Welcome to second PGI AUTO TRAINING SEMINAR- Helping our dealers navigate the complex and ever changing Web space and help to generate the most leads became PGI s mission- therefore my personal passion. Digital marketing has changed dramatically since our last seminar and regardless of who does digital marketing for you, knowing these concepts will make you a better dealer and it will allow you to make better choices about what you think will work for your dealer. The programs and technologies that we will analyze has been our earnest attempt to address your changing needs and deliver smart solutions and choices. Countless hours of research, classes, seminars, and field experience are needed to compile this conference workbook. Our goal is to stay ahead of the curve. Today I am very grateful to this opportunity to connect to our PGI dealers and address some of the subjects you have been asking for quite some time. Hopefully you take with you helpful tips and fresh ideas to better your daily operation. We are here to educate. Yago Paramo 2 P a g e
Terms of use: This PGI Digital Marketing Strategies workbook is designed to enhance the educational and learning experience of the PGI s training seminars. The materials in this workbook are for the private business of all the registered attendees. The materials containing in this workbook should not be copied, digitally transmitted, photo copied, or modified without written permission from Paramo Group Inc. Note to the dealers: We use many local examples in our workbook as they make the best to understand what things are since we are all familiar with this area. These examples are for the purpose of learning and identifying areas of improvement. The goal is to stay ahead of the curve. We are here to learn and educate. Digital marketing is about 1000 little things and we all have areas to improve. We could cover an entire day seminar with just one of the subjects here but time is of the essence and we hope to provide a good overview of many aspects. This workbook is designed to provide a starting point and for you to follow up on learning. We also want to offer you the knowledge to do things on your own, to have us do things for you, or to do a mix of both. Legal Counsel: PGI doesn t offer legal counsel of any kind. In the event that you have any doubts about advertising strategies, pricing systems, etc consult with your own layer. 3 P a g e
1 I liked this image from Cardone the moment I saw it. As simple as it is it brings a simple message: Stay positive. Regardless how overwhelming this new technologies may feel you are already a step ahead of everyone else because you are here and you will get most of the knowledge that you need to know what to do and what not to do. Stay positive because this is not that hard, twenty year old kids figure these things out. Any car guy with 10+ years of experience has more business battles and deals in his resume than all these geeks together. Just stay positive, focus, and take the time to learn these things. It will all come together. Extra Credit: You will see these color coded messages, in the book, this is what they mean: Online research: Links to go online and learn more about a subject. Advanced: Things you should/could do after you get the main subject handled. 1 Copyright Cardone Training Technologies Inc. 4 P a g e
Craig s list: Advanced system and tools. Why CL is important? Since we started working with the CL system back in 2005 we have not seen it stop. While some dealers have done better than others there are a few things that have remained true: Traffic has grown dramatically. Number of inventory has grown tremendously while other websites have decreased. Dollar to dollar has remained the best value in 3 rd party digital advertising. Customers have shifted. From www.alexa.com Compared with all internet users, the site's users are disproportionately Caucasian, and they tend to be moderately educated, childless women earning over $30,000 who browse from home. Craigslist.org has a bounce rate of about 14% (i.e., 14% of visits consist of only one page view), and the time spent in a typical visit to it is approximately fourteen minutes, with 20 seconds spent on each page view. 5 P a g e
The last time that we did this seminar Craigslist.org had close to 49 million/month unique visitors and autotrader.com had close to 11 million/month. How is CL related to Social media? Upstream and downstream shows where people go and come from on the web. Pretty much it records where you came from and where you are going. You can see that, besides the search engines which is very normal for any website, a lot of traffic comes and goes to Facebook, ebay, and Amazon. Pricing in CL. (Also refer to previous pricing strategies that we have seen in the seminar) Psychological pricing. Ok, I know that looks like a big fancy phrase and we're just trying to sell cars, but in all likelihood it's a strategy you've been using for quite some time. 6 P a g e
