How To Attract & Sell The Millennial Car Buyer – PART 12

How To Attract & Sell The Millennial Car Buyer (PART 12)

TRANSCRIPT: All right, when we talk about the connected buyer in mobile, I don’t want you to overthink mobile. Okay? Mobile is only the most important part of your marketing strategy to attract the connected buyer. Don’t overthink it. It is the most important. Okay?

When you’re talking about mobile, I want you to understand, with your website, it’s what can I do with my thumb. Right? Where can I get on your website with my thumb? Can I get to pricing? Can I get to research? Can I look at deals? Can I get real time advice? Okay? Don’t think apps when we’re talking about mobile. Okay? For service maybe, but for sales?

Think about this. Here’s the truth about mobile apps for your dealership. As of today, there are more than 2 million apps in the iTunes store and there are even more for Android. All but the top 200 apps are fighting for 30 percent of the app usage, so more than 2 million apps fight for 30% of the app usage while the top 200 apps get 70% of the app usage. The average new app loses about 95% of its users in 90 days. You get 100 people to download your app at your dealership. In three months, 5 of them still have the app. Okay?

Apps are great for your sales staff, by the way, to shorten the road to the sale, but not for your marketing. What I mean by that is having an app from, say, your CRM or from another provider. Maybe it’s on an iPad, maybe it’s in a kiosk, whatever. Those apps that take me through the road to the sale and can shorten it, those apps are valuable. That’s not the same thing as a consumer-facing app.

Let me give you the bottom line on apps. Okay? Again, maybe for service, but for sales, no one wants your app. There’s no customer out there that wants your app. Now let me give you a mobile caveat though. Salespeople out there who are doing true social selling, they benefit from the salespeople apps that are out there.

Basically the salespeople apps that are out there that are really good, they’re basically your business partner with everything included. Right? You can manage real follow up through this app. It’s like a miniature CRM for the salesperson. Allows you to track feedback, manage your referrals, gauge interest. See, you track referrals. Your app, if you have an app like this, it lets you know when it’s shared, and it lets you know what people do with your app.






You’ve got a referral program like Joey Book here at Lewis Automotive. You have $100 to someone who refers someone. They can refer Joey just by sharing his app. Joey will know when that customer starts looking at vehicles and exactly what vehicles they looked at because they did it all on his app. He’ll know who they are and exactly what they were looking at. These are apps that work, but this is really more of a miniature CRM and a tracking device more than a consumer-facing app.

Now dealers, if you can manage your team properly, you should look into buying this for your entire dealership, because this is going to sell you more cars. If you’re just going to throw money at your current salespeople, don’t expect them to use it because they probably won’t, but mobile everything else, all right?

We’re not going to do a traditional sales app, but we do need to be focused number one on mobile. Mobile search continues to grow. It is already more important than desktop search. Okay? More mobile searches are completed today for things like vehicle pricing and trade in information than they are for desktop. With connected customers, you have to have what we call a mobile first strategy.

Now the mobile first strategy has three goals: speed, usefulness, and presence. Speed is can I get to what they’re looking for right away. Google says only 9% of users are going to stay on a mobile site if it doesn’t let them get to information quickly or navigate quickly.

Here’s a quick tip, eliminate unnecessary steps. Make sure that everything I do on your homepage is one click. One click to sales, to inventory, one click to service appointments, one click to call. Whatever it is, it’s going to be one click.

It’s also got to be useful. I’ve got to find the information that I’m looking for, and it’s got to have presence. It’s got to be found. Okay? Usefulness, by the way, is everything that we’ve already discussed. Right? Having price, research, deals, real time advice. This means also having texting or messaging options. These are no longer options on your website, they’re simply not. You have to have those on your mobile site.

Also, don’t be afraid to have a lead or call generation strategy on your mobile site. A lot of dealers think they can’t generate a lot of leads from your mobile site. You can, especially if you’re using things like instant retargeting. Instant retargeting is discussed in the website best practices video series that you can watch.

The people on your website, they’re low funnel, but they need to be asked to call you. They need to be asked to submit a lead. Make sure that you’re doing the right processes that we teach you in that website, Convert More Website Visitors into Buyers.

