“Branding” is a term heard all over the advertising industry, but what does it mean? Simply put, it’s the way you want others to view your dealership. It’s providing potential customers with the understanding of what you represent. Branding is important because it’s an opportunity to provide an image of your dealership; it’s what can help make you recognizable.
This sounds simple enough right? Not exactly. It’s not just enough to come up with an idea of what your brand means, it’s developing a complete campaign that resonates this brand image to viewers throughout everything you do. You must ensure that the image you provide remains a constant through all forms of media – traditional, digital, social, and so on.
Websites, especially social media sites, provide a great opportunity to tell your customers who you are. Provide these details in web panels, status updates, tweets, blogs, etc, keeping in mind that each of these elements should reflect your dealership’s “personality”. You might think that this is distracting from your efforts to sell cars, but in fact this a tried and true way to increase sales. It’s important to showcase more than just current vehicle specials. Show visitors how you helped the local school raise money in a food drive, or how you volunteered at the local humane society. This helps make you more than just another dealership to potential customers, and therefore makes you have a deeming quality that makes you more memorable. Why would you want to be memorable? I think the answer is obvious, don’t you? If you’re memorable, when someone thinks ‘I need to buy a new car’, they’ll think of your dealership, and possibly buy their next vehicle from you. If you don’t stand out, they might not remember you and might not go to your dealership for their next car.
Are you ready to stand out in your local community as more than just a dealership? Contact us now, to get the ball rolling on branding your dealership!
The CPO Forum announced that, Paul Potratz, founder and COO of Potratz, headquartered in Schenectady, NY, will be speaking as part of the 2013 Used Car Week Conference when it meets November 11-12 in San Diego, California.
Paul’s topic, “13 Creative Ways To Increase CPO Sales, That No One Told You About…Till Now!” is slated for November 11, 2013, at 2:00 PM. It will teach attendees the best selling message to generate leads and sales, where to spend ad dollars and how to measure the results and reallocate efforts to increase the sales.
Paul is very excited to be a part of the CPO Forum’s 2013 Used Car Week Conference and looks forward to helping dealers learn how to sell more cars. If you have ever thought, “What else could I do to sell just 8 more vehicles that would not cost a lot of money?” then this is the workshop is for you!
For more information on the CPO Forum 2013 Used Car Week Conference, click here. For additional information on Potratz or to receive announcements of future speaking engagements, click here.
Are you the type of person who plans every aspect of your life, months or even years in advance? Or are you the type of person that does everything on a whim? I’ve always considered myself the latter in my personal life because I like the thrill of spontaneous plans. However, I take a different approach when it comes to working in automotive advertising.
In automotive marketing, it is best to plan for the future months instead of working in the current month. There are plenty of reasons why this works best for the industry, but here are three that are key to remembering the importance of thinking ahead:
1. You can analyze your current marketing strategy and decide whether it is bringing you the results you desire or if you need to go back to the drawing board and adjust your approach.
2. It is more cost efficient when it comes to media buying. Many reps offer a discount for buying months in advance. Buying in advance also could open up more attractive placements considering how few spots have been reserved.
3. You will avoid making rash decisions that could end up costing you money. These are the end-of-the-month panic moments, the quick decision sales events that go awry, and the poorly crafted E-Blast that’s riddled with mistakes and missing information.
When it comes to dinner plans or mall purchases, a little spontaneity is harmless. When it comes to achieving business goals though, you must put a schedule into place that manages your planning. Each of these points above helps explain why circling dates on the calendar three months down the road can get you where you’d like to be, but recognize it could take awhile for the results to show. If you are starting from scratch, your marketing strategy can take some time to lift off the ground. In addition to a little forward-thinking, you need to build a presence on Google, find the right media for your market, build a presence on social media, set up marketing automation sequences, and optimize your website. All of these outlets coincide with each other create the perfect marketing blend. Thankfully, the automotive industry is predictable when it comes to incentives and sales events so we can take that into consideration when planning ahead.
In general, you will never regret taking the time to carefully plan. Mapping out the future will leave you time in the current month to analyze the results of the past and will relieve you of the stress that comes with scrambling for ideas. A little less stress and more carefully executed projects? These results may just be enough reason to change my whimsical ways.
Picture this: you’re in a situation where you don’t know what to do. Maybe you have an important decision to make or need to fix something. When you need an answer, how do you get it? In situations like these, I always turn to someone who has worked through the problem in the past. I trust their advice because they offer something that not many others are willing to provide: honesty and past experience. In the future, I’ll return to this person for the answers because they took the time to help me when they didn’t have to. This is the kind of relationship dealers should build with their customers, but how?
Virtually every dealer’s website contains a form for setting or requesting a service appointment as well as contact information and directions. The general idea is to get the customer to contact the store by phone, email, chat, or by physically visiting the store. However, hundreds of customers visit service sections of a dealer’s website without ever taking these actions. The website should do more than help loyal customers know where to call for service; it should help service shoppers find the information they need to know they found the right store for service.
