages.

To steer clear of disaster and avoid the retail carnage, this New Year I’d like to recommend a few important best practices for your Resolutions. 

Number 1. Resolve to be diligent, hard core, even obsessive about accurately collecting customer information. Some retailers require employees have a 97% collection ratio or you’re asked to find your happiness elsewhere, and for good reason. The more records you collect of real riders in your market area, the more effective your marketing will be and the more your business will be worth in the future. It benefits present bank and future bank. 

Number 2. Resolve to spend your limited marketing budget targeting those who are most likely to buy from you. This is called your buying base and is made up of two groups. Those who ride and have done business with you in the past, and those who ride and live in your market area but have not done business with you. Quit marketing to the masses trying to convert non-riders into riders, it’s a waste of your time and money.  

Number 3. Resolve to implement lead generation marketing. Stop it with the branding, get your name out there advertising. You’re not a big dumb company with millions to blow. If you can’t measure it, you shouldn’t be doing it. If someone tells you the purpose of your advertising is to create TOMA, Top Of Mind Awareness, don’t walk…run. They don’t understand the motorcycle business. Branding will be a happy byproduct of proper direct response marketing. 

Number 4.  Resolve to have integrated marketing messages online and offline across multiple media methods that build affinity and create relationships, NOT promote sales and discounts. The OEM’s and their agencies have this wrong and it drives me crazy. Don’t follow their lead here. I’m not being speculative or assumptive, I have the data from thousands of campaigns to prove it. In fact, pass this article along to your OEM rep. OEM reps, pass this along to your Executive leadership teams, you guys have to learn this stuff. 

Our Predictable Growth formula is simple. Grow your number of customers, and consistently grow their annual customer value through consistent, targeted, relationship-building marketing. By creating a personalized experience with each and every rider in your market area you generate more repeat customers who stay longer and don’t haggle over price and also send you more referral business. 

But who and how is the industry supposed to grow and add new riders? For the last 3 decades, the data has proven that new riders come from the influence of friends and family (not radio commercials!). If we want to see our industry grow and create new riders we have to create better relationships and better experiences for the existing riders. That’s not the popular answer, but it is the right one. 

This business model is completely opposite of transaction selling based on lowest price and is immune to the shrinkage many retailers will experience in the New Year. 

For more information on Predictable Growth and how to create relationship marketing for your Dealership contact us at 877-242-4472. 

Happy 2017! 

Merry Christmas!  Can you believe it’s the most wonderful time of the year already? I tell ya, the more gray you get in your hair (or for some, the more hair you lose) the faster the year just seems to fly by. 

Of course, part of Christmas seeming to get here faster is because companies are putting out their Christmas decorations and products earlier and earlier every year. In fact, this year I began to see Christmas trees and lights in stores before Halloween was even here.  

You ever wondered why the big retail stores start Christmas so early?

The reason is found in the math. The fact is that Americans spend 70% of their discretionary dollars between Halloween and New Year’s Day. If a family has $2000 in discretionary funds each year, $1,400 of that amount on average is spent during this time of year. (Discretionary money is what’s left over after the bills are paid and all responsibilities have been taken care of; it’s the money that a person or family can spend at their ‘discretion’. )

The majority, if not all, of our industry’s sales in every department in the dealership come from discretionary dollars. We’re a big toy store. 

Many of our clients have done the math: 70% of discretionary dollars are spent in November and December & most of their business comes from discretionary dollars. This means they can’t back off their marketing too much during these two months. They understand they have the power, through good marketing, to sway shoppers to spend some of those dollars getting the powersports enthusiasts on their list, and themselves, a Christmas present they’d really like.

There are lots of reasons to give people a reason to shop with you this time of year… Black Friday, Chrome Saturday, Cyber Monday (you can actually drive traffic into the store with this), 12 Days of Christmas, or a single Christmas event on a Saturday in December (12/3, 12/10, 12/17, or 12/24).

Have you ever heard of the 13th Month? 

The week between Christmas and New Year’s Day is referred to as the 13th Month because retailers will often do a month’s worth of business during that single week. People are spending their gift cards and Christmas cash. They’re returning the gifts they didn’t want so they can buy something they like. 

A popular campaign we’ve implemented for dealers during the 13th Month is ‘What Santa Forgot’. The focus is ‘Get What You Really Wanted for Christmas!’ This campaign can also be done the first or second week of January. 

Before doing business with us, some of our clients had stopped their marketing in November and December. They had tried everything to compete with the big box retailers and failed. Nothing seemed to work.

The truth is you can’t compete with the millions of dollars being spent on TV, Radio, Newspaper and other mass media. You’re just a drop in the ocean.

You can, however, target the enthusiasts in your market area (both past customers and conquest riders) with a Sharp Shooter campaign that gets traffic in your store and generates leads for every department. This gives your staff people to work with (and sell to) and leads to follow-up with. 

I’ve heard from dealers that October and November to date have been soft. We experienced this with the big election in 2008, when there was lots of uncertainty as Obama was elected. This year, we’ve experienced something similar with another big election, but it’s over. 

In 2008, business picked up in December and 2009 was a good year. Trump will be our next president. The general consensus I hear from people is that they believe Trump will be good for small-to-medium sized businesses, and that’s what the majority of our economy is built on. 

