Automotive Alchemy
Welcome to 'Automotive Alchemy', a podcast that dwells in the cavernous depths of data, unearthing precious gems of wisdom to illuminate your path to digital marketing success. As alchemists, we understand that each nugget of information is a vital ingredient in our elixir of knowledge. So ready yourselves as we embark on an enlightening journey through the arcane world of data-driven automotive marketing.
Automotive Alchemy
Car Dealer Marketing Street Fight: Traditional vs. Digital vs. Third-Parties
Discover keys to revolutionizing your dealership's advertising strategy as Shean Kirin peels back the layers of marketing success. Our latest episode packs a punch with critical insights on when to cut ties with traditional advertising and how to embrace a data-centric digital approach. The automotive industry is changing, and so must our tactics. We'll show you why betting big on your own website and analytics can drive your sales further than any third-party platform.
Gear up for a high-octane discussion where we put the pedal to the metal on the effectiveness of analytics in car dealership advertising. We tackle the conundrum of quality versus quantity in lead generation and the art of finessing third-party partnerships to optimize your advertising dollar. With our strategic advice, you'll learn how to navigate the complex analytics that should be the backbone of your marketing decisions and pump the brakes on inefficient spending. It's time to shift gears and race ahead of the competition with precision targeting and smarter budget allocation.
Rev up your engines for a glimpse into the future as we charge into the electric vehicle market and the digital shifts transforming car sales. The showroom isn't going anywhere, but the way we interact with customers is driving into a new era. We explore the balance between the digital and personal touch, breaking down how the decline of cookie tracking and rise of personalized data will turbocharge your marketing efficiency. Fasten your seatbelts for a journey into the heart of data-driven decisions and how they will define the road ahead for car dealerships.
Welcome back to Automotive Alchemy, the podcast where we transform automotive challenges into opportunities. I'm your host, sean Reigns. Of course, I'm joined again by the premier dealer, alchemist, sean Kiran, and today we're jumping into traditional third parties and digital. It's a street fight, so let's get right into it. Are you ready for this, kiran?
Speaker 2:I am let's do it.
Speaker 1:Of course, dealers are going to be really familiar with. You know comparing traditional and digital and third parties, but a lot of people aren't talking about it. Sometimes people don't realize that there's still a lot to uncover. So the first place I want to start with you is, when we talk about traditional versus third party providers versus digital, it is very easy for dealers to blow through tons of cash they overspend. Do we really need all of it? What are your thoughts?
Speaker 2:So what a great way to open up. Let me tell you so. On a regular basis, when we're meeting a new client, one of the first things we do is get a hold of an ad budget and look to see where that spend is going to get allocated. And you would be amazed at how many of them have four different third parties of major traditional spend. And you go say, ok, well, how much are we going to spend on your own website, like sending advertising, google, meta, sending advertising to your website? And they say, well, I've got $5,000 left over. And I'm thinking to myself we got $37,000 in traditional media spend, $27,000 in a mailer and $45,000 going out to third parties. And I wonder why you don't have any money left over. So the easy answer there is you absolutely do not need all of that. As a matter of fact, one of those three is probably not a really good way to spend money in today's world, and another one, as much as everyone wants to be a critic about it, is pretty important. So I can't wait to dive in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, good, good, good. It's to me always an interesting topic. It seems to never get old for me because there are, of course, nuances and just about everything. But I know you're one of the people in the industry that point out things specific to traditional versus digital, versus third party, and you gave a great example there in terms of even what happens on the website. There's a lot of these things have to do with your entire digital strategy. So next thing I want to explore with you a little bit of why do you think some dealers still kind of just hold on. It's like the baby blanket. They don't want to get rid of their clinging to these kind of outdated marketing methods. Is it comfort or something else?
Speaker 2:I think it. You know, ultimately we're in a relationship business. The challenge with being in a relationship business is that we value the relationships that we have. And if I look at a lot of these traditional budgets and I'm just going to throw this out here in the very beginning I am not a fan of traditional spend I can give you a gigantic list of top 10 stores in the United States with various brands that we might work with, that none of them spend a dollar on traditional media. So that's a pretty easy way to say that right. So I think you cling to something outdated, because everything, no matter how much we like to pride ourselves on our ability to get uncomfortable, we still want to be comfortable and we enjoy the relationship.
Speaker 2:And if we've been successful and we've been selling cars through COVID and we've been making a lot of money, then we didn't have to change anything. The problem is that it just changed, and last time I started looking at some zone reports from some of the various dealerships. Some of those numbers do not look good, and so I guess the reason we hang the cling to those outdated models is always going to be relationships. But really the question then becomes is that relationship more important than you selling cars? I don't think it is.
Speaker 1:Especially now, you know, Especially now. Reality has come all the way back around, you know for some dealers, All I can yeah that's a challenge and this is an automotive podcast, not a political one. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I'm going to say this the kindest and nicest way that I can regardless of what camp you fall into, there's no one out there that is not nervous about the next 12 months. So, in a world where the market is nervous and interest rates are high and the cost of borrowing is up and everything is more difficult than it was before. This is the time where we have to get a lot smarter about every penny that's being spent and really more granular about every dollar, and I can tell you.
Speaker 2:You know, ultimately, if you're spending money on an advertiser, ask yourself what are you paying for? So let's see if I'm spending money on traditional media, I'm paying for equipment, stations, people, office buildings, gigantic salaries, somebody's airplane, all of the above. What percentage of your money actually goes to your advertising? Now?
Speaker 1:I'll get to my third parties.
Speaker 2:Now I'll just start this in the beginning of the third of the podcast. Do I love all third parties equally? No, I don't. However, in today's world, it is usually recommended to have a couple of them active for your dealership. Not four, not five, not all, but two is a great number. Yeah, when you spend money with Google or with Meta, guess what happens? You get a better ROI and in the end we are a business that is 100% based on ROI. So I guess that kind of tells you the direction that I think we go with this, just because it is a it's time to make a change and it's time to make an adjustment for a lot of stores. And if you know, there's the old definition of insanity Well, congratulations. You know, if you change nothing, nothing changes.
Speaker 2:And so oftentimes, if we do change there's also it isn't just digital anymore. Now it's modern digital versus old fashioned digital, because there's a difference too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's, we'll get into that a little bit too. Yeah, that's all really, hopefully, for the dealers that tune in that watch and or listen, listen and or watch Just just that piece alone is so valuable when you consider that and again, this is a nice bashing third parties. They've been around forever. They kind of are really part of the pioneering days. Right, it was. The internet came upon us and dealers were literally buying these third party leads before most of them even had websites and they were working those off of fax machines.