At Potratz, we’ve developed a series of 16 Service FAQs to answer questions that site visitors seek. Going out of your way to provide this information to shoppers may seem counter intuitive. After all, why would a dealership want to help someone confidently change his or her battery when the store could turn a profit on that service? A dealer achieves Trusted Advisor status with shoppers by sharing information with them. The fact is many shoppers seeking do-it-yourself information do not end up doing it themselves. Having explored the alternative, they approach the store more confident in their decision to pay for professional service. They value the service and generally have a high trust level in the store providing candid information relative to service providers who are simply open for business. Offering help lets the customer know what kind of store you run and what kind of helpful attitude toward the customer they can expect. Saying you are friendly does not carry as much weight as demonstrating you are friendly.
It’s hard to establish the type of bond I explained above with someone you’ve never met before. That’s why it’s crucial to personalize your website and provide ways for customers to see your team as people; caring people who can offer the assistance they need. With these FAQ pages, a dealer can demonstrate their expertise and willingness to help at the exact moment a customer is searching for an answer via a search engine. The next time that customer has a car problem, who do you think they’ll turn to? My bet would be you.
By: Yasmine Syed
If you’re not yet familiar with the twitter hashtag #takemymoneyhbo, you ought to be. This hashtag has been utilized by a conglomerate of individuals who petitioned HBO to allow them to subscribe to HBO Go without having to subscribe to a cable TV provider. HBO Go is an app that allows you to stream the HBO programming of your choice to any digital device via the Internet or through a cell phone signal. The app is available for free to HBO subscribers. Adding HBO to your cable package usually costs $10-$15 a month. If HBO Go was available for this same monthly price, it would be a bargain compared to the roughly $100/month that most people pay for cable service.
This petition points to a possible transition of TV to an a la carte service rather than bundled together in expensive packages. After all, does anyone really watch all 300+ channels that come with premium cable packages? We may see a TV platform similar to iTunes in the future, where consumers can purchase individual songs rather than entire albums. It’s also likely that TV will follow in the footsteps of music providers like Pandora and Spotify, which will change how advertising will be disseminated. Audiences may be much more targeted and the potential for wasteful ad spending will be diminished. That being true, the explosion of digitally consumed media is making it possible for marketers to produce original programming and distribute it without the active support of a traditional media channels i.e. broadcast TV channels.
Branded content is gaining in popularity and consumers aren’t hostile to it, so long as it’s good. Brands like Nike, Virgin and American Express have all successfully built a following of their brand-led YouTube channels. One example of brand-created content was Pepsi’s live-streamed concert starring Nicki Minaj, which was available for viewing via twitter.com/pepsi and pepsi.com. Had Pepsi gone the traditional sponsorship route, it would have cost them several millions in ad spending. By producing, creating and digitally disseminating the content, they undoubtedly saved in overhead costs and penetrated their target market more effectively. This is all good news for advertisers.
Over the course of the next five years, the cost of advertising will be reduced as more specific modes for targeting emerge. The challenge is staying ahead of the digital wave, which is something we do best at Potratz.
On January 22 at 3:00PM, Potratz – a full service automotive marketing agency– is set to launch its latest web series, Digital Marketing Dialogue. The series will feature live discussions on best practices associated with all aspects of digital marketing. Sarah Adamo and Renee Benedetti, Search Engine Marketing Managers for Potratz, will host the new bi-weekly series. The company has also launched both a Facebook and LinkedIn group for discussing latest episodes as well as current trends in digital marketing.
The live event will encompass all of the major digital avenues that Potratz currently offers for clients. These include search engine marketing, social media marketing, marketing automation, web and graphic design as well as content marketing strategies. The hosts will take on-air questions from a live online audience looking to gain insights into the latest trends in the digital marketing world.
Digital Marketing Dialogue will follow in the footsteps of Chief Operating Officer Paul Potratz’s web series, Think Tank Tuesday in delivering quality marketing tips and best practices for professionals seeking advice to improve their business and sales. “Think Tank Tuesday has become a staple in the field of automotive marketing; we hope to continue delivering quality information through our series,” said Benedetti.
Adamo and Benedetti have led trainings for Potratz’s current digital marketing apprenticeship program, a paid training that assists young professionals looking to obtain Google Adwords Certification. “We have an opportunity to improve the amount of qualified individuals in the area and to position our company as a resource for young professionals looking to gain experience,” said Adamo. The last group of apprentices all obtained certification and some were offered full-time positions as members of the Potratz team.
To keep up-to-date with latest episodes for the series, sign up for email updates at digitalmarketingdialogue.com. The team is also set to appear at National Automobile Dealers Association convention January 25-27 in New Orleans, and will be offering live demos and workshops on current products and services.