When we talk about presence though with a mobile strategy, it really is organic first. Okay? Make sure that you’re coming up in search and in the maps and Google Maps especially. From an SEO standpoint, you want to look at Google Analytics.

Unfortunately Google Analytics doesn’t show you the terms that most of your organic traffic is coming from, but look at Google Analytics and find the percent of traffic that’s coming from mobile versus desktop search, and look at that over time. You should be growing your percent of mobile searches, not decreasing.

Conduct your own searches with a clean cache on your phone in your market using market and buying terms. If you’re a Honda dealer, look for Honda Accord pricing Spokane. Right? If you’re a Honda dealer in Spokane, Washington, Honda Accord pricing Spokane, or just Honda Accord pricing if your mobile phone is sitting in Spokane and see where you come up.

This is empirical. Right? It’s not pure science here, but it will give you a good idea of between that and looking at your mobile traffic over time, the percent of organic traffic that comes from mobile versus desktop. Looking at the two of those combined is going to help you determine if you’re being seen or not. If you’re not, if you’re not there organically, you’ve got to be prepared to buy your presence. This means digital marketing including search engine marketing on mobile.

Now let’s beware our digital marketing vendors out there today. The problem with most digital marketing vendors is they think great campaigns end with a click, and they don’t. All right? I don’t know how many times I’ve had digital marketing vendors tell me how great one of my clients is doing. “Hey, campaign was a huge success. We’ve got over 10 million impressions. We had the highest click-through rate so far.” First off, we know that those are irrelevant or unreliable measurements, because they are unreliable.

Let’s make sure that we put in place a landing page strategy. Okay, we can’t just take these clicks and drop them right on our homepage. The landing page strategy has to serve both the 39% and the 61%. Our landing page strategy is we’re going to make sure that the clicks that we’re buying go to a page that’s high converting so that we get the 39% to tell us who they are, pick up the phone, submit a lead, but it’s also information rich so that the 61% find what they want and they’ve got enough information to come down and buy a car from us. We also need to put in a measurement strategy when we talk about our digital marketing vendors.






Now this is just an old school spreadsheet that I use with my clients, and the reason is, is that I can’t get all of this information in one report from their CRM, and so we put together something like this. This is how I determine ROI. This is how my clients determine ROI. The ROI measurements we talked about earlier is what we’re going to use in our measurement strategy, but all vendors should be compared side-by-side.

Where you see sources …

It seems we lost audio momentarily during the live webcast. The idea behind having to use a spreadsheet is that most CRMs don not easily provide these side-by-side comparisons between all lead sources. Moreover, it’s important to know measurements like your CONNECTION RATE for one source relative to others and to your team’s total CONNECTION RATE when determining the quality of the leads a source is sending.

You can get fancier if you’d like, but beware of the unreliable ROI measurements. Okay? The unreliable ROI measurements should not make it onto a spreadsheet because you’ll start to give them credence, and they’ll start to raise above, rise above your safe measurements and your contingent measurements.

Let’s look at the columns I like to track for vendors. The green columns, those are my safe ROI measurements, and the yellow columns are my contingent measurements. Now there are other safe measurements we talked about like cost per lead and cost per sale. Those don’t need to be included here. We can deep dive if necessary. If you just focus on cost per lead, cost per sale versus, say, cost as a percent of gross, you’re missing the boat on what you should be measuring.

Again, those are safe measurements, but they don’t need to be included here. I want to keep it small enough that I’m able to focus on the things that I can change. By the way, even though appointments are on here, I didn’t give them a color because appointments are really more a function of our team versus being a function of the source. All right?’

Now for some of these sources, it’s the relative measurement how they stack up against themselves or against similar providers, not absolutes across all. Our website is going to perform better on a lot of these. We’re going to have a higher connection rate with our website. We’re going to have a higher sold as a percent of leads. We’re going to have a lower cost as a percent of gross because it costs us less, we generated more gross.

Again, it’s out there for you. If you would like a copy of this versus having to scribble all that down, send me a quick note through SteveStauning.com.