by Megan Duncan, Digital Solutions Consultant

Thinking differently can cause some anxiety. Just ask Katie Couric & Bryant Gumbel circa 1994. Remember the Super Bowl commercial about the advent of the Internet?

But there's no escaping the fact that the landscape of digital marketing is evolving due to the increased connectivity of content hungry consumers devouring information from around the web. Today’s…

Swapalease.com, the nation's largest online lease marketplace, compared truck inventory and consideration data from 2014 against 2012 and found that there has been a significant increase in the number of shoppers driving truck leases, and those looking for truck leases.

Topping the list is the Chevy Silverado, which has seen a 286.4% jump in Swapalease.com inventory, and an 89.6% increase in shopping consideration over the last two years.



Here are numbers on four of today's popular trucks showing an increase in lease activity on the Swapalease.com marketplace:



                                      Percent Change From 2012 to…

Tools to Increase Your Business Aren’t Worth Much Without Follow-up and Training

The recent NADA Convention is over. As always, there was plenty of information to gain and a lot of shiny objects being displayed. Dealers and major executives were out with their checkbooks looking for ways to increase their business in 2015. There were countless vendors that offered websites, digital marketing (reputation management, SEO/SEM, social media, etc.), CRM, equity mining, mobile, training, consulting, and much more.

What shiny objects did your dealership sign up for? How will your staff use these shiny objects?…

The phrases "big data" and "business intelligence" have seen their share of overuse in the digital age. The car business is the exception in many ways because nearly everyone south of the OEM level has not fallen…

For over a decade, Craigslist has been one of America's favorite ways to shop for cars. It has the raw subtlety of old newspaper classified ads while maintaining the digital benefits such as keyword searches and dense amounts of information on the vehicle, particularly through images.

Now, the platform is gaining even more users thanks to "Gallery View" on vehicle listings pages. This gives a dealership the ability to truly highlight their vehicles utilizing photos. These photos have always been an important part of the individual listings themselves, but now dealers can draw more attention to their cars while people are still search through listings. Gallery View makes the use of proper images more important than ever before.

It's not just a matter of taking the right…

Automotive News recently carried a story about a lawsuit filed by Subaru of America against one of their franchisees. The lawsuit accuses a Southern California dealership of falsifying 224 CSI surveys in an effort to increase their CSI scores. This was after being issued a warning by the OEM in 2012 for past poor CSI performance. According to the article, when surveys arrived via email from the manufacturer, the dealership would then allegedly have employees fill them out at a neighboring dealership (that was also part of the same group). Apparently, as many as 12 employees were tasked with completing and submitting these surveys, which to me illustrates a massive failure in leadership – should it…

Do you ever have those days where you have a million-and-one things to do, and haven’t the slightest idea how to get it all done other than to do multiple things at once? 

If you answered yes, you might not be surprised to learn that your online shoppers have this problem too. Time is of the essence, and we’re all busy, busy, busy.

But in order to gain more business from the busy crowd, your dealership needs to find ways to grab their attention and make their time worthwhile.

So how do you accomplish this?

It’s simple. You offer your shoppers ways to get their other tasks done while they are trying to buy a car or service, and as a result - you win their business!

Let’s take a look at a few ways for how your dealership might effectively execute an automotive…

We’re only two months into the year, and already the marketing world is abuzz with new terms that have been slowly sneaking their way into daily articles and brainstorming meetings.

I was actually reading a Contently article called “10 Content Marketing Buzzwords You’re Going to Hear Way Too Much This Year” when I first saw the term “conversation marketing” -- and after some research, I think it might be the buzzword of 2015.

What is Conversation Marketing?

Conversation marketing is when you observe your audience’s interactions on your website, and “respond” to those actions by making changes to your website to drive more…

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

ALBANY, N.Y. – February 16th, 2015 – Auto/Mate Dealership Systems (http://www.automate.com) today announced its President and CEO Mike Esposito will speak at the INSIGHT15 Customer Loyalty and Retention Conference, March 24th through March 26th at the Rosen Shingle Creek in Orlando, FL. Esposito will present "A Better Way to Customer Loyalty: Focus on Employees First, Customers Second" to auto dealers attending the conference.

"Auto/Mate has no customer loyalty products or programs to promote, so what dealers will learn are pure management and leadership principles that will transform an organization," said Esposito, "True customer loyalty begins with the relationships that your employees have with your…

The question most pondered by businesses when advertising is perhaps the most important:

“What is my ROI?”

It doesn’t matter whether we’re discussing television ads, radio, 3^rd party leads,

that gorilla on top of your building, or the contest you’re running on social media; all roads lead back to the ability to answer that one simple question. Dealers and their vendors use call tracking numbers, unique landing pages, and a plethora of reports to justify the monthly expense of any given marketing campaign. Some dealers swear that a product or service works, while others might complain that it does not.

In the case of video marketing, if you don’t believe or are unsure about its effectiveness, there’s one simple metric that you should take a look…