Year-End Sales Event

It’s December 31^st, so hopefully by the time you read this you’ve exceeded your annual sales goals and are in the bonus round for the month. If so, why not put some more candles on your cake with a fantastic year-end sales event. If not, here are some quick and profitable steps you can take to get your share of the additional buyers shopping for a new car the week between Christmas and New Years.

Targeting

Be smart with your advertising money.  Almost every retail category will be advertising some type of sales event the last week of the year, and it can be to get lost in the clutter. Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Target your advertising dollars to a specific audience and dominate a medium. Don’t spread your dollars or message too thin this week.

Frequency

The last week of the year is the most critical for frequency. Without it, your message will just be lost in a sea of retail commercials. While your campaigns can normally generate traffic with a weekly frequency of around five (5), to run a successful year-end campaign the last week of the month you will need to achieve a minimum of an eight (8) frequency. That is why we suggest targeting to a specific audience. Remember, you’re going after incremental sales this week so focus on a specific demographic is the key to success.

Radio

Dominate a medium this week. Radio is a frequency medium and has proven to be the most efficient platform for targeting a specific audience. Buy vertical from the day after Christmas until around noon on New Years Eve. I would recommend a minimum of one spot per hour or more on three to five stations that reach your core demographic. Buy a mix of :10 second and :30 second ads and remember to negotiate added value in the form of free rotators, unsold sponsorships and name mentions. You would be surprised what you might get this week if you just ask.

Creative

You can target a specific audience with a lot of frequency this week, but if the offer is not compelling, then you’ve wasted your money. Car buyers are looking for a great year-end deal, so give them one. Remember, perception is reality. Everyone will be advertising the factory’s incentives, so you will have to offer them something more to get their attention and drive traffic over your competition. Set the bar for the market. Choose your ‘ad car’ carefully and make sure your offer is designed to drive traffic TODAY. Make them an offer they can’t refuse. Make sure you stress that this offer will end on December 31^st, so they need to buy today to reap the savings – if they wait or buy somewhere else, they’ll spend too much. They must believe that from your message.Create a ‘Clearance Zone’ on your lot and place your advertised cars there, it is an easy disclaimer for your radio ads.

Thomas Hensey is the managing partner at Rhino Marketing, a full service automotive advertising agency. You can reach him at 713-681-6711 or thensey@rhinomarketing.cc or visit www.rhinoautomotive.com. 

Social Media Works (If You Have a Plan)

Quite frankly, to do social media for the sake of being “in the game” is not worth the effort. You will just be disappointed with the results, get frustrated and eventually give up. If you don’t commit the time, resources and money it takes to effectively implement and stay on top of a social media plan, then you might as well keep your money parked in traditional media.

Most dealers are now spending 30% - 40% of their overall budget on some type of social media exercise. This includes Facebook, YouTube videos, blogging, tweeting, live chats, SEM, SEO and the like. With that level of spending, you must commit the same level of resources to implement and monitor your activities – both internal and external.

Planning, execution and monitoring are more critical with social media than they are in traditional media. Knowing what you are doing and why you are doing it will dramatically increase your success rate. Just throwing up videos on YouTube will not get the results you are looking for. If you want social media to work for your dealership, then you need to dedicate the internal resources or bring in professional outside help.

There is no ‘one-size’ fits all
Do not buy ‘off-the-shelf’ or ‘one-size-fits-all’ social campaigns. What works best for one dealer does not necessarily work for his competitor – I know that from experience. Your dealerships culture, customer base, consumer proposition, product line, location and traditional advertising message all play a part in planning your social media strategy.

Evaluate the needs and opportunities that best connect with and collect customers on the internet by using relevant social tactics and creative dialog. Build bridges that link your videos, blogs, tweets and on-line promotions back to your web site. Use a consistent tone-of-voice, graphics and/or writing style in all your social communications to build brand trust and consumer recall. All this must fit your dealerships culture and personality.

