In the late 1990s, an idea sprung from an independent dealership on a dirt lot in Vermont and a team of five individuals.

The brainchild of founder Mark Bonfigli and his team, Dealer.com began as a car dealership website builder.

But Dealer.com is not the same as it was 20 years ago and neither, for that matter, is the overall auto industry, which has seen particularly rapid growth and diversification within the digital landscape since then.

“The whole space is rapidly evolving … it’s strong but it’s definitely shifting,” Dealer.com general manager Mike Rother told a gathering of reporters last month.

“This industry is changing and shifting as we speak” and the rate of change is only getting faster, Rother said.

While at Dealer.com, websites are still at the heart of the business — Dealer.com builds more than 60 percent of U.S. franchised dealers’ sites, according to the company — it has evolved into an enterprise that, from a product perspective, also includes digital advertising, digital retail and managed services (SEO, content, creative, etc.) at its core.

Dealer.com has become the auto industry’s largest digital marketing company, says Rother.  

Its home in Burlington, Vt., is also where parent company Cox Automotive has its largest group of employees outside of Atlanta.

There is a staff of 1,145 employees at the Burlington, headquarters, 912 of which are Dealer.com-specific and 233 of which work with other Cox Automotive brands.

Of the 1,402 total Dealer.com employees, 490 people work outside of Burlington, including hubs in Dallas and Kansas City that Cox Automotive is developing.

Amid this growth, though, the roots are still strong in Burlington, as was evident when the company brought together a handful of reporters there last month to speak with executives at Dealer.com and tour its facilities, with Dealer.com celebrating 20 years in business this year.

‘Vehicle deals page’

Speaking of beginnings, the website building segment itself, where Dealer.com got its start, has changed.

For instance, here’s an acronym that has been around, essentially, as long as Dealer.com: VDP, which most know stands for “vehicle details page.”

Not at Dealer.com, though. Not anymore.

“The acronym of VDP sticks. But fundamentally, we’re changing the term, we’re changing the perspective, we’re changing the philosophy around it,” Rother said.

“There’s no longer a vehicle details page. “It cannot be a vehicle details page,” he said. “It must be a vehicle deals page.”

Dealerships today need to think of those terms, Rother said. Websites are not the Sears catalogue, he said. They’re now meant to be a resource for building a deal.

“What you put on that (page), and how you engage them and what kind of experience you offer is absolutely the most relevant that thing you could do to sell a car today,” Rother said.

No longer a ‘funnel’

Another area of change impacting how Dealer.com and the industry at large operates is the shift away from what’s traditionally thought of as a “sales funnel.”

“That’s not at all how people actually shop for anything in their real lives,” said Andy MacLeay, the director of digital marketing at Dealer.com. “It’s much more of a mobius than it is anything else.”

There are different touchpoints that consumers go through at different stages, so the challenge for car dealers is “delivering content that matters to them, influences a decision that they’re looking for, and doing it at a cost they can afford,” MacLeay said.

And a big part of that is personalization — a big theme throughout the Dealer.com visit and, in general, how consumers now interact with Internet. It’s about tailoring information to get rid of “clutter.”

“And that’s the same thing for advertising, too. You get rewarded from Google, you get rewarded from Microsoft and Facebook if you’re presenting clients or customers — or really the person viewing that ad — with content that’s relative to what they’re looking for,” MacLeay said.

‘Alignment and integration’

But the messaging in marketing must be consistent.

Say there’s a car shopper on a newspaper’s website and he or she sees marketing messaging from a dealership, perhaps a retargeting ad, and clicks through to the dealership website.

“You want to make sure that that consumer feels like they’re in the right place,” says Erica Danford, the vice president of managed services at Dealer.com. “And that isn’t just about a consistent offer.

“It has to do with the way that the imagery is portrayed, it has to do with typography, it has to do with color palette — all of those things need to be working together and be consistent to have the consumer feel like they’re actually in the right spot.”

While such digital marketing know-how and mastering the moving parts is useful, dealers might not always have the time or resources to implement it.

Such strategy includes everything from designing and copywriting creative to SEO and social media marketing.

That’s a mountainous to-do list that may be “unrealistic” for a single employee at a dealership to head up, and sometimes to cumbersome to manage multiple vendors, should the dealership go outside its own walls.

That’s where Danford and her team, which was formed four-and-a-half years ago, come into play.

“We certainly aren’t the first ones to take this approach, but we look at things in an integrated way,” she said. “So basically, what we do to solve this problem for them is we have a team of people that works with the dealership and discusses what their strategy is.”

And a big part of that is bringing strategy recommendations to the dealerships.

But to go back to Danford’s initial point, a major point of emphasis Dealer.com makes with dealers in digital marketing is consistency.

“The philosophy really is, we don’t care where the touchpoint is from the shopper’s perspective, we need to make sure there is alignment and integration,” she said.