When a Plan Comes Together
Brad Cannon | 05/21/2020
As I sit here to write this, the world seems to have gone completely nuts. There’s a pandemic that has shaken up the entire planet, we’ve hunkered down and isolated ourselves, and yet I keep hearing about dealers who have had record months.
Go figure.
With all the isolation and social distancing talk, now seems like a great time to talk about websites.
We’ve always said that your website is your digital dealership, and nothing proves that more than recent events. With many brick and mortar dealerships shut down by mandate, websites have quickly become a go-to for information, communication, sales, and ultimately, survival.
It’s the anchor of your digital presence, and it needs to be efficient and effective at doing it’s job – generating leads that turn into sales. Anything less, and you’re wasting time and money.
Leads have to be generated, tracked, and followed up with every single day. I’m proud to say that PSM has a website platform that generates those results and provides leads every day – 24/7 for dealers better than the competition, and with the best customer service in the business. Don’t believe me? Read our reviews.
While a critical component, having a great website is really just the beginning. When you opened your physical dealership, did you just unlock the door and wait for floods of people to just come rushing in? Would that happen? Of course not.
Anyone with half a lick of sense advertises, right? That’s why we developed our digital advertising program, partnering with Google (as Premier Partners), Facebook, and Instagram. Don’t sit back and hope for the best, we drive traffic to websites with SEM and social media marketing better than anybody in the powersports business.
We successfully run Digital advertising for hundreds of dealers across the country, but dealers who have a Firestorm website get to see the advantage of the seamless experience and premium performance of using an integrated suite of products to leverage additional performance above and beyond the competition – with less work.
For those serious about performance, we bolt on Firestorm email and website tracking. Visitors are identified – even if they didn’t fill out a form – and begin to receive messages encouraging them to come in and make a purchase. On top of that, regular emails with featured inventory, follow-up, birthdays, anniversaries, and many other important events can be created and deployed automatically. Yeah, it’s amazing. Oh, and all with themes (well north of 200) and graphics designed BY riders FOR riders. Not some cookie cutter platform that tries to be all things to all people. Riders are a special group that deserves special treatment. Oh, and some of that special treatment is a data hygiene program like no other in the industry, along with audience segmentation, that leads to the best delivery rate in the business. Check it out.
There’s really only one thing that is better than advertising. Word of mouth. And we have that covered in our suite of products as well. Our reputation management product has generated hundreds of thousands of positive reviews for our clients – and studies have shown that people make decisions about who they buy from based on both quantity and rating of reviews. Think about it. When you’re looking to make a purchase, do you look at the reviews for the product? Sure. And what about the business selling it? When it’s a big ticket item, of course you do.
So what if you want to buy a motorcycle, and you’re looking at two different dealerships – one has 10 reviews with a 3.5 star rating, and the other has 400 reviews with a 4.7 star rating? Which one would you buy from? That’s why our reputation management bolt on is so critical. It’s word of mouth from the internet. And a lot of it.
What is one of the best ways to communicate in a non fear producing way? Text.
We have an app for that too. Literally. Customer Connections is our app that allows you to use your website (and dealership main phone number if you want) to text back and forth with clients. Texting has a ton of benefits for all departments, as it reduces phone calls, and allows for employees to answer as quickly as possible without customers sitting on hold and getting frustrated. It’s amazing. And we keep hearing stories from clients who have gone through the entire sales process via text, with customers only coming in to pick up their new units. It’s crazy cool.
My point here is that if handled properly, using all the right tools, it’s possible to use your website and digital marketing to generate an incredible amount of sales. The suite of products we’ve created for you will do just that. We’ve seen it over and over with our clients. I’ve really only given the 30k helicopter view of how powerful these products are, but hopefully you can see how each of them can dramatically improve your dealership – even more so when used together. We’d love to talk with you about how these solutions can work together for your dealership. Give us a shout.
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