Car Dealerships’ Newest Trick

Local Dealership Placing Customer Reviews Front & Center

BURLESON, TX: Local Lynn Smith Chevy has taken massive strides to link customers to customers, allowing for open reviews, and also publicly post all reviews by each sales person. Some may view this as a trick, but many view it as a favor.

“We realize that our industry is tainted with horrible, dishonest, and untrustworthy sales associates. Rather than tell you how great our team is, we decided to open our doors to public reviews and place those directly on our website.” Says Lynn Smith, owner of Lynn Smith Chevrolet.

Smith has also incentivize sales associates by placing those with the best reviews over a 90 day rolling average first on their site. “This means the people you see on the homepage are the ones that have the most reviews and activity”. Says Smith

Mike Fitzpatrick (CEO CarDealer Press) & Lynn Smith

Each sales person now has their own individual website hosted by Lynn Smith. Each site serves as a hub for users to read about their sales associate, reviews, recent photos, and even see their social media accounts to find out if they have friends in common. Their new myPages platform has taken the veil of ‘who is the person I am working with’ or ‘can I trust them’ and allows the consumer to conduct quick research not only about the dealership, but also the individual that is going to serve as an honest guide through their car buying experience.

But, to take it one step further, each review is geared toward the next consumer down the line. After each customer receives a photo of themselves in their brand new vehicle, they also receive the opportunity to share why they purchased that vehicle versus several others they were comparing it against.

“We realize that that customers do an extreme amount of research prior to walking through our door. We want to provide quality information, written by consumers, that will help aide others during their vehicle purchase.” Says Smith.

After just 6 weeks of launching their new myPages website, Lynn Smith has already noticed an 18% increase in online traffic that spans from consumers not only researching their vehicles, but also their sales person.

The post PRESS RELEASE appeared first on CarDealerPress.

Using WordPress in a niche like the automotive industry has some great advantages. This video is from my talk at WordCamp Reno Tahoe for myPages. Showing the process we went through to create websites for salespeople.

The post Reno WordCamp Talk – Car Dealers New Trick appeared first on CarDealerPress.

A concern regarding responsive website design came up when speaking to a dealer a few days ago. I have to admit when we shifted to all responsive it was also a concern for me. The issue was that responsive websites don’t have a “view full site” link.

Why do we click on the view full site link in the first place?

If we step back and ask ourselves this question, the answer is pretty clear. We revert to pinching and zooming the full/alternate site when we aren’t finding the content we are looking for. In most cases the content that we are looking for is something that we have seen on the full site before going to the mobile site. Of maybe an ad we encountered in another medium (tv, radio, newspaper) and aren’t seeing any trace of that on the mobile site.

That’s the strength of Responsive design

A responsive website Is the same content as the desktop site, just organized to be usable on a smaller device. It is of course important to keep the “sent” of the full site as well as make sure that you don’t remove access to any of the internal pages. Keep in mind that the “home” page of your site is really just an index so that visitors can get to the page/content that they want. So make sure that you maintain familiarity; buttons, colors, etc. Then make the navigation clean and to the point while staying congruent with the full site. If you have a big site with a lot of pages consider creating internal index type pages so that you don’t have a mobile menu that is unusable. On the full site you could have sub menu items and on mobile just the top level links. Once on the top level page the additional sub pages would be available to navigate to.

The true power of responsive

Ultimately a well designed responsive website has no need for a “view full site” button/link. This is especially true since the internal content pages should work great on any device if done correctly, and this is where the real “meat” of you website exists anyway. Now you are free to promote Facebook posts or do PPC to an internal page without worrying what device your users are coming from, and whether or not the content on your full site is the same as your mobile site etc., etc.

The post No “View full site” link appeared first on CarDealerPress.

The post Using your myPages website appeared first on CarDealerPress.

The philosophy behind myPages

At CarDealerPress (DealerTrend) we are always pursuing the best way to help dealers sell cars online. If you have been following us for any time at all you probably already know our philosophy on what perfection is when selling cars using technology. If not here it is in a nut shell:

Build relationships and trust just like you would offline and in person.

Really, there is no magic bullet that is going to sell more cars for you. Using Social Networks is one way to accomplish building trust, but as a person, not a brick and mortar dealership. People engage with people, not buildings.

This of course is why we chose to use WordPress in the first place. You can configure your sites to be uniquely you. Then freely create content to express what makes you different than the guy across the street. With a WordPress website that you own* there are NO restrictions on what you can to with it*. Okay so I’ll stop the rant there and answer the next question;

How can a dealership build relationships online?

