corporate branding

We Must Protect This Brand

In order to create one solid image throughout your customer base, and continue to maintain that image, consistency is critical. A brand will only fracture itself by introducing new “personalities” in each of the spaces it occupies a presence.

If you’re not consistent then your customers have to meet you and get to know you all over again. Not to mention finding you in these spaces turns out to be a lot harder. It turns into a game of ‘50 First Dates’. But trust me – unlike romantic comedies, all does not end well.

Now this is not to say you shouldn’t evolve your brand over time. That is not what I’m talking about. What I am talking about is at one point in time is your brand presenting a united front to its customers in a platform agnostic way? A company’s brand is a very valuable asset and as a social media practitioner it is your responsibility to protect it in the social space. Here are three ways to do just that.

Via: Social Fresh

Protecting your dealership’s brand is paramount in this social networking era. A clear, consistent message will demonstrate to your customers that you are listening making them that much more likely to share their experience.

What is Branding and How Important is it to Your Marketing Strategy?

By Laura Lake, About.com

The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines a brand as a “name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of other sellers.

Therefore it makes sense to understand that branding is not about getting your target market to choose you over the competition, but it is about getting your prospects to see you as the only one that provides a solution to their problem.The objectives that a good brand will achieve include:

Delivers the message clearly
Confirms your credibility
Connects your target prospects emotionally
Motivates the buyer
Concretes User Loyalty

To succeed in branding you must understand the needs and wants of your customers and prospects. You do this by integrating your brand strategies through your company at every point of public contact. Your brand resides within the hearts and minds of customers, clients, and prospects. It is the sum total of their experiences and perceptions, some of which you can influence, and some that you cannot.

A strong brand is invaluable as the battle for customers intensifies day by day. It’s important to spend time investing in researching, defining, and building your brand. After all your brand is the source of a promise to your consumer. It’s a foundational piece in your marketing communication and one you do not want to be without.

Source: http://marketing.about.com/cs/brandmktg/a/whatisbranding.htm

Living Your Brand – It Starts With People

A few weeks ago, we discussed how your brand is more than the sum of your tagline, logo and name. Rather, it’s a promise that you deliver to individuals every time they interact with your company. And that promise begins and ends in one place — your people.

Even in an automated and digital world, people do business with people — it’s there that we begin to judge the organizations we dealing with. So, if you’re positioning your dealership as “the customer-friendly alternative to the big boys” then your people best live every aspect of that. If your brand promise is “the lowest price, no exceptions,” then how your people act and make decisions should change to reflect that.

In short, if your people can’t live your brand, then it doesn’t matter what your logo looks like or your tagline says.

D. Jones
Marketing Strategist/Creative Consultant
SmackDabble, LLC

A Familiar Face

As web technology evolves, and more and more of your marketing is online, it’s increasingly important to see that your digital brand is a proper reflection of your offline marketing materials.

When someone sees your web address in a newspaper ad and then types it into their browser, do they see a familiar face? Do the website and newspaper ad look anything alike? Are the colors and graphic styles consistent? Is your logo even the same?

You’d be shocked to learn how many times we find dealerships where these simple things are not the case. And in this era of near-constant connectivity, such a thing should be inexcusable.

D. Jones
Marketing Strategist/Creative Consultant
SmackDabble, LLC

How to Ensure ROI with Internet Advertising

From Digital Dealer Feb. 12, 2008
by : John Federman

According to the National Automobile Dealers Association, in just 10 years, Internet advertising for automobile companies has gone from a fraction of a percent to 11.5 percent of total advertising spend. That’s nearly $680 million a year spent on online advertising.

Why the increasing emphasis on online advertising? Because it engages prospective buyers at the moment they’re most likely to be interested…just after conducting research online about a particular vehicle. Today, more than 80 percent of shoppers turn to the web first when researching automotive purchases, according to another study by Capgemini. Not surprisingly, the ad dollars are following the consumers. However, while you may already be investing in online advertising, it is imperative that you take a step back and set goals for your online campaigns, and implement measurement techniques that will help you assess the success of your online spending.

When considering your options, it is imperative that your dealership considers exactly how online customers will interact with your brand.

Organizations that spend in search engine advertising will pay a premium for popular terms such as “Ford” or “sedan.” With web site tracking and analytics tools, it’s easy to see which keywords are generating the most traffic for your site. However, as effective as search marketing may be in delivering eyeballs, the reality is that most car purchases happen offline. For that reason, it’s imperative to track how your advertising is performing across channels.

Think beyond the click
Studies show that live customer service remains the best way to close online sales leads for complex purchases, such as automobiles. The Capgemini study report referenced earlier also found that:

• 34 percent of consumers said they expect to receive a response to a web inquiry within four hours.

