Articles

 Happy Hallow-Thanks-Mas!

With up to 70% of consumer spending occurring between Halloween and Christmas, it makes sense for you to get in on the action and attack your buying base this holiday season!

Simply choose how many people you want to reach for each holiday. Then we will market to your buying base each month for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas (the “Hallow-Thanks-Mas” Program) via our done-for-you Sharp Shooter multi-channel system.  Click the image above for more information.

Local Web Dominator Case Study: Hattiesburg Cycles

Objective:

In spite of the huge 100,000 sq. ft. show room, and the 10 major Powersports brands that they carry, the team over at Hattiesburg Cycles are more like family than employees.  They are the Mississippi Gulf’s largest dealer and happily care for customers from all over the southeast region.  While, they’re passionate about their toys, they’re also pretty passionate about their business.  That’s one of the reasons why General Manager, William Moore, signed up for the Local Web Dominator program.  He not only wanted to ensure that the Hattiesburg Cycles treated everyone like family...he wanted to grow his ‘family.’

Solution:

William put one of his right-hand guys, Marketing Manager, Robert McMorrow, in charge of the day-to-day operations of the LWD program.  And Robert knew that any good marketing generates good sales.  That’s why he activated the Lead Magnet feature of the program and selected the curiosity-driving incentive of the “Internet Value Package”.  This lead generating tool is included for FREE as part of the Local Web Dominator program.  And it’s a proven winner for generating new & used unit leads.

Results:

Hattiesburg Cycles has generated more than 500 authentic unit leads in 9 months. That’s in addition to the sales leads coming in from all the other standard sources.  With a conservative closing ratio of only 10%, that means Hattiesburg Cycles Lead Magnet contributed to about 50 unit sales over the past 9 months to the Lead Magnet!  Wow. Plus, to make their life a lot easier, Robert is spearheading an integration with Traffic Log Pro to have the leads funneled directly from the Lead Magnet into their TLP account which will enable the sales team to manage those incoming leads much more efficiently.  Those are some powerful results from a powerful tool (and one that can so easily be coupled with the current systems in place in the dealership).  Thanks to the Lead Magnet & Robert’s ingenuity in collaborating with his marketing partners, William is going to continue growing his Powersports family pretty rapidly.

Want to generate additional unit sales from a steady stream of leads to keep your sales team busy as we close out the 3rd quarter of the year? Give us a call at 877-242-4472 and we’ll show you how to get started.

SHARP SHOOTER BOOK & TRAINING PROGRAM

Our FREE book program supplements the current Sharp Shooter campaign training we offer each week.  When you sign up for a Sharp Shooter campaign, we’ll train your staff to be ready for the event with our live ‘Campaign Kick-Off’ webinar.   View the training times and log in details by visiting our Training Calendar here.

In addition to getting your team motivated to provide outstanding service to your customers during your event, dealers who attend the Campaign Kick-Off Training prior to their event will receive one FREE motivating business/life book each month they attend.

Following is the list of FREE books for 2015:

This month, I want to go back to basics a little and review the three basic fundamentals of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

When you have a PPC campaign (or campaigns) running, there are three basic things that happen that can help you determine your success when everything is all boiled down. Think of them as three stepping stones on the path to success.

First, you have impressions. An impression is when your ad appears on the search results page when someone types in a query. In the PPC world, your ad could appear at the top, right side, or sometimes bottom of the search results page. Kind of like a little billboard on the Google results page for your dealership. If the searcher takes no action on your ad (doesn’t click on it), then this is recorded as an impression. They saw your ad, and now they know you exist, even though they didn’t go to your web site.

There is some “branding” value associated with impressions, but it isn’t very high. After all, they only saw your ad, but they didn’t do anything else.

On a side note: some dealers like to bid on their dealership name, and/or variants of it. The reason is because in some cases their competition also bids on the dealership’s name, and bidding on your own name will have higher quality scores and the competitor’s ad can be pushed farther down the page (or off the first page entirely). While there is some validity to this, I’d consider the circumstances before moving forward with that approach.