Speaker 1:And it's fun to tell those nostalgic stories because it was so crazy when you compare that and contrast it to today CRM tools and all these more advanced processes, most of which dealers still don't stay committed to. But the point being is, if you developed that kind of I've always said it's lead addiction, right, and they need to have you know some sort of way to handle the withdrawals if they were to move off of it. But you mentioned like, hey, you don't need all of them, but a couple of them, one or two of them still around, probably so, and so I just want to ask you you can follow up with this when you're talking to a dealer, would you say hey, pick the two that perform the best for you. And is that most important for them? To look at cost per lead? Or is it volume of leads If one could get a higher volume?
Speaker 1:But the cost per lead was a little bit higher, two or three dollars more, even though the numbers are way higher than that for third party cost per lead. They don't even talk about that and they haven't for years. But would you if a dealer said okay, I hear you loud and clear, kiran, but we're using four providers and we should cut? How would you tell a dealer like that I need to cut. To who would you? What method would you tell them to use to decide which ones to get rid of?
Speaker 2:So we believe in using analytics for everything. We should. All decisions for advertising should be driven off data. Right now, as a car person, I'm again 22 years in a dealership before starting this company eight years ago. I love relationships and I trust my gut.
Speaker 2:Advertising is not a gut decision, and when we use our gut to make a decision based upon whomever is in our office selling us, you know whichever package we feel like buying today. Right, you know someone's being sold in that deal and your gut is talking about the relationship in front of you. It has nothing to do with results. Analytics, on the other hand, give us transparency into exactly what happens, and there's always a better way. More is not better, better is better Period. And so, in a world where better is better, we care about quality. Well, why do we care about quality? We care about quality because we've got either salespeople or a BDC working in our store. That salesperson or BDC is harder to hire than they've ever been, harder to keep employed than they've ever been, more expensive than they've ever been and, for a lot of times, a little softer than they've ever been. Right, and I'm kind of an old school car guy. Maybe I'm going to get in trouble for saying that out loud, but I think they're kind of soft, so I have to manage their momentum. If I throw a thousand bullshit Facebook leads at them, what I'm going to do is I'm going to blow up the BDC because you're not going to sell any of those. It looks like you're busy. It looks like you've got traffic, but that traffic's not real. You take that same thousand Facebook leads and turn it into 100 super high quality customers that are interested in the exact car that you've got in stock right now via the phone or via the internet, and all of a sudden, you're selling 20 cars. You're not selling 20 cars on those thousand bullshit Facebook leads. All you're doing is pissing off and blowing up your BDC.
Speaker 2:Well, with third parties, they function very similarly. So I want to look at a cost per sale first and I want to ask myself when all the dust settles. My first metric is record my cost per sale. How much did I spend on the you know the third party providers, right? How many cars did I sell? What was my cost per sale? Then you got to dive in a little bit deeper, right? If you do nothing else, at least stop there, because what you may find is you've got one of them that sent you a bunch of leads but you sold no cars on it. You may have one that sold you a sent you a middle amount of leads but you sold a really high percentage of them, and you may find that another one really didn't send you any actual leads, because that happens Once we get through those metrics you can dive in a bit further.
Speaker 2:So, after cost per sale, I wouldn't really look at cost per lead, but I would go jump back into my wonderful friend Google Analytics 4. And then GA4, I want to look at what is my real traffic that was sent to the website and how much of that real traffic became a phone call and became a form fill. I was just talking to a provider today that's not in all markets, you know, and I'll bring them up on here because you know might as well, right? So I was talking to CarSoup.
Speaker 2:So, let's say I'm in Denver, I'm like who the hell is that company? I've never heard of them before. Let's say I'm in Florida, California, wherever. But let's say you're in like Minneapolis. Not only are they incredibly strong there, but when I looked at this dealership, I saw 4,200 visitors on their website from CarSoup. I saw two minutes average engagement time. I saw as many phone calls as came off of Metta and in addition to all of that, the other thing that I found is when I went into top conversions, I noticed that that traffic was the fourth largest provider of mid funnel and bottom of funnel traffic. That means that they came to the website first off of CarSoup. They came back again as direct or organic and eventually converted as direct or organic.
Speaker 2:So the lead didn't register as CarSoup or carscom or auto trader or car gurus or Edmunds or true car or car facts. Did I leave anybody out? I tried to get them all right. It didn't register as one of those companies because it came back a second or a third time, and so I think it's valuable to have your advertising partner look at that with you and say, based upon these metrics, my opinion is these two look like the highest performing and then I don't think you need to keep more than two, because the problem is that all you're doing is spending money on car gurus websites, spending money on carscom website, spending money on auto traders website, and not only are you building up their brand instead of yours, but also they're trying to sell your customer a trade in, they're trying to sell your customer financing. They're trying to do everything else that we want to do as a dealer and take your profit center, and so I'm not really a big fan of that Right.
Speaker 2:So what do I consider those right now a necessary evil, and do I have friends at those companies? Absolutely, and I love them and they're fantastic and they're amazing. They're great at what those companies have to make money to. We're a dealership. We do it, no different. We make money in service, we make money in sales, we make money in finance, we make money everywhere because we are a company, a for profit entity. That's what you do, but at the same time, you need to reserve enough of your budget for your own website. Sorry.
Speaker 2:I kind of got off on a little tangent there, because I think that question is, I think that question has me Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, it's great. I don't want to put a gate up. You run free. You're a wild stallion Like you do what you want to do, but you shared a lot of things that.
Speaker 1:I said a number of these things. Just last week I was talking to a dealer friend and he was asking me about third parties and they use a bunch of them, and I said a bunch of the same things. I was like if you just go based on cost for a lead alone one, it'll make you really mad, but two you won't see the whole picture Right. So there are some other metrics that you should probably look at first, but overall I said some of the same things. You don't need that many, so you need to come up with this formula to decide which ones actually are doing the best for you, for your investment. And then also, don't feel bad and don't lose any sleep over the fact that you've cut these down, because it's not going to make any difference in the number of vehicles you sell, because all of those providers are fishing from the same pond.
Speaker 1:If there's one big pond or there's several ponds, there are only wherever. It's a numbers game. It always has been a numbers game and I've I'm a broken record on this particular part of this topic, but I've said forever there are, I'm sure all the third parties are. Let's just say they're all fantastic, but they're all trying to catch fish from the same body of water, and so if you live in Minneapolis and you're going to go within those sources, you'll be able to find which ones perform better regionally. You can also vary, almost unintentionally, stack so many of them up without realizing you're not actually helping yourself, as if one of you.
Speaker 2:There's a lot to add on to that too, right? So what I'll tell you is every area is different, and what works in North Texas is different than South Texas.
Speaker 2:What works in the Northeast is different than California, what works in New York is different than Boston. So, no matter where you are, you do have to test it and you do it, you do have to test it. And then, once you get there, you've got to be very cautious, because what those companies want to do is sell you all these advertising packages on top. Well, let me ask you a question of carscom or auto trade or any one of them, doesn't matter who they were. Once upon a time they generated one fee for a listing service that put your cars on there right A third party listing service, because that's what they all were.