The answer is the same way that you do offline, you take care of your customers one at a time with great salespeople. In any great organization it is the people that make the difference. In most cases good people can even overcome a bad product experience. After over 20 years in the car business I have seen some amazing salespeople build careers where customers line up and wait their turn to buy a car from them. Dealerships and managers have long pursued the ability to clone those top producers with continued sales training and CRM tools. Let’s face it, CRM tools in the automotive industry brought the promise of being able to duplicate the habits of successful salespeople. Scheduling follow up calls, birthday cards, etc. etc. The problem of course was getting people to change their processes to adapt to the technology.

Using technology to create the process

We have been working with salesperson sites for a couple years now and have fine tuned the formula so that they can fulfill all your needs as a dealership and salesperson. Take a few minutes to watch the following video (11 minutes to be exact) and you will be amazed at how technology when done right will accomplish so much. Dominate your market for SEO, Social Networking, Reputation Generation, and much more while using technology to create a process instead of trying to change your processes to fit the technology.

*while on your servers .

The post myPages – Websites for Salespeople appeared first on CarDealerPress.

1. Set a specific and detailed agenda

Typically a meeting topic is general and everyone hopes that the conversation will take the meeting on a direct course. This leads to meetings that run forever and often, have no ‘call to actions’ at the end.

• Before a meeting, create a one-page agenda with simple bullet points of the items to be discussed. The best practice is to create a meeting-agenda template for the company or department. This way, anyone scheduling a meeting can create the agenda in a quick and uniform manner.
• At the beginning of the meeting, the agenda should be quickly discussed and approved. People should be a bit flexible in modifying the agenda, as the needs of the group outweigh the need for strict adherence to the original agenda.
• Establish time limits for each discussion. You’ll be surprised that the discussion almost always fits the time frame, simply because people will tailor their conversation to fit the time allowed.
• Give a warning when you are a minute or two from the prescribed end.

2. Invite only the people that need to be there.

When you think of it, a meeting with 6 executives is costing the company hundreds of dollars per hour. Especially if only two people are carrying a majority of the conversation. This also leaves the other 4 individuals feeling frustrated for their time being wasted.

• When you build your agenda for the meeting, list only the people absolutely required for each of the agenda items.
• If not everyone is required for all the agenda items, schedule the discussions so they start with the most people and allow people to leave as their names drop off the list. That way they’ll be motivated to keep their own conversations short and to the point so they can get back to work.

3. Create a structured close

One of my friends is a therapist and when talking to her about clients that ‘drag’ along meetings, she suggested creating a structured close. She schedules a 50 minute agenda for a 1 hour meeting, to give the her some ‘wiggle room’ towards the end. At the 10 minute mark, she concludes the meeting with these questions three questions:

• In one sentence, what was your single biggest takeaway from this meeting?
• In one sentence, what is one topic that should be discussed in our next meeting?
• Give one word or phrase describing how you feel about this meeting?

By establishing this closing structure, she has set expectations in her client’s mind for closure of the meeting, and wrap up is simple. In a group setting, whoever is in charge of the meeting can direct the same process around the table and take notes for future agenda items. People who leave earlier can take two minutes and share before they leave.

The post How To Keep Meetings Short appeared first on CarDealerPress.

In this Plugin release

Vehicle class filtering. This allows you to filter either New or Used vehicles. This makes it easier to create class specific microsites so you don’t have to use custom javascript or css to hide the vehicle class you don’t want.

Vehicle make filtering. Most dealership groups these days are sharing their used inventory across all of their brand specific websites and this feature helps accomplish this. For example: Dealer group with 3 franchises/roof tops and consequently 3 sites. Each franchise site would like to share used inventory, but can only have their specific franchise make for new. This filter allows you to put the dealer ID for the group into the plugin and filter new by franchise, leaving all used and only the selected franchises for new.

Responsive on/off toggle button. When the responsive inventory themes were release they automatically change the display for mobile/tablet even when the website isn’t a responsive site. Even though this still works, we had some dealers request that the inventory not change. By adding this toggle each site owner can choose whether or not to utilize the responsive inventory.

Auto updating within WordPress admin. We have managed the plugin on Github since it’s inception and had built in auto updates from that location. Recently Github changed how this works and it broke the auto update function. We have now moved the most recent version of the plugin to S3 and implemented auto updating from there. So going forward one click updates are once again available. Just beware if you have modified the plugin or created unique inventory themes that you will still want to use ftp, sftp, or ssh to update your plugin so that the default WordPress updater won’t overwrite your modifications. Also you may need to update to this version manually depending on the current version that you are using.

There were a couple of bug fixes in this release too.

Previous releases

Since we haven’t been posting updates, I am going to list some of our past enhancements.

Responsive inventory themes. We all know that mobile is very important and going with Google’s recommendation for mobile SEO and general usability all of our built in themes are now responsive ready. To utilize the responsive layout you will need to have a responsive website to begin with.