Psychological Pricing is what marketing experts call it when you price a vehicle with the intention of inducing a positive psychological effect on a consumer. For instance, pricing a vehicle at $9,995 instead of $10,000. The idea is that when the average consumer will look at the price of the car and think $9,000 when in actuality the car is nearly $10,000. This strategy goes back over a hundred years and has been a very effective strategy for traditional advertising. Unfortunately, today's market is anything but traditional. Think about it for a minute, the way we sell cars has changed drastically in the past decade. Yet most dealers still use this "tried and true" pricing strategy. What you don't realize is that this is potentially costing your vehicles valuable search results on sites like Craigslist, Backpage, AutoB.com & Autotrader. It's also preventing your vehicles from getting the individual vehicle description page views it deserves. The biggest problem today, with psychological pricing is that you're just moving the car from 1 pool of shoppers to the next. For example, say you have a vehicle priced at $10,495 and you take it down to $9,995 to help get it off your lot. All you've done is move it from the couple hundred people who were looking for cars in the $10,000 - $12,000 thousand dollar range to the couple hundred people looking for a car in the $8,000 - $10,000 range. Wait, look right there at the previous sentence, there's a strange common denominator. $10,000. So, what if we price that vehicle at $10,000. Woah, now we've just doubled our pool of potential consumers and all we did was RAISE the price by 5 dollars. Let's face facts, most people search on Craigslist by price and have a specific range in mind when they start, but by pricing your vehicle at $10,000, $15,000 or whatever the case may be you have the potential to double or more the activity on your vehicle. I like to call this Zero-Point Pricing. You just round up or down to the nearest price band. The most common pricing bands are $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 and so on in $5,000 increments. Now wait, I'm not saying you should take your $8,200 car and jack the price up to $10,000 or lower it all the way down to $5,000 to try and move it. However, if it's due for a price change, lowering it to $8,000 could increase the activity on your vehicle exponentially. The bottom line is this strategy will get more people looking at your cars and, more importantly, more people buying your cars. Dynamic marketing. CL has the traffic, so why doesn t work for some dealers and not for others? The differences between dealers are: Inventory type. Location. Pricing. Add message. 7 P a g e
We have seen many dealers that have treated CL just like other websites. They used CL and in some cases when they didn t get calls within 2 weeks of starting they cancelled. CL is a dynamic market, meaning that you can play with those 4 variables that we mentioned before. Use them to your advantage before calling it quits. Inventory type plays a role if you are highly specialized: You mainly carry 2009 Cadillac and the market is just not buying them right now. However CL allows you to target different areas other than your ZIP or even your state. As an example Larson MB in fife owns a 2006 SLR McLaren at almost $500K new now selling for $369K. There are two great choices to sell that vehicle: ebay and Craigslist. For $100 a month or less you can have that car present in every major market: LA, Huston, NY, Miami, etc where it will have much better chances to sell. You can see the car here: http://www.autobase.com/cgi/info.exe?bc=2491442/mercedes-benzof-tacoma/mercedes-benz-2006-slr Location also plays a role depending on the market conditions. Use the areas to move the inventory as different groups may be buying more than others at certain times. We already had several options along the seminar on how to use different pricing strategies with CL. The add message also plays a role in the number of leads but also in the type of leads that you get. The most important thing to remember is that: If you don t get calls or leads, don t quit. CL has the traffic and you have the inventory. You can work a way to connect those. Volume of postings needed. CL requires a certain volume of postings in order to achieve enough visibility to stay above the clout. In this market we recommend to post your entire inventory every day and to delete your ads past 48 hours. This will allow you to always be on top of the searches throughout the day. We have seen some dealers hiring several companies to post on CL for them at the same time and even some Internet gurus recommending that. This is what we found: When we posted the same inventory twice from 2 different teams (like 2 different companies would do) the team that post last got the most calls. That showed that when customers see the same car several times in a search results it didn t increase the number of calls. Furthermore we saw that having 2 teams posting on top of each other (that s how we started to call that technique) actually turned into more cases of people in CL flagging that dealership for spamming the system and also in more ads being ghosted. 8 P a g e
CL requires a little bit of analysis when it comes to how much to spend. Some dealers wanted to spend too much and some are spending too little. It is not about how much it cost it can be whatever you want but that is the wrong approach. CL needs to be what it needs to be depending in your aggressiveness, will to set up multiple identities, reach of market, and inventory size. Ad customization. The message in the ad will determine not only the type of lead that you will get but also how many you will get. We use the banners as advertisement for customers to click and send them to the dealer s website. While that affects the calls we will record, any customer that we send to your website is a much better prospect than those that keep shopping in CL. Craig s List funnels from the bases; it brings people to the dealerships that are all stages of the funnel. 9 P a g e
For more information on Craig s List strategies contact: Geoff Wilkins Director of National Sales Ph: 425-379-0483 Ext 112 Cell: 206-992-8866 Fax : 425-357-0796 geoff@pgiauto.com 10 P a g e