This Christmas shopping season is going to be “YUGE!”  It’s up to you to sway shoppers with good marketing.  Call 1-877-242-4472 to get a free quote on a Sharp Shooter campaign for your ‘13th Month’. 

- Tory

OBJECTIVE: 

Thornton’s Motorcycle Sales is a family owned & operated dealership in southeast Indiana, nestled between Indianapolis and Cincinnati, Ohio. What started out as a passionate hobby for John Thornton back in the 70’s is now a 24,000 sq ft facility including a warehouse of inventory. Thornton’s is run on the strong Christian principles of the owners coupled with a passion for all makes & models of motorcycles & ATVs. While their team does an incredible job with folks that stop by the dealership, they wanted to increase their online presence by driving more traffic to their website and generating more online leads.

SOLUTION:

General Managers, Tammy Schwagmeier and Myron Barnes signed up for the Local Web Dominator’s digital marketing solution, including the Facebook advertising component.  For a local dealership with a small-town feel, these guys have great instinct for what works with digital marketing.  Instead of growing the likes they have on Facebook, they directed their budget to drive Facebook visitors to their website. The strategy to use Social Media to help drive online leads to their website is still under-utilized in the powersports industry, and Tammy and Myron were happy to jump in early and reap the benefits. 

RESULTS:

Last month, the Facebook campaign was seen by 41,354 motorcycle & ATV riders within 50 miles of Versailles, IN while they were scrolling through Facebook.  

Plus, the ads generated 533 visitors to www.thorntoncycle.com. In fact, the campaign increased website traffic and conversions (leads) by 5%. That translates to 19 total conversions in one month from the Facebook ad campaign alone.  With a closing ratio at the industry average of about 10%, that means that Thornton’s could sell 2 units from the Facebook ad campaign, in one month!  That’s a pretty powerful way to put social media to work for their dealership.   

Want to have an email marketing program that was created exclusively for the Powersports industry, has pre-populated images and ad copy, and generates killer results?  Firestorm is a FREE component of the Local Web Dominator program.  Give us a call today at 877-242-4472 and we’ll be happy to show you around.

We just wrapped up our Fall Marketing Boot Camp, and we’re only a few days post-election.

I have to say, I couldn’t be happier with how both turned out.

The New Year will be starting soon, making this a really good time to reflect on this past year and plan for the next one.

At Powersports Marketing, we are always setting goals, targets, and making commitments to better performance. It’s what has led to the success we’ve experienced in the past and what will drive us to excellence as we move forward. 

I’d encourage you to do as we do here each year and do three things:

1. Decide

2. Commit

3. Succeed

Decide that 2017 will be the year that you will determine the trajectory of your dealership through conscious action.

Commit that you’ll actively work to create and cultivate a positive culture in your dealership, making it both a great place to work, and as a result, a great place to visit and buy. Dealership culture flows down from the top, and over time, it can be difficult to maintain. Every dealer I have ever met got into the business because they loved motorcycles. It’s a passion-based business. Unfortunately, running a dealership can be tough. As you know, it can be really tough. That can take a toll. As I used to tell my GMs, it’s important to always remember that we work in a toy store. That’s what our customers think. Customers are looking for an excuse to come to your dealership. That’s what WE thought the first time we showed up in one, and even the first day we went to work there. Over time, that changes, and it isn’t as exciting as it once was. That can be reflected in our attitude, and that attitude is then mirrored in every department. And not only is it mirrored, it gets amplified. Setting a good tone lays the foundation for success.

Commit that you will take every opportunity to learn about how to work ON your business instead of just IN it. Decide to attend events like our Marketing Boot Camp (we’ll have two next year) where you’ll learn the newest (as well as time-tested) marketing best practices tailored specifically to a powersports dealership. Your interest and enthusiasm to make the business better will be noticed, and will continue to create a positive culture in your dealership. Not only that, but enthusiasm is contagious. Others will want to participate.

Commit that you’ll have a clear policy on good data acquisition and accuracy. This is the gold in your dealership that allows you to grab success by the reigns and make sales happen instead of hoping they do. The MIC has said for years that in any given market only 3-6% of people ride motorcycles. Knowing who they are is more than half the battle. The ability to target exactly the right audience with direct response marketing that brings them back into your dealership creates the path to success. 

Commit to using the data you will be harvesting to proactively market to your buying base, touching them 52-104 times per year through event based marketing, e-mail marketing, and online digital marketing. It will be hard. You will be tempted every month to just skip it this month, just this once – I’ll pick it back up next month…

That’s deadly thinking. Don’t give yourself an excuse to give up. It’s simple physics: objects in motion tend to stay in motion – objects at rest tend to stay at rest.

Keep moving, keep going – I guarantee the competition is.  

We’ve had the privilege to see dealers across the country follow the steps I outlined above and experience success better than they ever expected. It’s not the easiest path to take, but most things worth having don’t come cheap.  It looks like the political climate is going to be more conducive to small-to-medium sized businesses than it has been for a long time, and I’d like to encourage you to capitalize on the opportunities it will bring.

Here’s to a great 2017 to you and your dealership – and of course, we’d love to help be a part of making it great. 

Talk Soon,

Brad