If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

The basic Law of Reciprocity states: To give and take mutually.

I have thought about this a lot over the last few months. We use this concept very effectively in conversion optimization by giving white papers, special offers etc. on landing pages.

The idea is if the person gives something, you then give something of value in exchange. But think about it… you asked for the value FIRST. The visitor had to give you their name in order to get your value.

Isn’t that backward? Shouldn’t you give the value first then ask for the mutual value back?

Amazingly enough, this backward give and take works well; but recent events have made me start to wonder HOW WELL?

Earlier this year we launched ShowroomMagnet, our incentive based behavioral targeting engine for websites. We knew it would work well for conversion because these kind of popovers have always had a positive impact on conversion.  In addition, we’re making and offer and a single clear call to action (something too many websites lack).Not to mention we tested it, as we do EVERYTHING.

BUT there was a surprising side effect.  A few of our dealers started using this in a way we didn’t expect.

It started with Andy Wright at Lehigh Valley Honda, who by far was selling more cars from the program than most of the dealers.  I asked Andy, “What are you doing?” and the answer was so simple it was a little bit scary.

As customers came to the showroom with their gift card validation in hand (or smart phone as the case may be) Lehigh Valley Honda sales people would take them right to the desk and validate their gift card INSTANTLY. They would put it right on the customer’s  smart phone before they even took a test drive!

LeHigh “kept the promise” the website made. And they made it instant – as soon as the customer walked in the door.

There was no hook. There was no caveat.  They had promised a gift for visiting, the customer visited…so the dealership handed over the gift card. 

Here is the surprising part…

I thought when we started this we would see closing rates in the 30% to 40% range and that would be great!

Lehigh Valley Honda’s closing rate…. 68% over the last six months!

Bottom Line – WHEN YOU MAKE A PROMISE… KEEP IT! You’ll be amazed at the number of customers that will reciprocate… it goes back to The Law of Reciprocity.

Too often in our business we think we have to trick people… hook them into doing what we want them to do when really all they want us to do is keep the promise that we made.

Simple right?

So simple it’s a little bit scary!

Tim James and I are doing a case study on this at Digital Dealer 13 in Las Vegas on Thursday October 25th in the Antigua Room hope to see many of you there 

A great video from Robert Cialdini on the Law of Reciprocity

ZMOT its everywhere seems like these days. With Google as the general session at Digital Dealer this year I thought I would talk about how we see the execution of ZMOT for dealers. Below are the slides from my presentation. I think these numbers will add up to a pattern if you look at the slides closely.

• There is not ONE ZMOT in Automotive there are TWO
• People spend as much time consuming online media as they do off
• Targeting is getting better & faster online, you can now target display like you target adwords
• Offline marketing is just pushing consumers online so you have to be in both and understand where you are pushing them
• It doesn’t matter how good you are at adwords or display, if your ad sucks you won’t get the click no matter how relevant you think your message is to the keyword
• It doesn’t matter how good you are with your adwords or display and even your ad if your landing doesn’t match what you promised you won’t get the conversion
• Remarketing is valuable if you use it right, if you just send the consumer back to the same page they didn’t like before it’s NOT
• IT TAKES A COORDINATED STRATEGY ONLINE AND OFF TO WIN, NOT JUST AN INTEGRATED OR BUNDLED ONE

At the end of the day, I still see a lot of “Marketing Partners” who have a product, widget or new shiny object to sell not a coordinated service offering to help the dealer sell & service more cars.

Last Digital Dealer we explored the data behind SEO & PPC and where your efforts get the most bang for the buck.

At Digital Dealer 12 in Orlado April 3-5 will will explore the data behind ZMOT and how to execute it in your store to increase lead volume and most importantly Show Rate in the dealerhips.

Click Here to attend my Digital Dealer 12 Session “Marketing By The Numbers” Executing ZMOT in your dealeship

Here are the slides from DD11 SEO VS PPC “The Epic Battle”

But you couldn’t be more wrong about microsites!

I have had a few dealers reach out to me lately on Microsites being a bad idea and even one of the largest industry providers asking me if dealers using them will be “Black Listed” by Google…REALLY?! 

In this video Matt Cutts from Google explains his OPINION on microsites and calls out a post by Vanessa Fox “Microsites A Bad Idea Most of the Time”.