Speaker 2:And now a significant amount of their income, revenue and profit comes from their social advertising, their OTT advertising, their this and their that. Do you think they're really advertising you or do you think they're putting more of that traffic onto their own site? That money should be spent on your provider without a markup, so that it's done at cost, because what you can't see is that when you look at the cost of that click, you're probably 300, 400, 500% markup for something you don't have to pay markup on, right. So the third party listing site should only be the third party listing site and nothing more. And it should stand on its own with its own cost per sale metric and its own quality website referral metrics. And if they do that, that little equation right there and put it out there, no problem it'll see.
Speaker 2:And if you're a dealer and you are in, you're wondering which one of those works better. You can call me, you can call us. We will happily do a dive and an analysis with you because ultimately that's money you could be saving Right. What I hate to see is the challenge where a dealer you look at their advertising they're $782 a car and you go look at it. They've got $5,000 in paid ads because they've got every third party and all the traditional media running and they're wondering why they're not market effective.
Speaker 1:And I'm sorry.
Speaker 2:If you're not sales effective, you need to change something. You got a problem, yeah, now if it's your 3% internet and Lee closing ratio, you better hold up a mirror, because the problem is you.
Speaker 2:But if you've got a 6, 8, 10, 12, 14% Lee closing ratio and you're not sales effective. That's an advertising problem period and there is no reason in the world not to be sales effective. In today's world the manufacturers have that down to a science. So if you're not sales effective, you've either got an internal process problem or you've got an advertising problem. Right, it's one of those two.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's so easy for dealers to tap out their budgets right, their ad budget, their marketing budget. It's so easy for them to tap out there, especially around third parties, when they have more than they need right. It just becomes like lasagna just repeating itself. You have enough of each of these layers. But I would very much encourage dealers if they're not already hearing through your comments on the episode thus far, two, four, six grand, sometimes more, can be sitting available in your ad, your marketing budget that is allocated to something that is not doing you any good. It literally is doesn't even make a needle blip right, and so, realizing that that could be holding you back, I would just tell every single dealer that it's probably a good time, if you haven't in a while, audit all of those investments so that you could figure out where you might reallocate some of the spend. And again, this is keep the ones that really work for you, but you don't need a plethora. Let me move on with you on digital marketing.
Speaker 1:So the trajectory for digital marketing since around 1999, some people would say 2000, because that's when Google AdWords, now Google ads, finally hit the scene. You know the fall of the year 2000. But it took a while it took years actually, for people to even have any clue of how that worked. And you had the rise of big companies like Reach Local back then that were powering dealercom search long before total control dominator. There was so much of that going on that people didn't know, but the trajectory for digital marketing is pretty much been this the whole time just up up up, you know, in some variation. The last three years has been kind of interesting, though curious to know your thoughts on how you feel like digital has evolved in these past few few years.
Speaker 2:So the largest change in the last three years is the ability to utilize data and making decisions. And it's an interesting thought because, you know, we're in the world of everyone wants to sell a CDP right. It is like the token hot phrase out there. Well, you know, I did a little marketing analysis of our top performing dealers and when I explained top performing, what I mean is they're going to be in the highest percentage market inside of their brand, like a top performing Toyota store in the country, top performing Hyundai store in the country, top performing Kia stores, things like that. And so all of these dealers are going to be top 25 with their manufacturer in the country.
Speaker 2:They've got advertising cost per vehicle that's considered low for their brand and for their area. They've got good internet and lead closing stats. And then we go to look at their marketing mix and here's what I find that they all have in common. What they have in common is, first, not any of them are spending a dollar on traditional media. Every once in a while they get an available advertising from from the manufacturer and it drops into a mailer, because a lot of their digital medias are saturated. But other than that little mailer that comes out on occasion. There's no television or radio running. They're not running an OTT through their cable provider on only the cable stations, because it doesn't work right.
Speaker 2:And they've got a couple third parties two or three is the general rule of thumb and then you look at their digital spend and what they and they've got a healthy digital spend on Google, on meta and some on OTT, and all of that drives to their own website. That's the way that that looks. Well, why? Because what changed over the last three years is that it is not the dealerships data that is the power. It is Google's data and Meta's data. The AI that they have running in the background of those platforms is out of control. When you feed it the right amount of data, it does a better job. And so we are replacing a provider in a in a pretty well known dealership in the Midwest and in that setup you know they've got this quote unquote CDP that manages all their advertising. And I'm thinking, okay, that's great, but how come you're not market effective then, if you're not sales, the sales effect of something's wrong. I go to look at their internet leads. They're closing at 12% and I mean, yeah, they want to be at 14. But if they only know, they're actually closing better than 75% of everyone else. So that can't be the problem, right? What the real problem is they're not getting enough customers to their website. Well, if I'm only serving ads to my database and a quote unquote look alike, I'm missing all of those customers that are coming to my brand and my dealership that have never been here before, and I can tell you from being in finance. Any guy in the dealership in the desk and finance can tell you half of your business comes from outside of your dealership. They've never seen you before, they've never heard from before. They're a new customer in your store, and so if that's the case and you're only advertising to your database, while you're missing all of those customers that were shopping for your vehicles but didn't exist in your world, and so what's changed in data is our ability utilize that Google and metadata more effectively. That is the single largest change. We can, in today's world, know every single person that is in that dealerships market, what vehicle, what year, what make, what model, what price range they're looking for, and the data can connect them with the, with the dealerships inventory that matches them on all devices. It's completely real, because that's how it happens, like that's what we do, right?
Speaker 2:If I look at something from before, three years ago, that didn't really work. We wanted to, but the data didn't connect well enough. Well, now the data's changed so much. Now you've got these other companies, like your major, your major cable providers, that will come in and sell you this major data package. They'll tell you I can get you all of these customers that are ready to buy a car right now in your area. It's only kind of cost you $3,000 a month per rooftop and then you just plug it into your to your social and you advertise to it.
Speaker 2:Well, what's funny is, when I look at that advertising, I look at the data. The data doesn't show that it works Right. You can plug in data in the back end of those platforms and it doesn't work and the data is easy to get. In order to make it effective, you got a custom build data sets and any company that's doing it well is custom building a data set. So long, I'm always giving this long worded answer to to why, but data has evolved so much in the last three years and I think we're only on the beginning of of of that evolution. What's also funny, too, is we're on the evolution right now with AI, and how AI integrates and where AI manages and should manage is really important because of AI is managing 100% of the placement of your ads. You're underperforming because AI doesn't it can't manage that data yet Right.
Speaker 2:If you don't believe me, when's the last time something came out of chat GBT that was false? Every day, Right.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:So it's getting better, it's learning. You got to let it learn a little bit more.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, no, and only long-winded answers.
