The Automotive Sphere

Social marketing is on the horizon for auto dealers and we have some content for you in this newsletter issue that should be useful in your quest to learn more about automotive social marketing. Be sure to check out Dan Walls’ article about the benefits to dealers and social networks. Also be sure to check out the Squidoo page about AutoBurst which is our new blog marketing product for auto dealers. AutoBurst provides a baseline for dealers to kick start a social marketing strategy. Also i...more

Internet search is a changed science today. Old school SEO is out and RSS marketing is in. Dealers are misled and misinformed by auto industry vendors and providers which results in wasted money and poor ROI for auto dealers and their search marketing efforts. This issue provides a brief history of Internet search and how it is evolving. It is the beginning article in a series of articles we hope will constructively explore how dealers can get more out of their SEM efforts. We also are featuring...more

This week we are exploring the idea of a PPC bandwagon that dealers are being misled in to because of lack of knowledge throughout the industry in search marketing. over the past couple years, organic search has fallen to the wayside in the automotive industry because companies are primarily focused on PPC, or pay-per-click advertising. Search marketing is more than just PPC and while traditional organic search techniques have become outdated, new techniques, primarily RSS marketing, offer even ...more

The feature article this week is about the idea that today’s Internet advertising models in the auto industry are causing dealers to miss out on millions of potential car buyers that conventional advertising such as radio, television, and print advertising effectively reach. The problem is that the audience size of these conventional advertising channels has been diluted to the Web. The end result is that millions of potential car buyers that used to be getting exposed to dealerships and t...more

When it comes to marketing on the Web, dealers are often limited to what their providers are doing for them. With website providers, dealers are typically limited to the effectiveness of their provider’s conversion tools which are often online forms that users must complete. With CRM providers, dealers are often limited to email campaigns and auto responses. With portal classifieds, dealers are limited to lead generation. While these are all useful tools in the general marketing efforts of...more

Do you remember a time when dealers didn’t have websites? How about when they didn’t have Internet departments, or didn’t invest into search engine marketing? Where were you during these periods when such new technologies were on the rise? Were you: a.) Resistant to these “emerging trends”? b.) Using them for the sake of it or because everyone else was? c.) Assessing their usefulness and effectiveness to create a better tomorrow? Like most good businesses, you are p...more