The next step on the PPC path to success is a click. Once a searcher has seen your ad (impression), if the ad/offer is compelling enough, they will take action and click on it. At this point, the searcher is sent to a page on your web site that is relevant to the content of the ad they clicked. For example, I search for “Indian Dark Horse,” I see an ad about the Dark Horse and click on it, and am taken to a page on a dealership’s web site that is all about the Indian Dark Horse. It should contain a good description of the bike, several pictures, and maybe an editorial type review by someone at the dealership. 

Clicks have more value than impressions, because “clickers” have taken action and visited your web site. These guys are interested enough to check out your dealership web site and click to visit it. 

And because we want our web site to act as our digital dealership, and not just be an electronic brochure, there should be “Contact Us,” “Request a Quote,” “Schedule a Test Ride,” “Trade-in Value,” and “Finance Application” buttons on that landing page as well.

Which leads us to the third step in the PPC path to success – conversions. Conversions occur when a web site visitor engages in a desired behavior on your site. This can be anything from downloading a file, signing up for an e-mail newsletter, calling the dealership, watching a video, or what is most common in our business – filling out a form like those I just mentioned.

Conversions are the highest value visits we can get for non ecommerce sites, because we can actually associate an ROI with conversions. Different types of conversions have different ROI values, and this can be tracked when PPC campaigns are properly linked with Google Analytics. 

Analytics track everything that happens on your web site – whether as a result of online advertising, or simply from folks visiting your site via other means, like typing your address straight into their browser, or a referral from another site. 

To say that having Google Analytics set up properly on your site is important is an understatement of Biblical proportion. If you can’t see what is happening on your site, you can’t capitalize on what is working or correct what isn’t. You end up working on guesses instead of data. That’s a fail.

Now I’m going to get on a soapbox for a second. I normally try to stay neutral on a lot of what happens in our business, and that’s usually pretty easy. Today, not so much.

In our industry, there are three major providers of web sites, and I have historically made no pitch for any one of them over another, because they all pretty much had all of the basic bases covered when it comes to providing a reasonable web presence. I no longer feel they are equal, and I’d like to share my thoughts as to why.

We work with hundreds of web sites every month, and as you can probably guess we deal with many, many web sites from each of the big three providers daily. This isn’t a big deal, as we normally don’t need to do anything more than put Google Analytics tracking code on each of the web sites pages so that everything that happens on the site can be tracked for improvement. This isn’t a big deal, hundreds of millions of web sites use Google Analytics code, and have done so for a very long time now.

What I find troubling, is one of the big three providers is now advising that they can’t use Google Analytics code on many of their pages (specifically inventory pages – where most conversions happen), and not just that. In some cases, this provider has advised clients that they shouldn’t use Google Analytics because that code can cause their site not to function properly.

I won’t speculate as to why they might not be able to add Google Analytics to their web pages (when literally hundreds of millions of other web sites can with no problem), or why someone would say that the code could cause their site to crash (which based on my experience for the last 15 years is total hogwash). I’ll simply say that it is a bad business practice to engage in any marketing effort that is unmeasurable. Especially when there are so many site providers that have no problem providing the normal and customary service of allowing you to track your web site’s performance. If your provider can’t help you track your site’s performance – get a different provider. FAST.

Impressions, clicks, and conversions: these are the steps in the path to web site success. Each has value, which increases with the level of engagement they represent. 

If you’d like to talk more about how you can get a done for you AdWords/Analytics solution for your dealership, give us a call: 877-242-4472.

Talk soon,

Brad
 

Roseville Honda is Northern California’s #1 Honda Dealership. As a Honda Powerhouse Dealer, they pride themselves on superior customer service. A quick look at their testimonial page will show they’re living up to that standard. One way they keep their customers loyal, is by having consistent events at the dealership. The challenge for most dealerships is how to market these events.

Consistency is key. Whether you’re talking about working out or marketing your dealership, consistency is the key to your success. 

According to a recent study in the Powersports Industry, it takes up to 28 touches to gain a new customer. A touch can be a mail piece, phone call, visit to the dealership, email, social media update, etc. What this means is, if you’re serious about carving off new market share, you have to be consistent. You have to be dedicated. You can’t send one mail piece to a group of customers who’ve never done business with you before, one time, and expect they all come running into the dealership waiving the mail piece begging to buy something.

