Blogging

In a perfect world, what would car dealers need to create a great video for showcasing vehicle inventory? Let’s see… a Steadicam or some dolly-type device for professional, steady shooting… high-quality recording hardware to do the voice-over… effects software to overlay images and text… about a dozen takes…

Ah, but you work at a car dealership, and you’re lucky if the General Manager approves a P.O. for a mouse pad. Plus, you probably wouldn’t have the knowledge or time on your hands to utilize the aforementioned resources, even if they were available. In the end, I guess automotive dealers are confined to posting those psuedo-videos… you know, the ones that are just a set of photos fading in and out Ken Burns-style. See ya later, conversion rate.

Well, the kings of Web 2.0 may have saved your asses again. Last week, YouTube announced the implementation of Annotations (read the YouTube blog post) in their videos. Annotations are basically text overlays of “video notes” that you can plop into your video, available in three different iterations:

• General Note
• Speech Bubble
• Highlight Area (mouse rollover)

Why is this awesome? Because now you or any other member of your staff can shoot a quick and dirty vid with a cellphone or digital camera, post it to your YouTube account, and fix’er up to be infinitely more appealing and useful to the consumer.

I created an example video for marketing dealer inventory to give you an idea of how useful YouTube Annotations can be. It’s not just about adding content either; if you conduct a less-than-stellar walk-around on the video and don’t have time for another take, you can use Annotations to correct your missteps. I purposely neglected items while shooting this walk-around so that I could overcome them with the video notes:

• Failed to mention vehicle’s mileage
• Failed to open hood and trunk
• Failed to point out all of vehicle’s highlight features

Check out the vid, and take notice of what is annotated and how it’s said. You can really make the video more engaging and useful for consumers with this new capability, and I promise you, that will lead to more units rolled. Of course, it’s a beta feature at this point on YouTube, which means I can’t embed the video here yet… and like a lot of YouTube vids, you might have to refresh the page once or twice if you get the notorious “no longer available” rejection. Come on you smug little billionaires, and get this thing into full operating status!

Click to watch the YouTube Annotations For Car Dealer Inventory Marketing video

If I had a dime for every dealer who demanded to be at “the top” of Google… trouble is, most of them don’t know where the top actually is. Or, they know where the top is and (as usual) prefer to invest money for instant ROI rather than invest time and effort for long-term ROI. In both of these cases, the dealer inevitably lands on spot #2: the top of paid search.

But folks, that ain’t the top.

If you’re a dealer asking questions about getting to the top of Google, then you already have some understanding of the power and value of search engine presence. But what you haven’t realized - or refuse to realize - is that “paid search” (PPC) marketing is not the magic bullet of search engine marketing. While PPC is highly cost-effective and can be tracked and analyzed to no end, it’s still just rented ad space. If you don’t pay for your ad to be there tomorrow, some other competitor will take your place… just like print ads.

Organic SEO on the other hand, builds upon itself. These are the results that “naturally” list out along the left side of the page; the sites which Google has deemed relevant to what users are searching for. The closer your site gets to the top of that area, the more clicks you receive, the more Google values your site, and the higher your site will go. It’s the snowball effect, and there’s really nothing like it in any other area of automotive advertising. Build a high-quality site and maintain it frequently, and you could be on top of the natural listings within a few months. That’s the discipline to keep in mind: the top of Google is in the organic/natural listings, not the paid listings.

The #1 result in the organic listings (Spot#1) gets about 40% of the click share on Google and other search engines. The #1 paid result doesn’t even come close (maybe 20% of the click share on a good day when listed above the organic side (Spot #3), and more like 10% at the top of the sponsored side (Spot #4)), and often you get better results as the #2 organic listing (Spot #2) than you would as the #1 paid listing. That means the majority of people are going to look past your PPC advertising efforts to find the page that Google has declared the most relevant page on the queried topic. That’s because users know PPC marketing listings are ads, and to a degree, they’ve trained themselves to avoid looking at such listings. It’s also because the organic results deliver more information in their results, so the user has a better idea of what they’re clicking on.

Now there are still a ton of people who mistakenly or purposefully click on paid listings, and I’m not suggesting you give it up. It is, after all, the second best marketing expense in this industry right now. But it’s still an expense, and that’s why it’s in the same boat as newspaper, direct mail, radio and TV advertising: when you stop paying, you stop getting leads. If you’re on a tirade about being #1 in Google, your first step is to realize that it’s not going to happen overnight, and that PPC marketing is not what gets you to #1. Your second step is to find a website developer who rocks at SEO and can build you a killer site… unfortunately, that means looking outside the offerings within this industry.

I’ve always told dealers that letting me loose on a Service Department is like letting a kid into a candy store… there’s so much going wrong on the Service side of the roof from an e-commerce perspective that Consultants such as myself could live on that alone, without ever having to step foot in the Sales side of the mess.