Doctor / Patient Consultation
If you go to your doctor, he will ask you a lot of questions. You should be having a similar conversation with your management team and agency. This is serious business and it is your money. Then, and only then, should your team bring you the opportunities and plan to achieve the objectives set for social media. Have a doctor – patient consultation first then set your objectives, build a plan and manage the process. Just like the path you take to sell a car.

I recently received an e-mail from a big dealer group and all it said was “I need social media help”. I wrote back and said, ‘fantastic, when can we meet”. They just wrote back and said “I prefer to e-mail, just sell me something”. To me, that is like e-mailing your doctor and telling him you have cancer and to e-mail you back a cure – just crazy.

Thomas Hensey is the managing partner at Rhino Marketing, a full service automotive advertising agency. He can be reached at 713-681-6711 or thensey@rhinomarketing.cc

How Social Media Can Help a Car Dealership Sell More Cars

Social media has altered the small business landscape. It is not enough for a car dealership to only have a website today, even if it is informational and well-managed. You need social media marketing - it is quick, precise, inexpensive and measurable.

93% of Americans believe a business should have a presence in social media, according to a recent Cone Business School study. 85% believe a business should not only be present but also interact with its consumers via social media, and 56% of Americans feel they have a stronger connection and are better served by businesses when they can interact with them in a social media environment.

Anyone can have a social media marketing strategy but not everyone can do it right. Here are some ways a car dealership can do it right.

Expense

A car dealership today averages about $550 per car using traditional advertising. With the economy still struggling, it is more important than ever to spend your advertising dollars wisely. The cost of social media networking and marketing is fraction of what the traditional advertisers like TV, radio and print demand – and it reaches a new market that traditional media can’t deliver for you today.

Drive Traffic to Your Website

Over 40 percent of new cars will be purchased through a car dealership’s internet department and that number will grow as consumers become more savvy about the convenience and savings available, according to Edmunds.com. There are many ways to use social networks like YouTube and Facebook to drive traffic to your dealer website. Entertaining commercials, events, loss leaders and distressed merchandise are a few examples. Someone who knows you from a social media network is more likely to visit your website – and your store.

New Selling Opportunities

The sooner your dealership gets its name and message out on the social network sites, the better. Sites like Facebook and Twitter have fan pages that generate leads, leak sales and deliver your message to a huge new untapped market. Facebook alone claims to have 500 million users – and 50% of them visit it every day. That is not a typo – 500 million! You can brand your dealership over time and increase your sales overnight.

Contests and Promotions

As a car dealership, you are very familiar with traditional promotions. Did you know that they are one of the most effective tools in social media marketing as well? You can use them to drive sales, generate leads and brand your business. A recent promotion for an Ipad on a Florida Toyota dealer’s fan page increased the number of fans by over 1000%.  Discounts are a great way to connect with your community. By giving special coupons to your social community, you are telling them you are not only a business to engage with but also one to buy from.

Interact with Your Customers

The reason why they are called “social” networks is because people socialize and interact with each other on them. It is the new word-of-mouth advertising. According to Jeff Kershner of dealerfresh.com, a negative image is one of the biggest fears that keeps a car dealer from embracing social media. But a car dealership is going to have that negative image whether he uses social media or not. And a dealership can change the image by joining a social networking site – almost immediately.

Save money. Sell more vehicles. Learn more about social media and how it can help increase sales at your dealership at www.rhinoautomotive.com

Written by Dan Chambers

Four Steps to Relevant Marketing - Identify, Find, Touch & Thrill

For the most part, dealers are playing by yesterday’s advertising rules when, in reality, the game has changed and the rules are being redefined. Negative media about the money crunch combined with traditional ‘interruption marketing’ tactics by dealers have shaken consumer confidence in the buying process and, in some cases, taken the consumer out of the game altogether.

This may not be happening at your dealership, but it is happening in every market and it is affecting your potential customers. The bottom line is, while the process of buying a car is the same, the consumers’ mind set has changed and so have their options. This needs to be recognized and addressed by dealers, the media and advertising agencies alike.