The challenge is, many dealers lack a plan. When you lack a plan, you end up shooting from the hip and wind up just ‘doing something’ cause you feel like you need to ‘do something’. This type of marketing never gets the results you want. The results you want out of your marketing comes from first identifying the proven riders in your backyard. As an example, if the majority of your sales comes from folks that live within a 30 mile radius, we identify the people that ride what you sell within those 30 miles. There are two ways to find these folks 1) Past Sales, Service & Parts Customers who’ve spent money with your dealership in the last four years and 2) Everyone else that rides what you sell and lives within 30 miles from the dealership but haven’t bought from you. 

Once we’ve identified where the majority of your sales should come from, we put a plan in place to hit them 52-104 times per year with a value-added message. By using up to 12 direct marketing touches per month, you’re guaranteed to achieve this target of 52-104 touches per year. The Sharp Shooter Program uses a combination of integrated direct mail, emails, call blasts, web banners, event signage, fliers, social media updates and even more on each campaign. Each piece of communication incentivizes customers to go online and compete a survey so they can tell us who they are and what they want to buy from you. Over time, this style of marketing drives a ton of quality traffic to the dealership and generates a pipeline of leads for every department. Most importantly, it puts a fence around your herd, making your customers immune to other offers from other dealers. Roseville Honda is beginning to experience the payoff from using the Sharp Shooter Program consistently to market their events.

Lucky Lock Open House: April 18th

According to Lisa Anderson, Roseville Honda’s Marketing Manager, their last event was, “…a great event, one of our best, with lots of traffic! We had an autograph session with the Honda race team and gave a bike away which was won by a ‘regular’ so that was cool.” What was more important than the individual results of the day of the event was that she said that she could, “…see the consistency paying off. We had a higher response, no complaints on the call blast and almost no returned mail,” which she attributed to the fact that they have done several Sharp Shooters and have been able to clean up their lists, and she knows that, “people are now starting to expect to hear from us.” Roseville Honda is creating affinity with their buying base by executing a consistent marketing plan by hitting the Right Target Audience, through the Right Media Channels, with the Right Message and just the Right Time.

Over their past four campaigns, they have generated

653 sales opportunities for each of their departments, which include over 200 New & Used Unit Leads, and hundreds of hand raisers for Parts, Accessories & Riding Gear! The lead generation aspect of these campaigns, turns a weekend event into a month-long sales process allowing our clients the opportunity to grow their Return On their Investment exponentially over the weeks following their event.

September means New Model Open Houses! The majority of OEM’s are rolling out new models right now which means your customers are basically kids on Christmas Morning. If you don’t have an event on the books yet showcasing your new models, call us today to make this happen.  September also means Extend the Riding Season parties, Hunting Season events, and even more. Check out the inserts for a few more proven winners. To have Powersports Marketing build your dealership’s Buying Base and put a plan in place to hit them consistently for FREE, call me on my direct line at 877-242-4472 ext: 112 or chat us up at powersportsmarketing.com. Happy selling!

Here in the Powersports Industry the most used advertising message is a sale or discount of some sort. To be blunt, it’s completely overused and sabotages margin. 

I believe the reason it’s used so much is because business owners and marketers know they need to give a reason to respond, or a call-to-action, instead of wasting money on getting their name/logo out there. Plus, a ‘sale’ is one of the easiest messages to come up with and write ad copy for. All you have to do is lower your price, show a picture of the product and hope that a few of the folks you’re marketing to respond and buy the product. But it’s a lose-lose situation. The dealer makes little to no profit because of the discount, and customers become trained not to buy unless there’s a big discount.

This way of marketing is completely unnecessary. You don’t have to give away margin to get a response.  Are you a Not-for-Profit Organization?

I think most dealers realize this challenge, but don’t know what to do about it. So, right now, you should take a break from this article and go to powersportsmarketing.com/boot-camp and sign up for our Marketing Boot Camp, October 26-28, in Atlanta, GA. You’ll discover how to craft a compelling message in detail.  Having the right message is one of 4 Fundamental Components of successful marketing. There is a way to create more responses than you’re currently getting, build affinity with your buying base of customers and new prospects, and do it without giving away the farm. 