• Half of the respondents say they would look for a new dealer if they don’t get their response fast enough.

• 25 percent say they would look for a new manufacturer or both a new dealer and a new manufacturer.

This means the goal of most dealer advertising initiatives should be to get customers on the phone and into the dealership as soon as possible. This means dealers must have the ability to track which ads are delivering phone calls and not just clicks to their web site.

Call tracking and click-to-call technology gives customers browsing online auto listings the option to connect with local dealerships via telephone, and gives dealers the ability to track which ads and keywords are generating phone calls.

Click-to-call allows online buyers to transition seamlessly into immediate telephone or PC-based voice contact with businesses from any online medium, including web sites, e-mails or directory listings. Call tracking technology allows dealers to assign unique local or toll-free telephone numbers to individual ads to track inbound phone response to online and offline campaigns, directory listings and advertisements, and provides a 360-view of call detail that offers more data on callers that can be used to supplement additional marketing efforts.

These two technologies also form the backbone of pay-per-call advertising where advertisers are charged by publishers on a per-call basis, rather than a per-click basis like other online advertising models.

What most advertisers find is that callers typically convert at a much higher rate, and have a much shorter sales cycle compared to standard web site contacts.

Drive offline leads
Research shows that consumers typically begin researching a vehicle purchase online and can take anywhere from 30 to 45 days to make their decision, which is why it’s critical to capture that last mile from initial contact to conversion.

One emerging trend is the use of save and send features on dealer listings. These services allow consumers to save or send information about an automobile in the electronic format of their choice – on the desktop, the web or mobile device – predisposing to return to that listing.

Save and send tools extend the shelf life of automobile listings by encouraging consumers to save data from their preferred dealers. Visitors can return to the information at their leisure and can even share attractive offers with friends and family members who may be looking to purchase an automobile. Online browsers can use a variety of information delivery methods including SMS, Skype, e-mail or fax leading you to potentially net two reservations using just one listing and transferable data. Dealers can even track online leads that come into the dealership if consumers decide to print out their stored listing, or if they’ve stored it to their mobile device.

The majority of consumers that conduct local searches transact offline, and most car buyers buy from dealers in their immediate area. Therefore, the ability to convert local online traffic to a phone call or a visit to a dealership is vital as consumers are shopping on the Internet. With technology, tracking phone calls can measure the quality of a lead and making sure that advertisers are able to convert online traffic into valuable leads.

Dealers are leveraging call tracking and monitoring programs to improve performance across channels and help close in on that “last mile” to conversion by extending the utility of online ads through services like click-to-call and save and send. More importantly, these services provide granular ROI data that helps prove performance to advertisers.

The online influence of offline automobile purchase is indisputable. Consumers have already made the transition and now rely on the Internet as their primary research vehicle for these kinds of purchase. As online automotive buyers become more sophisticated and begin to use a variety of online sources to research their purchases, dealers must be able to quantify every advertising channel to guarantee they don’t lose potential leads.
http://www.digitaldealer-magazine.com/index.asp?article=1749

GM/Cobalt Mandate

If you are a GM dealer, I am sure you have received some pressure from GM or Cobalt to give your domain name to them or forfeit your leads from GM. I have received many calls in regard to this, from customers and non-customers wanting to know what this is all about. Cobalt is a company that likes to strike up relationships with manufacturers and build manufacturer endorsed template web sites. Their goal is to try and standardize the message across all GM dealership sites. The issue is most GM dealerships do not want to integrate a cookie cutter template site with no individual brand. History has proven that these websites do not work. Cobalt created manufacturer endorsed 5 star sites for Chrysler and we can see that almost 99% of these dealerships have created their own website and have a secondary 5 star site linked up to Chrysler.com. GM has decided to try this for GM dealerships and Cobalt is helping with the push. They are trying to strong arm dealerships into using this site as their primary site. One year ago they attempted to do this and to charge the dealerships for it and dealerships just did not bite. Since that did not work they decided to give it away for free. Now they are notifying GM dealerships that they must provide their domain names so the Cobalt site can be set up to point to the compliant site instead of what they already have in place. All the calls I have received are from GM dealerships who are upset and confused. They are very upset and wondering what is going on and what to do, so here is the really simply solution to this whole dilemma.

Simply go register a new domain name, maybe a .net or .web address with your name. Give this domain information to GM/Cobalt and let them set the compliant site up under the new domain. You then have the Cobalt site running in cyberspace and you get the link on the GM website. You can still run your own website with whomever you would like under the original domain name with no changes.

Problem Solved!

Brian Cox
President
Dealer Impact Systems