New times call for new tactics

Relevant marketing campaigns connect with and empower consumers by building solid marketing bridges that complete the link between the buyer and seller. The four simple steps to building relevant campaigns are: Identify, Find, Touch & Thrill the target consumer. If applied correctly, your dealership will have a more efficient media buy and will see an immediate increase in traffic. The best part is you will spend the same amount of money to reach more qualified buyers.

The key is a narrow cast approach

By placing a greater emphasis on the end consumer, media partnerships and relevant creative, you will receive a higher and more accountable ROI for each dollar spent.

Relevant marketing is not a one-size fits all approach. It must be tailored to match the dealer’s culture, brand and model offerings to the geographics, demographics and psychographics of the target consumers. Each campaign is then constructed to fit within the proposed media platform. This will work across TV, radio, print, digital, outdoor and direct mail. Through this approach, you will achieve relevancy across the creative and media mix and hit your target consumer with maximum impact. It is better to be everything to some people than to be some things to everyone.

This process should serve as the foundation of your annual marketing strategy. You can then add quarterly focus and monthly specifics to your plan based on ever changing market conditions and incentives.

Finally, you must ensure consistency across all forms of communications, both internal and external, to maximize consumer recall of your message. One slip up here and you will break the marketing bridge you have spent so much time and money to build.

Take time to challenge your current strategy, management team and advertising agency with the four steps to relevant marketing. You might be surprised by the answers you get. This focused approach will allow your dealership to construct a solid plan to connect with and collect customers rather than just advertise to them.

Thomas Hensey is the Managing Partner at Rhino Marketing, a full-service advertising agency in the automotive sector. Telephone 713-681-6711 or e-mail: thensey@rhinomarketing.cc

Sell More Cars with ‘Referral’ Based Radio Campaigns

If you could, wouldn’t you grow your business off referrals? What if you could combine the effectiveness of referral-based selling with your next radio campaign and get instant, credible and direct response results?

Well, you can, by utilizing referral-based radio campaigns. It’s the most cost effective and credible way to grow your dealership and it can’t be duplicated by the competition on that radio station. Positive word of mouth and a strong referral trumps thousands of dollars in advertising any day.

For over 15 years, Rhino Marketing has successfully used this approach with radio advertising to help dealers around the country sell more cars and gain market share. Properly set up and executed, it will deliver immediate and measurable results and you will never buy radio the same way again.

Select the right radio station and the right DJ

First, you must select the radio station that best reaches your target demographic. You then need to identify the DJ on the station that best connects with the listeners. This is usually the morning drive DJ but depending on the station could also be the mid day or afternoon DJ.

Next, you need to meet with the DJ and ‘sell them the dream’ of why you offer a better product, better selection, better service, better pricing, etc. You want to really ‘showcase’ the dealership and have the DJ become a product knowledge specialist on your vehicles.  It may take several meetings to create the right relationship and may even involve having the DJ ‘test drive’ your cars during the campaign.

‘Live’ radio – not recorded

Once the relationship has been established with the DJ, you then you need to build a schedule based on ‘live’ radio spots, not recorded rotators. ‘Live’ radio commercials blend with the DJ’s editorial. This allows them to ebb and flow with the programming of the day, and many times, you will receive longer than the :60 seconds you purchased. I recommend one to two ‘live’ radio spots each day in the DJ’s day part or show. You don’t necessarily need to buy the station vertically or have a high frequency. Consistency in the day part is what works here and gives the DJ credibility with the listeners over the days, weeks and months.

Creative

Do not write a script and force words into the DJ’s mouth. Provide ‘talking points’ for the DJ to reference during each ‘live’ commercial. The real creative comes from the DJ and their experience with the dealership, the people that work there and driving the cars. The DJ has become a product knowledge specialist and knows your dealership as well as your best salesman. If done correctly, he or she will say “I drive their cars and you should too” OR “I do business with ABC Dealership and you should too”. That referral will immediately separate your dealership from all the other ones advertising on that station, giving you instant and positive credibility and direct response results.

Thomas Hensey is the Managing Partner at Rhino Marketing, a full service automotive advertising agency. Telephone 713-681-6711, e-mail thensey@rhinomarketing.cc or visit: www.rhinoautomotive.com