When was the last time you used a phone book to find ANYTHING?

Do you even know where your phone book is?  I don’t!

The Internet is the most important entrance to your dealership. If your phone rings 100 times a week, the internet was involved in 95 of them.

For a moment, take off your car guy hat, go to Google and go car shopping. Are you visible?  Look at your competitors, are they visible?  Every one of your competitors is gunning for that same spot on page one and competition is fierce. How do you win in this game?  Back in the News Print and Yellow Pages days, all you had to do is spend more to get more.

You need brain power to beat your competitors! Having your 2^nd cousin do it for you may have worked in 2007, but not anymore, those simple days are gone.

Today, we get to chat with Dev Basu, president of Powered by Search, 1 of only 4 global agencies chosen to participate in the prestigious SEOMoz Search Engine Ranking Factors and David Mihm Local Search Ranking Factors study.

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml

http://www.poweredbysearch.com/

Dev is one of the most brilliant minds in search in North America.  When Dev is not helping our members in the DealerRefresh forums he is working with automotive tier 2 and tier 3 clients including GM, Honda, Chevrolet, KIA, Nissan, Mazda, Suzuki, and Lincoln delivering unparalleled results via Organic SEO, Local SEO, and Online Reputation Management services.

Having been consistently ranked as a TopSEOs Best in Local Search company with press coverage in traditional media such as The Globe and Mail (Canada), CTV News, and ITBusiness Canada as well as SEO industry publications ranging from SEOmoz to SEOBook, combined with frequent speaking on the topics of SEO, Local Search, and Social Media at conferences such as Search Engine Strategies and Search Marketing Expo, Powered by Search is considered to be a thought leader in the Local Search space.

Dev has always been a straight shooter and I wanted to take a moment and interview him. Let’s get started..

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What actionable data are you getting from your Website Provider?

Dealers have come a long way in terms of expanding their online presence over the past few years. As customers started moving their research efforts online, dealers have adapted by shifting a portion of their dealership marketing efforts toward the Internet.

In addition to third party lead providers like Cars.com and AutoTrader, dealers should be investing a fraction of their advertising dollars on driving visitors to their dealership website. The easiest and most effective way to do this is through pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on search engines like Google and Bing.

But how can these campaigns be tracked efficiently?

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The two things that make a Dealership a Gen Y Hiring Magnet are responsibility and expertise.

What’s that?

You were expecting something a little sexier?

Hear me out. Read on to find out why these two workplace qualities absolutely rock, and why this is great news for your dealership.

Let’s begin at the beginning. As a first-time Digital Dealer Conference attendee, I was thrilled to be able to attend the Zappos panel entitled “Building a Customer-Focused Culture.” Even though the focus of the panel was around customer service, the takeaways for me were really around Zappos’s legendary employee culture. Here are the two biggest things Zappos offers that makes them such a Gen Y magnet.

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What is ZMOT?

ZMOT is a concept that Google came up with a few years ago. Their VP of US Sales, Jim Lecinski, recently wrote an eBook titled “Winning the Zero Moment of Truth” describing the concept. It appears as though the aim of ZMOT was to convince marketers of what used to be thought of as impulse items, that their buyers were doing research before the purchase in a way they had never seen before.

Here is what the Consumer Behavior models look like:

Why ZMOT is stupid – for automotive marketers

ZMOT starts, using as a foundation, the 3 step behavior model in place for decades when folks bought cheap impulse items… and then adds a fourth step. The problem is that the process for high-involvement items (like cars) was documented by folks who dedicated their lives to the study of consumer behavior decades ago as well. Hundred of textbooks, thousands of pages have been dedicated to this study. It is already well defined and was NEVER the 3-step model; it’s always been the 5-stage model. ZMOT takes it a giant step backwards from the Five Stages of Consumer Buying Behavior for a number of reasons.

Here’s an example of where ZMOT can lead dealership marketing astray; ZMOT advocates view much (all?) traditional advertising as “Stimulus”. But very little automotive advertising is actually “Stimulus”. Stimulus is the billboard you drive by on the highway that makes you think “Yeah, pizza does sound good tonight”. Most automotive billboards, on the other hand are designed with a strong branding component rather than stimulus. They are also in place to raise awareness of the dealership after a need has been recognized – to add the dealership to the customer’s consideration set. Branding can be a big factor in the high-involvement Purchase Decision stage. Having a strong brand can tip the scales in your favor at ‘ZMOT’.

With high-involvement products it’s almost impossible to spark the need, but advertising can be very influential in the Information Search and Alternative Evaluation stages. The ZMOT folks see traditional advertising as Stimulus because the ZMOT model starts with Stimulus (many times external) – the automotive buying model doesn’t. It starts with recognition of a need (almost always internal). While much of the automotive buyer’s research is done online, the factors that contribute to the Purchase Decision aren’t limited to the Internet. The strong brand a dealer has created offline will come into play at the online ZMOT.

So here’s the problem, ZMOT’s foundation is the wrong buying process – the buying process for chewing gum, pizza and pantyhose, one that goes from Stimulus to Purchase Decision. It’s added a step for sure, but when you’re marketing a car dealership at a high level, your foundation needs to be more advanced.