If you would like to make an appointment to speak with Paul or the team, please call 518-631-5505 or visit ppadv.com.
SCHENECTADY, NY- This month, DealersEdge featured a webinar on the “Tricks of the Trade” for search engine marketing. Nan Mossey, Director of Digital Marketing at Potratz, led the event which featured advanced insights on implementing and optimizing paid search campaigns. Many were in attendance as she covered detailed strategies on effectively using Google Adwords, Bing/Yahoo! and other search engine marketing services.
Mossey has over 20 years of experience in automotive marketing and is fully certified in all aspects of SEM including Google AdWords Certifications for Search, Display, and Analytics. She has administered several apprenticeship programs as head of Potratz’s digital marketing and has thus attributed to the certification of over 18 individual members of the Potratz team.
During the webinar, participants were supplied with proven tactics for improving campaigns and statistical data referencing industry trends in the world of digital advertising. Mossey presented attendees with the tools necessary for establishing campaigns and best practices for optimizing performance. Attendees gained exclusive insights on the ins-and-outs of display advertising and retargeting, keyword optimization, and bidding strategies along with many other vital areas in campaign implementation and management.
“I really enjoyed getting a little bit more in-depth about aspects of search engine marketing that people had heard about, but had little exposure to,” said Mossey regarding the webinar.
The live webinar was one of several held by DealersEdge that featured the Schenectady advertising agency, which specializes in everything from digital and traditional advertising to website platforms.
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Google Offer Extensions is similar to Facebook Offers and is a must for any business owner and marketer. Be sure to sign up for Fact Finder Friday Google Hangout and Think Tank Tuesday. Follow us on Twitter @potratz
By: Kimberly Roselle
I don’t usually think of myself as a trendsetter, but a recent survey has convinced me otherwise. Recent numbers show that I am part of a growing number of people that no longer subscribe to traditional cable or satellite television. Almost two years ago, I cancelled my cable package and bought a digital TV antenna. Now, instead of having hundreds of stations to choose from, I have the four major networks, PBS, and a few local station. I have never seen Mad Man. Now, according to this survey, I am known as a cord-cutter.
According to an April 2012 report by The Convergence Consulting Group, 2.65 million people left behind their cable subscriptions in favor of alternative methods between the years of 2008 and 2011. This number continues to steadily grow. A Nielsen report shows that 4.5 percent of television-owning homes choose to stream entertainment via Netflix, Hulu, or some other internet service rather than through cable. This is in addition to people who view television entirely through the Internet and don’t own televisions. That same report noted a 22.8 percent increase in cord-cutters over the past year.
As the number of cord-cutters rise and alternative means of television viewing become more popular, the question arises – is your business reaching this growing number of consumers? Digital advertising is more than just Google AdWords. As an advertiser, it is important to know and understand where your audience is interacting with your message. Then, you must make sure you deliver that message consistently and meaningfully to that audience.
Are your commercials on YouTube? Are your commercials being shown when people stream a TV show over a local network’s website? If all of this research seems overwhelming, look to your advertising agency to help guide you in the right direction as these trends change and grow.
From a young age, students are taught that attending college will increase their chances of following a path to professional success. They are repeatedly told that by obtaining a degree, they will be eligible to grab hold of an entry-level salary, post-graduation, up to 40 percent higher than what they would be offered with only a high school degree. Because of this, the common practice for high school graduates is to continue on to higher education.
However, the real question is: How much does higher education actually prepare an individual for the “real world?”
As a recent college graduate working as an apprentice in the Search Engine Marketing (SEM) department of Potratz, I can honestly say that college has not prepared me for the work that I encounter on a daily basis. While my degree in Marketing Communications has certainly helped me understand the marketing and advertising fields as a whole, SEM is such a new form of marketing that changes so rapidly. There is no way that a higher education school could build a course that is consistently teaching students up-to-date information.
It is because of this issue that I believe the SEM apprenticeship offered at Potratz is such a great opportunity. This six-week paid program goes in-depth to teach apprentices everything they will need to know about the SEM field. The daily teaching sessions mixed with nightly homework assignments ensure that apprentices are getting ample opportunity to learn all necessary information, preparing them for the Google AdWords Fundamentals and Search certification exams. In addition, apprentices are paired with Potratz SEM employees in order to get hands on experience working with Google AdWords and help them better understand how to work the program.
Along with preparing for the Google AdWords exams, apprentices are taught the inner workings at Potratz. They are given the chance to work with all departments within the company, teaching them how these departments work together to form the successful automotive advertising agency that Potratz is. At the end of the six weeks, if they choose, apprentices have the chance to apply for any open position within the company.
With the combination of certification classes and learning to work within the company, this apprenticeship is great not only for someone interested in becoming Google AdWords certified, but also for anyone looking for a full-time employment opportunity.