Speaker 1:That's the only ones I want, so don't worry I want the long answer Well ultimately, the audience wants the long answers because if you just gave me short answers then we wouldn't get into the meat. Right, we need to get down into the meat, which is great. I'm not going to put words in your mouth, I just I feel like, as I listened to you, that maybe not every dealer or large sophisticated groups, maybe this would be more difficult for. Maybe not, but it sounds like you are almost saying that the necessary elements exist for a dealer to be able to not only gather the data but interpret the data, make it actionable, make it so that they can clearly make decisions upon this data, even without going out and investing $25,000 into a CDP of some sort.
Speaker 1:That's not what you exactly said, but I feel that's how I'm interpreting some of that and also I will have to say I kind of believe that that is the case. I believe I wouldn't and I haven't told any of my dealer friends yeah, run out and do it right now. As much as I know, there's a big like let's go CDPs and say, okay, not everybody has enough blood to let go on the bleeding edge of all these things, because I don't even know if 50% of them end up turning out to be well worth the time and investment that the dealer makes. So I'm always kind of on that side of well, maybe we wait a little bit. But also maybe we dig even further to find out if there's already enough in the playing field for dealers to do really what they need to do and even what they're comfortable and would be able to understand right now.
Speaker 1:I'm afraid that the CDP thing is we keep ushering dealers into more and more and more, that they have no freaking clue about how any of it even works, that we just give them more to be confused by. We just give them more, and then we have these higher expectations of the dealers when it's can we just boil this back down to they have a crisis with selling EVs right now. Like why don't we help them with what they already have at their disposal and get into more? Like let's talk about old school strategies similar to like hey, how do we get some incentives behind selling these conversion vans or some of these conversion trucks? That, to me, is the EV now, and there's a lot of them. So how do you incentivize to move some things like that, versus taking dealers into a place that a small minority of them could even understand, yet alone be ready to implement?
Speaker 2:I did just drive a 900 horsepower one last night. It was out of control.
Speaker 1:What kind of car was it? Lotus?
Speaker 2:The Lotus Electra. Yeah, I just drove one last night. Holy shit, 2.8 seconds 0 to 60 is really fast, I mean. And when you're in an SUV and it accelerates like that, it was crazy. And the funniest part of it was that it was a friend said he got one and he's like you got to come drive it. This is super cool. So I'm getting all excited about it and we're driving down the road and you know what pulls up next to us? A lime green Lamborghini Urus. And so it was super fun because we got to have a. We got to have a lot of fun driving down the road next to that car.
Speaker 2:And yeah, so, but anyways, I just I had to throw that out there because it just happened and it was super fun. But it's interesting that you bring that up because, like, when you look at advertising problems and EVs are an advertising problem right now, they just are. Yeah Right, so if I'm on this situation about my, you know my customer data, my data, this, my data, that your advertiser's job is to understand which data to use and how to use it in order to drive a better result, and the advertiser should be able to give you a plan of what they're going to use and how they're going to use it, and they should be able to tell you what to expect from it. Right, there's this thing called the, the, the early adopter bell curve. Have you seen that? By any chance? Absolutely.
Speaker 2:It's all those bell curves Looks like this yeah, and so in the beginning, the people that are early adopters. They're early adopters because they believe that later on the technology is going to be worth it, and what they do as an early adopter is they deal with the problems and the challenges of the things that don't work or break during that process. And so those early adopters right, and we're in that early adopter curve of that CDP. Some of them are gathering data from the website, some of them are not. Some of them can leverage that data, some of them can't. They don't know. There is no standardized version. We're trying to figure out the standardized way to use that data more effectively.
Speaker 2:We saw one company out there that wants to email every single company, every single consumer, every single week. You can't do that. You're going to blow up your database Like don't email your customer every week. That's horrible. So if I look at all of that, what I would say is that right now we're in the early adopter portion of that and there's going to become a time when it becomes the thing that we should all do as a big company. Big companies are great at being in the early adopter part of it and building the framework that a lot of the smaller dealers and smaller dealer groups work from. But I'll tell you, I've got plenty of mid-size and small dealer groups that don't use them and are the number one dealer in their market. So it's certainly not a requirement and it's an extra cost. So look at my marketing budget. It's a math equation. I'm going to spend X number of dollars per car.
Speaker 1:Great.
Speaker 2:My advertising cost per vehicle retail is going to be $700, $600, $500. I've got dealers in the $300 range because they're great at their job. You can pretend like you're the advertising company that makes that happen. If you're a dealer that's at a $300 advertising cost per vehicle retail, you're the one that's killing it Right. Your advertiser is probably doing a decent job, but it's you who makes the difference.
Speaker 2:So I take that and then I separate it out. It's like how much goes to my website, how much goes to my third parties? Then how much do I have left over to spend money driving consumers to my own vehicles that I have on my website? Ultimately, that's the way that that's got to look. When it looks like that, chances are things that work out pretty well. Then from there we can begin testing, like I was talking to Adila last night about this dataset from a major media provider that happens to share a name with an automotive company that we all love so much In this audience activator, audience inside, so audience whatever. We're over there, we're building out a separate Facebook campaign for it. We're tagging it separately so that it shows as its own consumer.
Speaker 2:We plugged it in the first day. We looked at it and we thought, oh, this is not going to end well when they realized how much money they're spending and that they get nothing for it. But, at the same time, what do you have to do as a dealer? You've got to have that extra budget left over because you've got to test these things. As much as I don't like that data, someone's going to come up with the dataset and it's going to work really well, and for six or 12 months, you're going to want to be on that package and you're going to be the number one dealer, because it's the thing that works and that works if you test it. So, anyways, yet another long-winded answer, but I just. There's so many caveats about how to allocate that budget correctly and how to leave enough money left over so that you can maximize the viewers on your inventory.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:If you're a $4 cost per click to drive traffic to a VDP, I'm sorry but you're paying too much.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Like let's look at these things and let's figure out how do I minimize that cost and maximize engagement, because that's ultimately what it's all about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, no. All great stuff and again, only long-winded answers. The dealers that consume this type of content, the people that are in this industry, that's exactly the stuff they need, right? They need to hear about real-world stories and they need to hear from people that have experienced that truly are subject matter experts that are, first and foremost, primarily interested in the betterment of those they serve in that particular industry, and in this case, it's car dealers. So all good answers. I want to ask you another question on digital marketing. So not just it being different, but I think you could argue that it's decisively better for selling cars. So love to know your thoughts on that. So imagine a dealer who's like okay, we've been doing the digital marketing thing for a long time. We know that it's different, we know there's been some changes in the last few years, but do you have thoughts on what would help a dealership totally understand how much better it is?
