3 very different conversations in a week

I bumped into an ex-colleague last week, an extremely talented and experienced GM who fedback that in his time working for his new employer (12 months) he had not heard from or seen anyone from the marketing department. The GM runs a substantial size franchise dealership. He went on to say that he had seen articles and posts on LinkedIn on how customer service initiatives are at the heart of everything they did - however he never had any overview and felt there was a disconnect between the marketing department and the dealerships.

In the same week I caught up with a good friend that is running the marketing department of a dealer group. We spoke about the quality of leads driven by different traffic sources, with my opening question being – “what are you seeing out there, and what are you hearing through the calls generated?” I was somewhat disturbed when she responded: “we don’t listen to calls, that is done through our training department”.

WOW, although it’s encouraging that the training department are listening and identifying opportunities to improve, I was shocked that as a marketing department this was not being actioned - as marketeers we should know the following:

1. Quantifying the quality of leads being generated
2. Understanding the questions that consumers are asking 
3. The all-important one – how the leads are being handled in the dealership/Business Development Centre

What was even more concerning was the marketing cost centre are being charged for the telephony; why would you not listen to the calls?

Remember: offline operational excellence is the real measure of marketing excellence.

And finally, this week I had the pleasure of working with a forward thinking dealer group that had installed Infinity Call Solutions. The software allowed us to:

1. Understand the quality of the leads generated from third parties 
2. Easily identify the hot leads, where calls and emails had been generated from the website’s VDP through the implementation of Dynamic Number Inclusion
3. Review the consumer’s “path to lead”, providing a granular consumer journey from the initial keyword input by the consumer

Understanding these elements allows us to assist in improving website conversion, and devise an engagement strategy that will drive the dealer’s Search Engine Marketing including a tactical retargeting strategy. Once this is written, the first steps will be to present the strategy to the dealers (the operators), winning their hearts and minds, as it is the operators that will define the success of the marketing strategy.

If you want any help with your marketing strategy or to discuss the marcomms software solution available, feel free to contact us anytime. 

Ian Godbold

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