Funny thing is, I was prompted to write this post after my experience as a consumer, rather than a Consultant. Now that I’m nearly a year gone from the days of driving demos, servicing my vehicle is a regular occurence. My local Acura dealer couldn’t hack it, so I started searching around for other options… I located another nearby dealer to try out, and sent a Service Appointment lead in off their crappy Reynolds site. I forgot the format Reynolds demands its users instinctively know in order to complete the Appointment form, so it took me three tries to submit that. And did I get an autoresponder to confirm that the dealer knows I exist? Nah. Did I get a response via email or phone at any point in the day? Nope. Okay, so it looks like in order to give this dealership my money, I’m going to have to set the appointment myself by making a phone call.

Ah, but there’s no Service phone number on the Service Appointment form. And the number on the Service Department page apparently just rings to the Sales receptionist… I know that because when I called, I got the overflow voicemail for the Sales department. Hi folks, it’s me, Mr. Customer - I have $39.95 I want to hand to you… is anyone there? Anyone?

Did I neglect to mention that this is a Penske-owned store? I guess there’s no corporate efficiency trickling down to the franchises these days. What else can you do but shake your head and wonder how much money Service Departments leave on the table every month simply because they make it as difficult as possible for customers to request work.

Yesterday, a dealer asked me what my thoughts were on buying up .mobi domains for his rooftops. First of all, I’m just happy to know that someone in the auto industry actually knows what a .mobi domain is… we’re making progress folks, slow but steady.

But seriously, don’t buy into this .mobi crap.

I don’t know if it was initially intended to be a scam, as technology trends tend to make fools of many a forward-thinker… but a scam is definitely what it has become. For those of you unfamiliar with the .mobi concept, it’s a new-ish domain extension (like .com, .net, .org) that requires the developers of the domain’s website to create mobile device-friendly content. If you’ve never checked out a typical website on a mobile device, trust me - it’s a mess. To appeal to current mobile device users, you have to minimize the quantity of your content and re-organize it so that its’ easier to browse from such limited devices. So the idea of .mobi is that if you wanted to surf BMW.com, but were on your cellphone or Blackberry, you’d just instinctively go to BMW.mobi instead and the content would be appropriately organized. From a layman’s point of view, this sounds like a great idea. But then, a lot of scams sound like great ideas to laymen… that’s how scams work.

So, why is .mobi not the wave of the future?

#1: Your current site is just as capable of being mobile-fied. The .mobi domain doesn’t actually do anything to make your site mobile-friendly or mobile-exclusive… it’s just understood that a .mobi site will look correct in a mobile browser, which is your responsibility as the site owner to ensure. And how do you design a site for mobile devices? With a combination of HTML and CSS, the two primary coding languages responsible for all the websites you normally view. So what, you say? Well, there’s one important stipulation in CSS that needs to be mentioned: you can use CSS to deliver a different layout and organization of content automatically to mobile device users. CSS will sniff out whether or not the user is on a computer or mobile device, and if you’ve designed a CSS stylesheet for mobile devices, that’s the one a mobile device will see. So if you want to go to BMW.com, and you’re on a mobile device, you go to… BMW.com. The site will know you’re on your phone, and deliver you a page that looks something like this (ironically, BMW’s .mobi site). Obviously the big benefit here is that people already know your .com name… why would you risk a leak in traffic by forcing them to acknowledge another site? Just let them come to the page they always come to and deliver it differently.

#2. Technology has already leapfrogged the mobile stylesheet concept. From the BMW.mobi example, you can see what sites look like when the developers cater to mobile device browsers and build a mobile-specific CSS stylesheet. Small, bare, and unimpressive. With the larger screens available on newer mobile devices and faster data connections being generated, wouldn’t it be great if phones actually showed you the real Internet instead of this tiny mobile stuff? Rejoice, my friends: it already happened. The Apple iPhone uses the Mac’s native Safari browser, and does not declare itself as a mobile device to the websites it surfs, but rather, as a typical desktop computer. So considering my previous point, you actually don’t have to do anything to your site in order for an iPhone user to experience it properly… meaning again that if you wanted to go to BMW.com on your phone, you just go to BMW.com. Except on the iPhone, instead of the mobile version of BMW.com, you’d actually get the BMW.com you’re used to seeing. And make no mistake - the iPhone has been responsible for preposterously high levels of Internet usage amongst mobile devices since its inception, and that’s not going to end. Eventually, all the popular Blackberry/PDA-type devices will make the same transition, and we’ll have little concern for this whole mobile-specific issue.

So there you go: short term solution, tweak your own website… long term solution, it’ll work itself out. The only issue with my points made here - from an automotive retail perspective - is that most of the dealer website vendors build horrific websites that don’t stand a chance in hell of being tweaked to fit a mobile stylesheet. Plus, half of the vendors wouldn’t know CSS if it hit them in the face. So if you were to approach your vendor about creating a mobile stylesheet, you may very well be met with a lot of resistance. But it’s like I always say - these companies serve you, not the other way around. If you don’t like the answer you hear from your vendor when you ask them about a mobile stylesheet or mobile version of your dealer site, pack up your contract and move to a website developer that actually knows what they’re doing.