Speaker 2:So here's a good way to think about it. If I'm looking at my third-party listing sites, your success on them is directly related to the quality of your inventory and the price of that inventory. And so if I'm a dealership that gets great trade ins, they're not all rental rockets at rental trim levels. Instead, I get my fully loaded Highlander. Then they're on trade with 20,000 miles or whatever it might be. Well, those vehicles always sell on a third-party listing site because there's not as many of them out there. If I'm a dealer who's, I'm going to make $4,500 a copy on every single customer, because I'm the God's gift to selling. Your third-party isn't going to help you sell anything. The metrics are not going to work. Your sale numbers are never going to be as high as everybody else's, but you're going to make $4,500 a copy, right? Do I want to sell cars or do I want to make profit? Ultimately is the way that that question usually goes, and the real answer is yes, I do want to do both, but there's got to be a balance. So if I think about digital marketing being better through traditional, there are no metrics that say that it works. There's just not. How do you know? Because look at your co-op dollars and what all is approved and what all's got co-op providers sitting there. Right, there's a reason they push you on all the digital spend. It's because they know what works. The data is very clear.
Speaker 2:But from there, whether I should spend more of that money on my own marketing through my own Google, my own Meta or third parties is directly related to your pricing and your inventory mix. I've got dealers that have great pricing. They're on an inventory turn strategy. Eight years ago we used to call it the race to the bottom. Now it's about smart inventory management. The latest statistic that I read was that used car prices are 21% lower than they were one year ago. Well, right now the market is dropping out of used cars, and so if I'm not on a 30 day supply and a 30 day turn really, then what I'm going to do is I'm going to end up aging out of my inventory and I'm going to have a water problem sitting there. You can offset that with digital marketing.
Speaker 2:But your Meta customer that clicks on your ad for your forerunner, right? Well, if your forerunner is the same as the next guys but his is $5,000 less expensive, do you think he's going to click on your vehicle. But if yours is a TRD Pro, congratulations. You don't need to advertise it, it's going to sell on its own Right. So if I've got a Ford Explorer and it's a standard rental XLT, well, congratulations.
Speaker 2:There are $7,000 in your market and, unfortunately, you better have a fast inventory turn strategy and you're probably not going to make a lot of money on that car unless you're that Ford store that can sell their own Fords because you sell used Fords as a Ford store. If I'm a Chevy store with that inventory, it doesn't work so well, right? Unless it's aggressively priced. So the digital marketing strategies work better if you've got aggressive pricing and you've got better incentives and you've got better Y buy messaging.
Speaker 2:If you don't have any of that and you're just a profit machine, probably spending money on your own website is the only way to go, because really you're buying cars. The people that buying cars from your people that know you, or people that want the exact car you haven't stopped because no one's finding it on a third party, right? As a matter of fact, if they come into your office, the person from the third party who says you get a lot more leads if you price your cars in the green zone instead of the red zone. How many times do you think a deal has heard that one?
Speaker 1:Countless. Yeah, it's interesting. You know, back in the you and I both been in it for so long that I mean I remember pre-digital era one of the popular ways the dealers would try to track what part of their advertising was working. You know the old saying like you know, 50% of my advertising is working, 50% isn't. The problem is I just don't know which one's which. That's right, but back in the day it'd be like, hey, we're going to hire a warm body to stand at the primary entrance of the retail establishment with a clipboard that had, you know, maybe checkboxes. So what brought you in today? Did you come in for the new special, the new promotion? Did you hear our TV ad? Did you hear us on radio? So you're trying to attribute like oh, that's old school attribution, and I'm thinking that's one of the more obvious things for people that have been in it for a long time.
Speaker 1:I understand there's a lot of people, even in the vendor side. There's a lot of whippersnappers that act like they've been in this for a long time and talk like they've been in this for a long time, and then I just go silent not to embarrass them. But for old dogs like you and I, we remember those days and so you can help some dealers that have been in it that long as well. Remember when you were doing just something like that. It's a completely different world that enables you to be so much better, like to the point where it's almost a challenge for most dealers to understand all of it. That's how good digital is, and I've tried to make the case to a lot of dealer friends saying I know that everyone wants to say that the internet and all things digital made things better and made things easier. Better, I think, yes, easier. I don't know about that. I think it's actually far more complex than it ever has been. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. It just means that you can't just be well, we sell the cars, we wash the cars, we service the cars and that's kind of all we do. Unfortunately, to really go into this era that we're in, modern retailing, that we've been in for some time, you can't just be the. All I know how to do is sell the car and that's it, and I don't want to do no paperwork and I don't want to touch the computers and I don't want to like you, just not many of those people. That's a dying grade, if they're not all dead already.
Speaker 1:Next, keeping with digital, though, and I always say it's kind of like the 2.0 wave. We got the internet, you know, comes on, everyone's like, yeah, awesome. And then we get social media and really almost the second phase MySpace kind of starts coming in and some of those. And then, of course, the Facebook era and as soon as Facebook was like well, we're going to be advertising platform as well. Do you think car dealers, you know, should they really care about likes and shares and tweets and the social side of things? Does it really even matter? Because we've, in the beginning of all that, everyone said it really matters, like there's consequence if you don't, and I'm like I would like to know your thoughts on it.
Speaker 2:So it like everything else is an evolution, right. So likes and tweets, they just don't matter. Now let's say you've got a salesperson on your lot that's building a funny video about a car every day and is putting them on TikTok and on Facebook and on Instagram. Those shares matter because it's original content that the salesperson is creating themselves, that is, to their audience. And then that world shares matter. But as far as your standard operating platforms, where you're looking at a paid ad on Google, a paid ad on Meta, that stuff doesn't matter at all. As a matter of fact, it used to be the most important metric. Now it's not even a metric worth tracking. So when I say it doesn't matter, I mean it has zero relevancy, right? So if you've got a salesperson, great, let them share it. That's what you're looking for. Well, when it comes to your own marketing strategy, I hope your vendor isn't tracking it, because if that's what they want to tell you, then something is wrong. Yeah, we totally agree on that.
Speaker 1:I've always told dealers, almost since the beginning, of socials, like if you have something that you can connect into social, that actually doesn't matter. That's social that actually keeps your interested customer because you found them out in social land, keeps them in that environment and allows them to consume or utilize something that's from you without having to take them off to your website right. That can be really helpful and one of those is people that have trade tools. I've done this, we've mentioned before we went live. We've talked a little bit about Brodsky Iato appraised, but you could do it with probably any of the trade tools. I haven't worked with a bunch of the others, but I know for a fact you can connect that in ways through social campaigns, even organically, that will drop a link in so that people could literally go and get a value on their vehicle, whether they wanted to sell it to the dealership or consider a trade-in. That type of stuff is really helpful. But I agree with you that just the let's accumulate likes and shares and all that, we went overboard. I think the providers that sold just those types of services were overboard on that stuff. It matters a lot more for businesses to get engagement of some kind. That's helpful, but for the dealers it's a bit of fool's gold. We already covered this quite a bit, but I want to go back a little bit in terms of the reliance from a dealer's perspective. That reliance on third parties auto trader gurus Let me ask you, in this case, in terms of marketing strategy, when a dealership is trying to put together their bones, if you will, of this is going to be core to our marketing strategy.