Another fundamental component of marketing is going after the right audience. In other words, who are you reaching out to with your advertising?  Historically, motorcycle & powersports dealers want to focus on creating brand new riders. They feel they’ve already earned and own all of their customers once they’ve purchased something from the dealership. If you feel this way, stop what you’re doing and listen to the fog horns and sirens, and all the red lights flashing warning you that this is the wrong way. This ‘entitled’ way of thinking is completely erroneous. Here at Powersports Marketing we’ve proven with literally thousands of marketing campaigns per year for over 700 dealers that there is a ridiculous amount of opportunity in every dealer’s customer list. You just have to know how to get it.

It’s also important to create new customers. Note that I didn’t say create new riders. There is a big difference there. With very, very few exceptions, advertising will never make folks who don’t ride powersports products decide to spend thousands of dollars to give it a try. The number one reason a new rider is created is due to the influence of friends and family. However, there are prospects in your market area who ride what you sell but have never purchased from you, and marketing the right way will get them to respond. To delve deeper into creating your Buying Base (past customers and new prospects) sign up for our Boot Camp at
powersportsmarketing.com/boot-camp.

The third fundamental component of marketing is choosing the right media that will reach the right audience. Mass media that reaches the multitudes feels good because it feeds your ego. For instance, you’ll ignore the 5 other radio ads that play before and after yours, but you’ll hear your ad and think that it’s working. Stop it. Only 3% to 6% of people in America ride motorcycles, and it’s far less than 10% if you include all off road categories. To learn how to use multiple media methods that quantifiably drives results…… you got it, come to our Boot Camp: powersportsmarketing.com/boot-camp

The last fundamental component of marketing right timing. This refers to dripping out several different media on a schedule that increases results. Also, you can use the time of year to tap into the conversation going on in the heads of your customers & prospects. Everyone is impacted by holidays and seasons, and you can generate more results by leveraging them in your message. Miss even one of the 4 Fundamental Components in your marketing campaign, and it will not work. For more information on any of these 4 fundamentals, which is a small part of what we’ll cover, join is October 26-28 in Atlanta, GA. Sign up now at: 
powersportsmarketing.com/boot-camp.
 

In spite of the huge 100,000 sq. ft. show room, and the 10 major Powersports brands that they carry, the team over at Hattiesburg Cycles are more like family than employees.  They are the Mississippi Gulf’s largest dealer and happily care for customers from all over the southeast region.  While, they’re passionate about their toys, they’re also pretty passionate about their business.  That’s one of the reasons why General Manager, William Moore, signed up for the Local Web Dominator program.  He not only wanted to ensure that the Hattiesburg Cycles treated everyone like family...he wanted to grow his ‘family.’

William put one of his right-hand guys, Marketing Manager, Robert McMorrow, in charge of the day-to-day operations of the LWD program.  And Robert knew that any good marketing generates good sales.  That’s why he activated the Lead Magnet feature of the program and selected the curiosity-driving incentive of the “Internet Value Package”.  This lead generating tool is included for FREE as part of the Local Web Dominator program.  And it’s a proven winner for generating new & used unit leads.

Hattiesburg Cycles has generated more than 500 authentic unit leads in 9 months. That’s in addition to the sales leads coming in from all the other standard sources.  With a conservative closing ratio of only 10%, that means Hattiesburg Cycles Lead Magnet contributed to about 50 unit sales over the past 9 months to the Lead Magnet!  Wow. Plus, to make their life a lot easier, Robert is spearheading an integration with Traffic Log Pro to have the leads funneled directly from the Lead Magnet into their TLP account which will enable the sales team to manage those incoming leads much more efficiently.  Those are some powerful results from a powerful tool (and one that can so easily be coupled with the current systems in place in the dealership).  Thanks to the Lead Magnet & Robert’s ingenuity in collaborating with his marketing partners, William is going to continue growing his Powersports family pretty rapidly.

Want to generate additional unit sales from a steady stream of leads to keep your sales team busy as we close out the 3rd quarter of the year? Give us a call at 877-242-4472 and we’ll show you how to get started.

I recently studied a compelling case study on an advanced Direct Marketing company called SunSetter who sells and installs awnings nationwide through its dealer network. To generate leads for the dealers, SunSetter airs national TV commercials and offers a free awning idea kit which includes a DVD. This free premium can be claimed by calling the 800# or mailing in a physical reply card.