This is a great quick read on where Landing Pages are being used outside the auto industry and where you should be looking at using them with in our industry. OnlineDrive clients are averaging over 200 landing pages per store and so far experienceing a300% increase in conversion rates as a result of talking to customers not at them.

The explosion of digital advertising means an explosion of campaign-specific, dedicated landing pages too. If you stop to think about all the places you need landing pages, it quickly adds up (head spinning yet?).

ion’s top-converting LiveBall customers average over 750+ active landing experiences at any one time. Where are they using landing pages?

• Paid search campaigns. I alreaady hear you saying “duh”. For some marketers, a landing page per ad group is sufficient. For others, a landing page per ad is more appropriate. No matter the size of your PPC campaign, it’s likely you need at least 50 landing pages, if not 500, or more.
• QR codes. When mobile users scan a QR code a mobile-optimized, relevant landing experience is an absolute must.
• Email marketing. Whether for third-party emails, or emails to your own house list, it makes sense to have people who click on your emails land on specific pages to drive them deeper into your funnel.
• Mobile ads. Mobile users want (expect) mobile landing pages. Actually, if you have substantial mobile traffic, you may even want to consider mobile-optimized pages for any mobile traffic (not just mobile-specific campaigns).

Read More…

"OnlineDrive has helped us double our conversion rate on Paid Search and we have been able to effectively increase our spend and target better than ever before"

Kevin Frye

ECommerce Director

Wyler Automotive Group
  
  
 
 
 

Great post on Hubspot  by Brian Whatley on Marketing Automation. I love infographics because  they are so cool, but sometimes its hard to take away good info from them. Here are my take aways from this great infographic.

1. Marketing Automation is movin away from push & interpution to inbound & permission what that means to you is that the ways we traditionally think about marketing have chage from targeting people to targeting intent an being there when customers go to find things.
2. Marketing Automation the way we currently define it (automated emails and targeted push marekting) is being filtered out more and more by our customers. If you arent adding value (your just pushing and offer) then you are being screened out more and more.
3. To get back in the game you will need to provide TARGETED CONTENT not targeted offers you will need to make it easy to get the why and the how to do business with your dealership.
4. Humans are still human and a relationship will still be needed to sell them anything but the way you communicate with those humans is changeing and redefining  what that relationship is…for  the better.

Marketing Automation is the use of technology and software to help move prospects and leads through your sales funnel. As part of a whole inbound marketing philosophy, you can use marketing automation to help take the leads you’re generating from blogging, social media, and other sources, and make them more sales-ready. While marketing automation doesn’t help you generate newleads and can be challenging to use effectively, it’s important to be knowledgeable about it and understand when marketing automation can or can’t help your business grow.

Read more: 

We’re all aware of how important click-through rates are in determining your Quality Score but Google’s recent update now places greater emphasis on the importance of landing pages.

Alongside the undoubted effect such pages can have on improving conversion rate we’ve compiled Top Ten Tips for anyone looking to either build or choose the best possible landing pages for their campaigns.

1. Provide the best experience

We like to use the phrase, “think humans and the robots will follow”. This means providing the best possible experience for your users in terms of site navigation and usage etc.

Speed is becoming a growing factor not only in the Google algorithm (see this post from Matt Cutts last year) but tests by Google and by Amazon indicate users are increasingly using speed as a determining factor in where to purchase.

You can see how fast your site loads on Google’s Developers site. 

2. Would you buy from you?

Get someone impartial to take a look at your site, what does it communicate in the first three to five seconds? Does it give a feeling of trust? Is your brand immediately obvious? What about purpose?

Without these things being clear you’ll struggle to achieve the conversion rates you want.

Read More

These are some really good ones so we thought they would be great to share.

There is a lot of misdirection of auto dealers on what microsites and landing pages do. Even more on the number your dealership should have and what content should they have.

WHAT MICROISTES AND LANDING PAGES DON’T DO!

Microsites and landing pages DO NOT spread your dealership a wide net helping you pick up traffic. This is a common misconception put forth by some web marketers in automotive that really don’t know what to do with a microsite. The web is far too big and search engines are far too smart now for you to trick them with volume.