Speaker 1:We tell them and we said this earlier in the episode well, you don't need all of them, so pick a couple of them. Would you put it in terms of strategizing providers? Would you put it in any particular order or would you say it's in the mix, but how would you decide between okay, we're going to keep two, but we're also keeping paid search for all of our new, not just our core, for, as we've talked about in other episodes, we're also going to have a used campaign. We're going to maybe do some conquest. We've got a body shop, so we're going to do some collision stuff. We're going to do some fix. Whatever that strategy is, do you have any recommendations when you're talking to dealers on where the third parties go?
Speaker 2:Our general recommendation is always the same. It's look at what you have currently running and eliminate down to two. And the reason we tell them to eliminate down to two is that you want to get to the point where you lost business after you eliminated it. So let's say I've got five of them. Well, cut the two bottom performers immediately, all right, wait 30 days and then cut one more and then see if your business drops. Right, because what you want to be able to tell is am I effectively using that money Now?
Speaker 2:From there, I would also say that if I reallocate that money into my paid search, my paid social platforms, what I'm going to see is that I sell more cars. So if that money goes from one bucket into another bucket and we sell a few more cars, either, our turn rate increases. I do a better job turning used cars. I end up in a better market position. Right, my zone rankings at the end of the month I'm a little bit higher up. Congratulations, it worked and you did a good job reallocating that spend.
Speaker 2:I would be remiss to say I put this one over the other, because I've never seen a piece of data that says that one provider belongs on all lists or that one provider doesn't belong on all lists because there are some providers that I don't like. I'm not going to mention them here because it doesn't matter, but I'll tell you that there are places where I'll find that provider that I don't like and I'll look at them and say you know what? You would be crazy to eliminate this one, because in some areas one platform just does a better job. And what you would do is really good recommendations.
Speaker 1:So I have two questions, kind of in follow up to what you've been sharing on third parties. One is okay, do the dealers really need them? Right, okay, you can whittle down to two, but do they really even need those two, if you have any more thoughts on that? And then the second part to this question would be you mentioned that there are some that you just don't really care for, and I'm in that same. There's some that I don't, and I have reasons, but we won't get into that. But are there any that you prefer, like, especially those when you think about all the dealers that you guys work with? I'm sure there are some that you have some insights to that would maybe say I would have some preferences. So do they really really need any, even the two? And then are there some that you prefer, and maybe why?
Speaker 2:So for most dealers and I mean 90% of dealers they should have one or two third parties in there. Right, and that's going to be the pretty much blanket advice you, unless you have very expensive used cars that you're very proud of, the bottom line is that you're going to sell more used cars if you have a third party provider on versus having none on, and, generally speaking, two is better than one, three is not better than two. As far as preferred, there are some that I prefer, the personnel of right. There are some that I really like, the people from Now, somewhere in every organizational chain is some people that I love, no matter what the company is.
Speaker 2:But, I'll tell you, even the ones that I don't like. They've got markets where their data is very clear that they're the better provider, and so I think the better decision there is. Don't make a decision based upon how sexy the rep is, because that's not going to work out for you. Make a data driven decision. Don't make a decision based on the person that pissed you off at that company seven years ago, because everybody's changed. Don't make the decision based upon because you think they have a monopoly or because you don't like the fact that they're trying to sell you OTT. None of those things matter. The only thing that matters is which one is going to sell you more used cars today on their base platform, and data is going to show you that. When you test it, take all the personal feelings aside, because all the personal feelings going to do is cost you money.
Speaker 2:Now, if you're so inset and if you're so entrenched in being right, you know that you are absolutely not going to use or going to use someone. Hey, no problem, go be right. But for most of us, I would say let the data make that decision. You know, and it's on a one on one basis and call us. We are happy to just go through it with you and say, hey, based upon that, here's what your data looks like to me, and also in certain areas. You know I wouldn't want to go over on a podcast because there's a lot of different areas, but there are certain areas where one provider is just a bad idea.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and I, you know, I would add, and you've actually mentioned this at least twice on this episode where it may not be the provider, it may not be the source, might be you, I have told, especially in the last really since leaving Dileron, because I just started to do other things they forced me to for a year. But one of the things that I think was most blown away by because I wasn't paying super close attention to it in the, you know, in the Dileron years, even previous to Dileron, was how bad the processes are, or non existent, or how they're not adhered to. And the reality is, is that a very, very good provider? Whether it's a third party lead source? Whether it's your digital marketing provider for paid search or SEO or maybe both of those things, your website provider? There are a whole bunch of service providers, vendors, partners, whatever you call them out there, dealers that get sometimes broomed out of your store and they shouldn't have been. You should have maybe fired some of your salespeople, or maybe yourself or your digital marketing manager or whatever, because the only true way, after all, you've looked at the metrics and all of that.
Speaker 1:But how did we handle all of them? Right, because if the auto trader lead got picked up on one ring and you actually had a dedicated line. It was like hey, thanks for calling me. Did you see one of our vehicles on auto trader? Or you're personalizing the experience to people. That's completely different than if the phone rang four or five times for the cargoers lead or whatever. So process consistency is something that you know. Hopefully I'm not stealing any of your thunder, but it belongs in a conversation almost all of these conversations that we have. Process consistency is so critical to you knowing the real truth, or I should say the whole truth. So, that said, I want to ask you a little bit about unless you had thoughts on that, I won't.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll give you just a quick one, right?
Speaker 2:So there are companies that exist today that, for a very reasonable amount of money, contract and tell you how many sales calls came in, on every single incoming phone call that came into the dealership, and can tell you what your sales department did or didn't do with them, what your percentages were and what they weren't.
Speaker 2:And in this world you know not, I have a lot of friends and a lot of companies, but there is one that costs less and does a better job. And so in today's world, if you know, if a company's out there looking and you call the guys at Total CX, their product costs less money, it does a better job and, using technology, it gives you an alert every single time a phone call comes into the dealership and your salesperson screwed it up, and that goes out to all the managers in real time, and it's not just one or two recorded lines, but it's all of them and it's at a completely affordable rate. So, whether your dealership sells 30 cars a month or 3000 cars a month, this is something that everyone should have, because what it identifies for you is is my department, is my salesperson, is my manager the problem? Because ultimately, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make a drink, right?
