Advertising. Who to use and what works best.

[crossroadlm]

Hello,

I am new to this forum and would like a to know what is working best for those of you with good Internet sales departments that are producing you several sales a month.
I am the Internet Sales Manager for a large Inianapolis area Chrysler Jeep / Lincoln Mercury dealership and we have had little success with our Internet sales department. I average about 8 to 10 sales a month using a few lead services. I am thinking about losing these services and using the money spent here on advertising to drive traffic to our own site. I find these service to be costly and do not see my return on investment. I just got out of a meeting with AOL/Compuserve and they were trying to sign us to advertise with them, but again the costs were out or sight. I believe the statistics of web users and even our own survey results show that well over 50% of our customers use the web prior to purchase, but who do we use? We have tried local print, and have our web address posted on parts vans, shuttles, my own company demo, but where are we failing. I hear of dealerships selling 70 to 150 vehicles a month from leads from the web and I want my share of this business. If the web is the way people are shopping for vehicles is it only logical to have a strong web advertising campaign? Banner ads, pop ups etc. Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks
Dan

[sallen1]

I'm not an expert in the field, but we are working the internet. If you advertise with AOL or any large-audience medium, expect to pay the price. Just like running a TV commercial that shows nationally, AOL would probably be world-wide, and that's not your primary target. You need to localize.

Lead generators work o.k. except they are not as productive as in the past. I too, have heard of very succesful internet departments and maybe some of them can comment, but lately, AutoByTel has dropped their monthly fees because we we're concidering dropping them. Same is true with a couple other sites.

Your best bet is doing what your are currently doing: Advertise your site. The customer who'd shop you on the 'net needs to find you and just like all the other dot-coms, the traditional print and broadcast media must be used. You can also try direct mail.

scott

oh, make sure your site shows on search engines and business/dealer locators. Ask your customers how they found you (i.e., lead-generator company, yellow-page site, internet ISP search engine, etc.) You'll need to do some coding to tweak your site for each search engine, but that's the easy part. Selling the car is the hard part! Good Luck.

[MarkB]

I have found the larger internet sites such as AOL to be expensive to use.
It is amazing what increasing the size of your web address on the advertising you currently use such as radio, plate frames, stickers, newspaper adds even down to business cards and the signwriting on parts and shuttle/courtesy vehicles can do to increase traffic...especially during the winter months!
If you sell a marque with a dedicated following you can often find great rates with a good target audience on some of the enthusiasts websites http://a4.org is a good example of this kind of site.
Search engines are a completely different matter and keywords and metatags could have their own forum, however a great shortcut that promises to pay is where you purchase keyword placement the cost starts at only $99 to give it a try e.g. http://goto.com/

Rgds

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[Matt Parsons]

Crossroadlm, not having seen your site, I would ask you a few questions. Is your goal to drive people to your site initially, or to draw them and have the re-visit you often? These are two very different objectives. The major mistake that many dealers make is that they do a good job of bringing people to their site, but provide so little value to the consumer that they never re-visit. Digital consumers that are using the net for research and purchasing have a different set of needs than a traditional walk-in. Dealers need to re-evaluate what they are doing and why. Are you delivering to customer expectations? How quickly do you respond to an inquiry? How valuable, detailed and correct is your content? How well do your back-end processes support internet activities? Do you measure effectiveness in any of these areas? All too often dealers want to treat the web as an advertising problem. It isn't. It is an information exchange medium, and thus you have to approach it in a different fashion.

Recently I discovered two dealers that really get it. These people have committed substantial time and resources to fully develop this channel. It isn't a part time activity by someone inside or outside of the store. It is a full time activity to fully develop and capitalize on this channel.

I would suggest that you look at Peter Brandows site (I believe it is brandowgroup.com). He is in Warminster, PA. Peter has written a white paper on how to effectively use the net, and I believe that he provides it at no charge to dealers - the title is something like the Internet Bible. The other site you may wish to review is tasca.com. Bob Tasca is a dealer in Seekonk, MA. He is pushing the envelope in terms of building a valueable site.

Hope these observations are helpful.

P.S., neither one of these dealers are clients of EDS, thus Ihave no vested interest in selling you anything in relation to what they are doing with the web.

[This message has been edited by Matt Parsons (edited 12-14-2000).]