What Microsites and Landing Pages do…do

They focus the visitor on a targeted message allowing the visitor to choose their own easy path to information and ultimately conversion.

We believe a dealership should have 50 plus microsites per franchise in some cases here is a list of what we believe they should be:

• Store Branded Microsite
• OEM Branded Microsite
• Traditional Marketing Microsites
• TV offer sites
• Radio offer sites
• Email marketing sites
• Direct mail marketing sites
• A microsite for each model you sell
• A microsite for the following used car types:
• SUV
• Compact
• Full Size Truck
• Small Truck
• Convertible
• Sedan
• Van
• Mini Van
• Vehicles under 10K
• Vehicles 11K to 15k
• Vehicles 16K to 20K
• Great Vehicles for first time drivers
• Car Buying Microsite
• Financial Needs Microsites
• Special Finance Microsite
• First Time Buyer Microsite
• Leasing Microsite
• Service Maintenance Microsites
• Express Oil Change
• Tire Microsite
• Battery Microsite
• Customer Pay Microsite

The real tricky part is that you may have as many as 3 versions or more of each site based on geo location and or channel driving traffic to that site. This is easiest managed from a single login landing page management platform where you can clone and tweak sites and pages without code keeping IT out of the marketing effort, that usually where the bottleneck is.

The whole point of having microsites and landing pages in the first place is to tightly monitor your analytics see what is working and what is not in a short time make changes and split test them. Having an integrated enterprise analytics system is key to making any microsite strategy work.  

The bottom-line microsites are the conversion work horses of your complete marketing strategy they purpose is always to convey the message or offer in concise easy way and give the visitor the quick information they need to convert to a lead.

Hope this helps,

Larry Bruce @pcmguy

Some people have heard me say this in the past
“It’s not your website provider’s job to give you a working website. It’s their job to give you a functional one; it’s your job to make it work”

What does that mean…REALLY?
       • It’s Your Job – to know what keywords to rank for
       • It’s Your Job – to create good content to make that site rank
       • It’s Your Job – to work to get the backlinks to your site

At the end of the day that is exactly what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is Keywords, Good Content & Backlinks it is really that simple and also that hard…Why?

Because we have been conditioned to think our website provider is going to do it for us. I can’t tell you how many times I hear website providers tell dealers “Our sites rank better and have better SEO than what you have now” and how many times dealer change website providers because they think the new website will be the magic bullet to get them ranked better, more traffic and more leads…WRONG!

In fact the website is pretty much worthless without the right online marketing strategy.

“Reality… the website should be FREE”

It is the tool of the online marketer not the online marketing strategy and that’s why I say…

“You don’t need a website provider you need a web marketing company that provides websites”

Without the marketing the website has NO VALUE.

What does a good online marketing strategy look like? Like this:

Now here comes the sad part ¾ of this you can’t even do because you lease you website presence from your provider you don’t own the property, and even if you did manage to find a good way to optimize your site it would only be a matter of hours before the other guy down the road on the same website platform had it too.

“The Law of equal incompetence” You can be no better than the network you’re on.

“AS LONG AS YOU LEASE THE PROPERTY YOU CAN GET NO COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE”

So what’s a web marketer to do? Optimally:

1. Get your own website 
2. Start an aggressive PPC & landing page campaign find the keywords that convert and start your online marketing efforts with them
3. Create a lot of good relevant content in your website 400 pages plus around those keywords
4. Get a wordpress.org blog make sure you set it up as a subdomain of your website
5. Create 30 plus relevant SEO optimized blog posts per month around your target keywords 
6. Profile your customers & Facebook friends for interests 
7. Share through social 20 pieces of content per day relevant to your audience 
8. Integrate your social campaigns to your web presence to get the maximum traffic, SEO & conversion value 
9. Create at lease 50 Microsites, Landing Pages and / or Conversion Paths to focus traffic on a specific offer and provide easy conversion
10. Use behavior targeting to drive organic traffic to high converting landing pages 
11. ABT (ALWAYS BE TESTING) Split test everything often

I hope this post gets you thinking about your website and web marketing in a very different way, that was my goal.

If you want to know more or have questions we do a webinar on these very topics every Tuesday 1pm Central Standard Time , Click Here – Own Your Web Presence

Hope this helps

Larry Bruce – @pcmguy