In this day and age of electronic communication, websites, social media, and email, it raises the question of why SunSetter would rely on such a seemingly antiquated marketing process.  Are these guys dinosaurs, plain crazy, or are they just another big dumb company wasting money on marketing that doesn’t work?

Actually, these guys ain’t no dummies. They’re a professional direct response marketing outfit who carefully measures cost-per-lead (CPL) and cost-per-sale (CPS). They quantify the percentage of response and the quality of leads generated by media and by the campaign. They work with a MEGA budget and are constantly tweaking and testing their campaigns for maximum results. If they could eliminate the cost of the DVD, tangible idea kit which includes real paper, has a significant postage cost, and requires a costly staff to stuff it, stamp it, and send it, and instead drive traffic to a website to watch a video and download the brochure, then you better believe they’d jump all over it. Cheap and easy.

However, their target audience ranges in age from 38 to 62 and most of those folks aren’t Tweeting or playing on Instagram. They’re too busy working and making money to be full time device fiddlers. The test data clearly indicates that it is way too soon to abandon toll free numbers and printed sales materials. 

Does their target audience’s age range by chance remind you of yours? It should. As the Dealer Principal or Marketing Manager of your dealership you must be very careful about heeding the advice of young whipper snapper employees or your own personal likings. Failing to offer multiple methods of communication, both online and offline, to satisfy the preferences of your prospects and customers (not your personal biases, opinions, and beliefs) is a big mistake.

To be candid, we see this ignorant behavior cost dealers thousands of dollars, month in and month out. Using emotion to determine marketing decisions rather than logic is a costly mistake.

Using one-and-done media methods to deliver a single standalone message is a recipe for disappointment. Relying completely on digital is just as unwise and putting all of your eggs in the offline basket. As we often say, “Diversity Equals Stability,” and, “You have to go fishing with multiple poles in the water.”

It’s not uncommon for us to have a dealer tell us that Direct Mail is dead, despite a preponderance of proof that it is one of the most reliable and effective forms of marketing for motorcycle dealers without question (when executed properly). Heck, we even have some social media happy do-gooders claim that email is old and outdated. Customers don’t want to be called, etc. Silly.

So what media methods (still) work, what is a waste of time and money?  I’ll admit, to successfully implement a multi-channel integrated marketing campaign that is 100% quantifiable is complex. You can ruin your entire investment by marketing to the wrong list. You can butcher your message by not having a compelling offer, premiums, and call to action with a deadline, or you can simply mis-time your deployment and sabotage your results.
 
You can have a seemingly high performing Google Adwords (pay per click) campaign or even a compelling radio commercial, but if your online reputation is littered with negative reviews, your investment can be sabotaged when customers see or hear your ad and go online and search your dealership. 

So what works, and what doesn’t work? How can you quit wasting half of your advertising dollars, but not knowing which half? How can you discover what really works for your dealership? 

Clearly the pros and SunSetter are students of marketing that have mastered their craft, and if you want to sell more bikes, make more money, and have more fun then you should be one, too. 

So go right now to www.powersportsmarketing.com/bootcamp and sign up for our fast approaching live Fall Harvest Marketing Boot Camp in Atlanta Ga. from Oct. 26th through the 28th.  We’ll help you sift through the data (not just the emotion) of the many marketing options you have to spend your hard-earned money on.

And, you’ll leave with a plan that WORKS (and is quantifiable and profitable). You will not be disappointed. I look forward to seeing you in Atlanta.  

It’s always fun for me when I have an opportunity to get out of the office and get in front of dealers. There’s so much to be said for eyeball-to-eyeball communication. 

Such an opportunity just happened recently, and there were dealers present representing every one of the major OEMs, so it was a good forum for me to throw out marketing questions on lots of topics and get a lot of good (sometimes interesting) feedback as well.

Anyone who knows me at all, knows that I love AdWords* and love to talk about AdWords as a marketing tool because it just works so well when executed properly.

Naturally, a lot of discussions ended up being about AdWords…

It seems as though companies who provide AdWords account management fall into one of two major groups based on the 150 or so dealers I spoke with. 