If you look to the 5-stage model, you’ll see that traditional advertising isn’t inherently a bad thing, but you’ll understand exactly how it influences consumers. That said you’ll also recognize the vital importance to a consistent branding and cohesive messaging.

Here’s Jim Lecinski, when asked if he thought ZMOT changes the buying decision:

“No, ZMOT was an attempt to catalogue, characterize and give a sticky name to the behaviors that we are seeing from consumers. What is new on a consumer-behavior front is that consumers who used to use this Zero Moment research model to inform their buying decisions only around high-ticket or so-called high-involvement products — white goods, cars or travel — are now so comfortable with and reliant on that behavior that they are now applying it to what you would call everyday items.”

Consumers have always followed a much more advanced model with auto purchases.

Why ZMOT is Brilliant

Way too few folks in the dealership world have a strong foundation in marketing. The birth of the Internet hasn’t helped. It’s focused dealers on the First Moment of Truth, the Purchase Decision. Whether we call it conversion, a lead or an “up”, we put all our focus on one stage. ZMOT delves into how we should be looking at all 5 Stages (or 4 if you wish to use the ZMOT model). If you do focus on the entire process, you WILL sell more cars. I’ll still contend that the Zero Moment of Truth is nothing new, but I fully agree that the more attention paid by dealers to the traditional 2rd and 3rd stages (ZMOT), the better off they will be.

And ZMOT is brilliant because it does just that. If a catchy little acronym is what it takes to get dealers to pay attention to the entire process – the entire cycle – then the dealers will be the winners.

This little eBook from Google and its advocates have sparked dealers’ interest in Consumer Behavior. Marketing, at its core, is about so much more than where you spend your money – it’s about having a better understanding of your consumer. ZMOT may well be the most important thing to happen to automotive marketing in a long while.

The Solution

Use the ZMOT concept to wake your dealership up but don’t base your entire marketing plan on an eBook written by the guy Google has in charge of selling you AdWords. Dust off your old marketing textbooks and dive into them. If you’ve never actually studied marketing, take a class or two. Do some reading. Study concepts like Purchase Intent, Awareness, Branding, Consideration Set and the like. They will serve you well in your quest to win the ZMOT.

The core foundation of your ZMOT efforts should be the proven Five Stages of Consumer Buying Behavior and not the behavior of folks buying bubble gum. From what Jim Lecinski says, he based ZMOT on the consumer behaviors that have always been at play with auto sales, he just dumbed it down a little for folks selling gum. Go back to the original material on which he based ZMOT. (he does have a Masters Degree in marketing, he knows what he’s talking about)

And one last bit of advice: Don’t just optimize for the sale, optimize for the research.

What do you think about ZMOT and how it relates to your dealerships marketing?

NOTE: The comments for this post has started over in the forums. Click here to comment.

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There is one customer who seems to have purchased from almost every dealership in the country. He is a master of disguises – sometimes he’s the nicest, little old lady and the next day he could be a first time car buyer. It is amazing how much this guy gets around but even more amazing is the ongoing damage he causes:

• Preventing your other customers from receiving your email messages because he’s convinced email providers like AOL and Hotmail that you’re not a reputable company.
• Over-inflating the amount of customers you have with email addresses by 10% or more.

Who is this guy and why does he have such an impact?

He has a few aliases, two popular ones are: “Does Not Have” and “Would Not Give.” You can probably look him up in your database right now by doing an email search for “DNH” or “WNG” and you’ll find tons of returns for:

• DNH@a.com
• WNG@1.com

But sometimes he’s a little sneakier and you’ll find him under:

• None@none.com
• NoEmail@test.com
• 1@1.com

The possibilities are really endless.

What is really happening is your employee is asking a customer what their email address is and when the customer declines, your employee inputs in the bad email address to get credit for asking – not realizing that a bad email is much worse than no email.

While some 3rd party vendors sending your emails will do a data hygiene audit to remove these bad addresses, I’m guessing the email broadcasts coming from your dealership do not.

When you send a dealership email broadcast with a high bounce rate due to bad email addresses, the email providers (Yahoo, Gmail, AOL) take note of that and use it as one of their determining factors in whether your email message gets delivered to your customer’s inbox, spam folder, or blocked entirely.

Send enough dealership email broadcasts with high bounce rates and soon you’ll find yourself with a bad sender reputation and your deliverability rate to all of your customers can suffer.

Additionally, most 3rd party vendors sending email on your behalf, base some of their pricing on the number of emails in your list. If you’re paying to send to dnh@a.com then you’re raising your price unnecessarily.

What can you do?

1. Educate your employees on the problems with entering false email addresses. If they need to enter something to show they asked, then enter “declined” without the .com extension. By not including “.com” in the field most email programs won’t import that address so you’ll avoid the bad send. (If the email field requires a “.com” then enter nothing.)
2. Clean-up your database to remove bad emails. You won’t have emails for your entire database so it may not be as large of a project as you think.
3. Develop a confirmation email process to validate new emails that are entered.
4. If your customers are receiving a benefit for signing up for your email notifications, email that benefit. So rather than hand them a $5 service coupon for joining your list, email them that coupon.

Online marketing options seem to change daily but basic marketing principles still hold true – collect accurate data on your customers so you can market to your base… which is almost always more profitable than the cost to find and convert a new prospect.

Has the master of disguises visited your dealership?

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