Introduction of Armadillo 2. Armadillo has been our most popular theme because of it’s clean layout and ease of modification. One of the most common modifications has been to move the images to the left and the form to the right, so that is all we did with Armadillo 2. This is also helpful on responsive sites since the site will wrap with the images at the top now.

There were also some bug fixes relating to our new car Showcase product and some various other bug fixes.

The post Inventory API Plugin 3.20.8 Release appeared first on CarDealerPress.

1. Have an SEO-friendly WordPress theme

Of coarse this is any easy in for us to ‘sell’ our product. But even if you’ve decided to DIY your website, be sure it is SEO friendly. All of our sites are designed with SEO in mind.

2. Our recommended SEO WordPress Plugin

SEO Plugins provide a user-friendly dashboard for optimizing blogs and blog posts for optimal search engine benefit above and beyond what is built into the standard WordPress interface. Some SEO plugin options may also include meta descriptions, index/noindex, and 301 redirects. The plugin may automate the process for you, but it is usually best to review the automated recommendations or populate the fields yourself.

The one best plugin for SEO that we use heavily is Yoast. Unlike the other 3rd party expensive products, Yoast is free – and is practically just as good – so there is really no reason not to use it.

3. Use Optimized WordPress Categories

WordPress gives you the options of using categories and tags to organize your posts. Categories allow you to take your keyword research and integrate it into your URL structure, which is one important SEO factor. The Tags are good for further organizing posts for user experience, but are best given a noindex attribute so search engines don’t pick up the tag pages.

A good benchmark is five to seven categories which draw from your keyword strategy. For example, Lexus reviews, Dealership Testimonials, or How-To Videos. Then these categories will make it into your URL – www.Dealership.com/lexusreviews – - Good SEO

4. Use Keywords In Your Title Tags

If you’re using a properly optimized theme, your blog titles will be using an H1 header tag. Couple that with the fact that WordPress allows you to automatically integrate your blog title into your URL, and it becomes obvious how important it is to use the keywords that you want to rank for in your blog title.

For example, lets say one of the key phrases you want to optimize for is “2013 lexus LS review”. You will want to be sure that you place “2013 Lexus LS Review” into your blog title. With this in mind, you are getting ‘Lexus Review’ into your blog URL twice. www.Dealership/lexusreview/2013_lexus_LS_review –

5. Write well and post often

In the post-Panda era, it’s important that your blog content is compelling and grammatically-correct. Don’t post too much in the way of short content – 300 words is a good start, but don’t skimp on quality for the sake of making a post longer. In addition, make sure your blog has a strong focus on one subject area – Lexus Reviews or Dealership Testimonials and various types of each (if both are related in one way or another).

Beyond creating quality content, strive to post frequently.  Search engines and readers alike want to see fresh content, and having more content on your blog means more content for search engines to index. Strive to create an editorial calendar to keep new content coming!

Overall WordPress is a great solution that can make blogging easy. But to get the most out of it, be sure to optimize it for SEO. The above seo tips should help you do exactly that.

The post 5 WordPress SEO Tips appeared first on CarDealerPress.

This year we were introduced to some amazing dealerships, products and people. The keynotes were outstanding but when I returned home I was asked, ‘So what earth shaking new thing did you take away?’. Well, truth be told, it was to ‘Go back to the basics’. To cultivate the people of a business. Their is no silver bullet product to take a business to the next level, it is the people in your business that have the greatest potential. Then, when armed with the right products . . . that is were the growth takes place. Below is a video that anchors this point called Acres of Diamonds. Would recommend everyone send this to your managers and ask them to focus on cultivating the diamonds in their departments and watch what happens!

Acres of Diamonds Video

The post Digital Dealer 2012 Review appeared first on CarDealerPress.

There has been a lot of buzz in the website world regarding responsive layout over the last year or so, and really gaining steam in the last 6 months.  Being heavily involved with WordPress and continually researching themes and plugins as they are introduced I have witnessed a huge demand for responsive WordPress themes.

Google officially recommends responsive

Google just recently released recommendations for building smartphone-optimized websites  and you can read more in this article from Search Engine Land

So what is responsive layout?

In a nut shell responsive layout is a way to design websites so that they are optimized for all portal sizes; desktop, tablet, mobile and everything in-between.  This can be as simple as scaling everything (images, text, etc.) down for a mobile site or even displaying completely different content based on device.

Moving forward with responsive

With proper consideration of your content and users, responsive design promises to be the future of web design. Now you can add content to one website to have it available on any device. Of course there is still some maturing that needs to happen before this technology can be effectively used in all industries, but we aren’t that far off.

The post Mobile, Tablet and Desktop with ONE site appeared first on CarDealerPress.