The first group of providers seem to have a very interesting business model. They sell you on an AdWords program, provide you little to no reporting or communication, and send an invoice (or auto bill a credit card) each month hoping you just pay and don’t notice. It’s a weird relationship between client and provider, kind of like when Baptists run into each other in the liquor store – don’t make eye contact or speak. Not a particularly healthy relationship and certain not to have quality results.
  
The second group of providers does what Avinash Kaushik (recognized as one of the leading Google analytics gurus in the world) refers to as a monthly “data puke.” They bolt on some kind of reporting tab (if done by a website provider) or give access to a report, or send over a report that has so much information that the readers eyes almost immediately glaze over. These reports are fun to look at for a few seconds – maybe even for the first two or three times they are received, but getting data for data’s sake isn’t beneficial. We want MEANINGFUL data – data that tells us something, and helps to point our efforts at making our websites do what they are supposed to do, become an online showroom and generate leads/income instead of act as an online brochure.

This model results in a really interesting phenomenon that is a bit of a head-scratcher for me. 

When probed about the value and results of the campaigns, most of the responses can be boiled down into something along the lines of, “There’s a crazy number of charts and graphs, lists of numbers and words, so I feel like it must be working.” “Also, there’s so much information here that it’s intimidating to try and ask questions to sort it all out.” 

AdWords is a big animal, and running campaigns is complex if done properly. Because of this, you can generate a seemingly endless parade of reports that can show you more dimensions of what is going on than most people can imagine. 

But that’s not the magic of AdWords. 
The magic happens when you sift through the irrelevant data and are able to pull out actionable nuggets that give insight needed to improve website results.

With good actionable reporting, it’s possible to see how (and when) people are getting to your site, where they came from, where they are going once they get there, and where they are leaving. Using this info, it’s possible to make changes to the content or layout of a page, increasing conversions (and dollars). Properly bolting on Analytics with solid conversion/goal reporting allows us to see the ROI generated by your web site so that you know the money you are spending on BOTH AdWords and your website are dollars well spent. 

The point is, as I’ve always said, your website isn’t supposed to be a set-it-and-forget-it static brochure. It’s a living, breathing, entity – just like your physical location that changes when the market does. AdWords (and Analytics) allows you to supervise your digital showroom and see what traffic is doing (like you do in your physical dealership), what they are interested in, what products they linger on or avoid. And with properly set up AdWords and Analytics, you can make the same kinds of adjustments in your digital showroom that you do in your physical one.

If you feel as though you might fall into one of the two groups I mentioned above, we can show you a different approach that can raise the bar on your website performance, just give us a call – and also plan to attend our Fall Marketing Boot Camp in October and spend three intense days with dealers from all across the country learning about and discussing marketing best practices for your dealership.  Get more info about the Boot Camp at PowersportsMarketing.com/Boot-Camp.  

Talk soon,
Brad

* AdWords (Google AdWords) is an advertising service by Google for businesses wanting to display ads on Google and its advertising partners. This is also known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising.
 

If you’ve read this newsletter for any length of time, you know that we have very deep convictions about training here. Incredibly deep. Training happens every single morning, and for some departments again at the end of each day – no joke.

It was during one of these training times that we were discussing our Local Web Dominator program, going through the features and benefits and comparing them to other programs on the market that the title of this article went through my mind.

We were dissecting a call that one of our Business Development Reps had made, and going through the different objections she heard. As we listened to each one, and the responses we gave outlining features and benefits, it highlighted why the program is so good, and why so many dealerships are taking advantage of it.

I won’t get into the specifics of the call, but it’s worth talking about some of the features and benefits that make this program great.

First, let’s talk about the current marketing landscape. There are a ton of different media methods that dealers use to advertise their businesses - everything from newspaper, radio, T.V., direct mail, and billboards in the offline world, to hundreds of digital methods available today. I have some strong opinions about what methods work and what don’t, but that’s not really important right now. What IS important is what happens almost every single time one of those methods catches the interest of a potential customer. According to the latest studies by Google and a few other companies, somewhere in the neighborhood of 95% of people will go online to research a product and/or company before buying. 

So what?