Speaker 2:We all know that if those calls are coming in and it's ringing three, four or five times, or use cars. This is Sean. How can I help you, right? I mean like I'm sorry, but that's not going to work, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you know you may have. This guy sells 25 cars a month. What you don't realize is that he's taking 200 of your phone calls to do it, and I'm sorry. That 25 car a month guy that's answering 200 of your phone calls and taking 100 internet leads is literally bleeding your dealership dry. The only person making money in the entire store is that guy. That is the like, the person that should be fired. Or maybe you have this department that everybody's working and every time they talk to the manager, the manager wants to point a finger. No, no, you go do that. I'm sorry, mr Manager. Last time I checked you were the professional. Can you come show me how that works? I just want to see what it looks like when a deal gets closed by you. Ah, you're weak. Blah, blah, blah. Go get out there and sell an F in car. I'm sorry, but that manager probably needs to go away too.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:We are in a world where engagement matters. The nice thing about today's world is that people skills are failing, and when people skills are failing, the people that have them are more successful. So the cool thing about this is, if you are just better than average, you don't have to be great. Can you smile half the time, even if it's kind of a fake Like I, I, I, I. You can see my teeth, I'm smiling Right, if you can get some of the verbiage right, but you don't have perfect closing skills. At least you're out there talking to a customer and the consumer appreciates that, because most of these people don't even want to talk to them. So the the the reference to what you said would definitely be you got to pay attention to that internal process. You have to know how many incoming phone calls come. Every dealership should know how many sales calls came. How many total phone calls came into the dealership, how many of those were serviced and how many of them were sales In the service department. How many of those calls were answered versus went to a voicemail. Of those, what percentage of my phone calls were service, update phone calls Versus? I have a problem phone calls right. An active customer on my sales department. How many of them were answered or unanswered? How many of them did we get a customer's name and a phone number? How many of them did we even ask for the appointment?
Speaker 2:Once you start to dive into that math which, by the way, that that company I told you about will show you all of that what you start to notice is that you really do need training. Well, this is like not the purpose of today, but I will tell you this much In my company, not only my executives, but my leadership team and all of the people that talk to our clients get regular training Multiple times per week. Every single employee in our company is working on training on how to get better at their job, and let's say that I am, I don't know Google or Metta or whomever. These people are constantly training and learning how to get better At the dealership. We normally most dealerships don't even have a training line item sitting on their. On their statement, they they'll take that training cost and then go stick it in another area because they don't have a training line item for it.
Speaker 2:Training is the single most important thing that you can do. It's to a point where, if I've got a $25,000, $30,000 ad spend and I've got a deal of being ineffective. I'll say something like hey, so that we can be expense neutral, can you take $4,000 of this and pay a trainer to come help you? It's, you're gonna yes, you're gonna have less leads, but guess what? You're gonna sell them. So let's just, let's just do that. Let's let's spend some of that money on training. Right? Partnerships look like that. They look like. Well, you got this overall expense. Why don't you move this money to pay for training? Or maybe take it from traditional media? I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that you're endorsing and encouraging training. I me personally I've always not quite understood why the dealers have such a broken commitment to it and a lot of them are just exhausted with it, and I'm like or my managers should train they think their managers should do it.
Speaker 2:Guess what? Your manager's not an experienced trainer, if I go to look at most stores.
Speaker 2:and I'll just tell you, I trained in dealerships for approximately three and a half years. I'm not sure how many dealerships I went into, but I can tell you I was gone three weeks a month, you know, every single month of the year, sometimes four weeks of the month. So when you're in a dealership, over 300 days of the year, different dealerships all the time over the course of three and a half years. I mean I'm not Jim Ziggler, that guy's been everywhere, but I've been to enough to know. And what I can tell you is this eight out of 10 managers don't know how to train.
Speaker 2:It doesn't mean they're a bad desk manager. It doesn't mean that they're ineffective at their job. It's that training is different than selling and for the average sales manager, they're not capable of switching gears from how do I hold gross, sell and sell and close the customer versus how do I teach a sales person how to do this. The reason you have to have outside influence for training is it is an unreasonable ask to ask your sales managers to go in there and fix your problems. If they could have fixed them they would have already. So what?
Speaker 2:you really need to do is pay someone to teach them how to train. That's how you fix that problem. It's not that they don't want to know how, it's that no one ever showed them how. That's the real problem.
Speaker 1:And even within and when you talk about traditional third parties digital. There's so much training to be done in all of those areas, but especially, I think a lot of people sometimes just get complacent and thinking well, there's nothing more to learn and there's no training around Our relationship with third party sources. Totally not true, and especially in the digital realm. I think for myself. I love what I do. I love and by that nature, I can't not be training because I'm constantly learning. The digital thing has made it so that all of the technology providers that continue to innovate and now all the AI stuff that's coming out some of which total garbage, but some of it's amazing from a marketing, a sales, a operation standpoint and so I am literally spending almost some part of every day doing something that's training myself, and there's some companies that do a good job of building training materials, so you can be a DIY person in that regard. But I was talking with my wife about something last night and she's like I'm kind of mesmerized that for I don't know how many decades now you got into all this digital stuff. There was no, you can go to school and learn any of this stuff. You were standing in the stream when the dam broke and turned into a river, and now you have accumulated all this stuff and I love that. So when I think about dealers, I always try to encourage them. Like, if you really love what you're doing and you want to be the best and you want to make tons of money, whatever motivates you to be that person, channel that into. Well, how do I just keep getting smarter and getting better? And you want to be better than everybody else? Because that's kind of how I get my juices flowing as I think about trying to figure out where I'm going to land the plane.
Speaker 1:On this episode, I do have a couple more things I want to ask you, so I'm going to stop talking and ask you a couple of these last few questions that are, I think, need to be asked. One is is the future of car sales online? As we talk about digital, is the showroom something that will be just a relic? Is it going to be? What are your thoughts on that? I know that's a topic that a lot of people have weighed in on, but when you bring up digital, a lot of people are going to want to know the opinion of anyone weighing in. Do you think the car?
Speaker 2:sales is going to be fully online, or what happens to you. I live in an interesting area and in the interesting area that I live in I've got a set of neighbors that buys some interesting cars. So one of my neighbors owns a Rivian and they also own a Fisker right.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:And so when I talked about those buying experiences, here's what's interesting they love being able to have transparent access to all of the data online to be able to think through the criteria.