Well, what if they go online and don’t find you because your online presence is so fragmented, incomplete, or contradictory from one listing site to another that Google isn’t really sure who you are, and because of that you don’t show up on page one of search results? Search engines rely on N.A.P. (Name, Address and Phone number) information from directory sites and listing sites as one method to verify businesses and give weight to who they say they are. Google is all about providing accurate information quickly. If your web presence doesn’t match up from one directory or listing site to the next, or it’s incomplete, Google won’t be sure who you are, and they aren’t in the business of ranking based on guesses.

If you have recently physically moved your dealership, renamed your dealership, just purchased a dealership, or just opened a dealership, I can tell you with nearly 100% surety that this is going to be an issue with your dealership. If you can check more than one of the items I just mentioned, odds are right at 100%. You need a way to check and correct listing information for your dealership to make sure accurate information is available anywhere you might be found online, and that it matches all other sites that mention you.

The LWD program has a dashboard that shows your online listing information for all of the most important directories and search engines so that you can build a uniform presence online. This is huge, because you can go to one place to see and correct your info rather than having to try and tie a string around your finger to keep track of each one.

Okay, so what else?

How many online reviews do you have? What is your star average? From a statistical and human nature standpoint, unless you are very actively engaged in acquiring reviews, you’ll have a handful of reviews at best and more from upset customers than happy ones. That’s just how it works.

Google studies have shown (as does common sense) that the more reviews a business has, the higher the likelihood that someone is to do business with that company.  These same studies show that an increased average star rating from 3 to 4 can actually increase revenue numbers by 10%. That’s significant.

The LWD program ACTIVELY harvests reviews for a powersports review site as well as Google reviews in a totally legitimate Google approved fashion. It’s not unusual for clients to have more than 100 reviews and a 4+ star rating in just a few months.

What about people who are really pissed off? It happens. As part of the review acquisition system, customers who have had a “less than excellent experience” are asked to provide details rather than a review – which are then sent in an email directly to the dealer principal (or GM) who can respond and save the relationship.

Angry customers are dealt with privately, rather than “on stage” in the review arena for the whole world to see.

Sounds pretty good, what else?

AdWords is huge, that’s what. In the online arena, there are some really big players and unfortunately dealerships aren’t. In many searches, OEMs show up high in the rankings, as do larger commercial sites like cycletrader.com, etc. These are national (international for OEMs) sites that are huge, been around for a long time, have tons of links to them, great optimization, and will outrank an individual dealership every time. It’s the nature of the beast. AdWords levels that playing field. 

There’s no way an individual, local dealership is going to be able to do all of the optimization necessary to outrank the big boys organically, but with AdWords you can still show up on page one of search results, giving you the same visibility and odds of getting that lead that the big boys have. Now, AdWords is a complex animal, and it can be really easy to spend way too much to achieve results so you have to be careful.

Or you have to be on the LWD program. At the Gold level, you have a team of certified Google and Bing experts who manage over 1 million dollars annually in ad spend specifically in the powersports industry actively managing your account to achieve the best ROI possible for you on your web site. You won’t get that anywhere else.

The bottom line is this, when it comes to marketing today, all roads lead to the internet – no matter what media method you use. Because of this, you have to have your digital house in order. I’ve given a 20,000 ft. helicopter view of the Local Web Dominator platform (that quite honestly really doesn’t do it justice because I barely scratched the surface of what it does) but even from that high up it’s pretty obvious that it’s an incredibly powerful program that can significantly impact the success of a dealership. If you aren’t on the program already, I encourage you to give us a call and get the full picture of what it can do for you. And make sure you ask about the new component that’s in beta testing now, it’s a game changer.

Talk soon… 

Darrin Gitlitz, owner of New York Honda Yamaha, brings so much charisma to his dealership in Long Island City, it’s no wonder his dealership is so highly rated among customers and OEMs alike.  Darrin is the kind of guy that cares about (and very passionately) in taking the best care of his customers as possible.  And that attitude has seeped its way into the culture of the entire shop.  Customers get a big, boisterous, warm welcome when they join the New York Honda Yamaha family.  Darrin recognizes that his website is a first-stop for some folks before they walk in his doors.  So, he wanted a way to generate leads from his site that translated into floor traffic, and most importantly…more folks joining the New York Honda Yamaha family.