Speaker 2:Do you know what made the final decision for them? Both Driving the car and both examples and these are fully like this guy in particular I'm thinking of is like Mr Electric. Right At this point, he might not even have any gas inside of his house, whereas me, I'm probably never going to get rid of my gas cooktop because it's awesome and it's great, and the gas grill, the Weber yeah, I'm sorry, never going to go away, right, so I'm probably. You know, maybe I'm killing some brain cells, maybe I'm killing some climate, whatever, but the reality of it is that we love that stuff. However, my neighbor he's Mr Electricity, and this is the guy that is the furthest on that bell curve of trying to be ahead of the innovation, and what he told me and I asked him about this exact same question what he said was you know, sean, I love being able to understand the math of each vehicle so that I could figure out which ones fit my lifestyle from a math perspective, but ultimately, I had to drive the car and I'm like well, tell me about it. He goes well, let's go drive the Rivian and you'll see for yourself. And I did drive the Rivian with him and it's pretty badass, I mean like it was Incredible, as a matter of fact. And so as we're driving and I'm like so what, what was the part that sold you? And he goes, it was the storage. And he starts going through all the storage and showing me the storage layouts in this car and it's got so much storage in places you would have never imagined storage could be. That, of course, it was the showroom experience, the Fisker it was the exact same thing. He added, ordered, he went down to go drive it and it was not gonna complete the purchase if it didn't drive right. But it looks like this little tiny thing in all the pictures. It looks like this cute little, I don't know grown-up PT cruiser or whatever, and Instead you look at it in real life and it's unbelievably cool.
Speaker 2:And so what the online experience can't do is it can't replace that experience and the person that's there has to be capable of going through all of it, going through the features, the benefits and the impact. It's always FBI all the time, right, what does it do? How does it do it and how does that impact me? And that part's never gonna change. It's just not Right.
Speaker 2:How many people you know the drive a Tesla and after they order it, they get home and then they're like, oh my god, this thing feels cheap, it feels like really light. Missing this, I'm missing that the new ones don't even have turn signals, like I mean. You know, you gotta. Those are the reasons why all the people that go do it online and don't have any in-person experience have a totally like. They don't like the experience.
Speaker 2:I'll tell you what my purchase like a drive a pole star. Right, and I drive a pole star because, number one, it's dealer friendly. Right, they work through car dealerships, through the franchise model. I'm sorry, but if you're in the car business and you drive a Tesla, you're driving the enemy's car. That guy wants to put you out of business and he hates you when everything you stand for. The pole star, on the other hand, is a dealer centric model.
Speaker 2:Well, I went, I did everything online. I drove down to the dealership, I took the car, drove it around, got to know it really well, came back home and they delivered the car to my house with my paperwork. I signed the paperwork at my house. They left the car there easiest experience of all time. And, by the way, oh yeah, I bought a Clear bra and I also bought an extended warranty package, just because I wanted to make sure that I didn't have to worry about any of this newer electronics things breaking and having it be a major problem. Right, people still spend money on that when you do these experiences. So it's a long-winded way of saying, yeah, the showroom's not going anywhere. We need it and we need salespeople and all of the non salespeople models. Well, you just heard how I feel about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I tend to agree with you. I, I, I Think I I probably line up in the camp that would say, just because we can doesn't necessarily mean we should, and that that goes for Right kind of the digital retailing or selling everything online or taking it all to a you know type of model that does away with the dealer and they become delivery centers and all that. And it's been a topic, hot topic, for at least A year, a couple years now. I mean. Obviously, the pandemic made that even more popular topic for me. I often times Think about my own experiences first and then say, okay and, like your neighbor, my experience of I have bought a car online, you know, because all the capabilities and I've told a lot of dealers I bought During the pandemic, right when it was starting, I bought a Jeep out of Arkansas for my wife and it was.
Speaker 1:It was few years old but it was already modified the way we're like this is cool, it's already lifted big tires, cool wheel package, like everything. She loved it, color was right, like everything, perfect. And it ended up being like it's like one of the worst decisions I made because I didn't drive it, obviously, until it was delivered to me and I'm the kind of person that I'm my tundra that I drive right now. I did so much online research that I knew exactly why I wanted to start with the one I bought first. So I didn't go to any of the other dealers that I had in mine, because the first dealer if you do it right, I mean the balls on the tee, so just don't screw it up, right. But the experience was, it was driving it right, it was seeing all the things on that tundra that I didn't have on my older generation tundra and there's just nothing like that experience.
Speaker 1:And I have kids in their 20s. You know my son, you know his most recent vehicle same thing, and I mean that he's technically Gen Z, not even a millennial. So if Gen Z pretty much has the same sentiment about this experience of a expensive purchase, but the experience has to be different than the one you'd get on Amazon, I think it's. I think it's a bit foolish for people to go too heavy on anything that takes into account the expectation that enough people are and have we not just live, been living through it and seeing it day by day with EVs? People don't want them as much as Right as as the market has been pushed and the government has pushed the incentives and so forth doesn't mean they're not cool. It doesn't mean that the rise of EVs will not continue, but At the rate that it's been pushed, probably not so much. Last question before I can land this plane is what do you think digital marketing goes from? Where we are today, what's the future or what's the near future?
Speaker 2:so as data evolves and platforms evolve, we're going to go from a world where I'm reliant on third-party everything. I'm reliant on cookies for tracking, because that's going away this year, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah what's going to happen instead is that there will be an individualized experience for every consumer on the website. The tracking is going to be done in a way where every device ID has an accurate advertising mechanism of understanding year-make, model, price range, color, equipment options, and Not only does that feed you an individualized ad, but it feeds you an individualized website, and so those platforms are in market. They're they're being developed as we speak. I just spoke to a CTO from a website company as a matter of fact, two of them that are working on this exact experience. It is how do I use the visitor data and what they came in on in order to change the way that that website looks and operates, in order to drive a better result, and so what it will do for the consumer is right, like I just saw.
Speaker 2:I Just saw something where I clicked on it and, as I went to go, turn off the ad settings, my first thought was hold on, I actually prefer getting the personalized ads. I Don't prefer getting non personalized ads. I want the ones that matter to me, right? I just bought some new pants from a company and it was great that I've got seven different Advertisers of pants sitting on my social feed and I ended up buying one of those companies pairs of pants, and they're awesome, right, I didn't go to Macy's or Nordstrom or wherever the hell else you go to my pants Instead.
Speaker 2:The online purchase was great. Well, that was great because the advertising experience made it that way, and so what's going to happen in the very, very near future is that these two experiences are going to tie together and, as they tie together, it's going to be easier for the consumer to see what they prefer to see after the first click, without going and spending two minutes on your website, because if they spent three minutes on your website, it really means that they're lost. That's what it means. Most people aren't going to spend that much time trying to decide.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:So I I think that I think that's kind of the key next step that is in process right now and it's coming inside of advertising. I mean, you're 12 to 24 months away from this being a new experience. I.
Speaker 1:Love it. That's exciting, that's a great place. That's a great place to bring this thing in for a landing. So to the audience, thanks for joining us for another episode of automotive alchemy. Today we dug in on third-party lead providers, traditional and digital marketing a lot to unpack. How does your dealership balance these options? We're curious. Do you have favorites? If you'd like to go deeper on this subject or any others, or if you want to take advantage of a complimentary digital audit from dealer alchemist, go to dealer alchemist comm and get in touch. And, of course, don't miss the next episode, where we will continue to turn these automotive challenges Into gold. See you next time.
Speaker 2:See you next time, thank you.
Speaker 1:So we'll stop the.