Darrin activated the Lead Magnet, which is a customizable lead generating feature that is included in the Local Web Dominator program.  He selected the “Internet Only Add On Offer” as his premium (which is one of the most popular premiums, with the highest response rate).  The Lead Magnet is available for website visitors to click on every page of the website, but it pro-actively opens up automatically on the new & used inventory pages of the website.  It’s designed to encourage leads from folks who are most likely to purchase a new or used unit.

In the 2 months since activating the Lead Magnet, it has generated over 80 unique leads for the sales team at New York Honda Yamaha.  That’s 40 leads per month!  

So, while Darrin will continue to greet his customers in the dealership with his contagiously charming personality, the Local Web Dominator program will continue to drive folks to the dealership for him and his sales team to win over.  Combined with their excellent customer service, great prices, and overall top-notch team, New York Honda Yamaha is adding folks to their family pretty regularly thanks to the Lead Magnet.

Want to give your raving fans a stage to shout your praises in a way that leads to killer social proof (and ultimately impacts future buying decisions for new customers)?  Give us a call at 877-242-4472 and we’ll show you how to get started.

Have you heard about our Fall Harvest Marketing Boot Camp coming up in October?  Take a pen and mark your calendar for October 26th-28th and plan to join us in Atlanta. This is a must attend event that is guaranteed to make a difference in your dealership. 

The reason we chose the ‘Harvest’ theme for this boot camp isn’t just because of the fall season. One of the Merriam-Webster definitions of the word harvest is ‘a productive result’, and that’s what I can promise you (and all attendees) in 2 ways: 

1. You will get ‘productive results’ from attending. This isn’t a clouds-in-the-sky, come and be on vacation boot camp.  Every attendee we’ve ever had has left feeling more than satisfied, and you will too. 

2. Once back in the dealership, you’ll also get ‘productive results’ from implementing what you learn at the boot camp. We really draw back the curtain and uncover the secrets of Direct Response Marketing.

I use the word ‘guarantee’ above with confidence. In fact, while the boot camp is made for Powersports dealers, we’ve had OEMs, banks & financial institutions, manufacturing companies, gun stores, and even a casino attend, and in every instance we’ve received nothing but overwhelmingly positive responses and testimonials after each boot camp. I know you’ll be glad you came. 

If any of the bullets below are important to you, you’re an ideal candidate to attend: 

• Learning online & offline marketing that’s

  working right now

•Driving more traffic to your dealership

•Selling more units and making more money

•Creating a marketing plan / calendar

•Stopping the waste of money on archaic   marketing methods used 10-years ago that aren’t quantifiable

Here’s a sampling of what will be covered:

•Social Media – What Role Does it Have?

•Internet Marketing - Including SEO & SEM Best   Practices

•Lead Generation Advertising vs. Image    

 Advertising

•How the A.C.V. of Your Customers Can Transform  

 Your Dealership

•Marketing Case Studies That Really Work

•Your Dealership’s Unique Selling Proposition  

  – Why Customers Buy From You Instead of the   

     Competition

•Four Fundamentals That Any & All Advertising 

  Must Have

•The Four Ways to Grow Your Business

•And, much, much more...

Another great part of this boot camp is the learning opportunity and camaraderie you get from all the other dealers in the room. Imagine the difference that 2.5 full days of focusing on your dealership’s marketing plan in a room full of other like-minded dealers will make. 

Plus, October is the perfect time… the summer rush is gone and it’s no problem to be out of the dealership for a couple of days. And there’s still time to make a difference in 2015, and plan for 2016. 

Fall Harvest Marketing Boot Camp. Enroll now: www.powersportsmarketing.com/boot-camp

When: Monday, October 26th – 2pm – 6pm EST 

Tuesday, October 27th – 8:30am – 6pm EST

Wednesday, October 28th – 8:30am – 3pm EST

Where: Atlanta Airport Marriott Gateway 

($165/night)

Cost: $249 before August 31st (then $349) 

– Additional guests are only $149 each

If you’d like to speak with one of our friendly team members about the boot camp, call 1-877-242-4472, or chat with us at 

www.powersportsmarketing.com.