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All American Harley-Davidson is a dealer with a 35,000 square foot state of the art dealership building located in Southern Maryland. Located just southeast of Washington, DC, not only are they a great riding destination, but their highly trained team makes customers feel like they are home away from home and love sharing the excitement of the Harley brand with locals and travelers alike. 

The team at All American H-D knows that taking care of the customers better than their competition creates loyal and repeat customers.  Plus, when their current customers are happy and well cared for, they help create NEW customers through word of mouth and positive reviews.  What customers say about their dealership is more powerful than anything that they can say about themselves. 

Lyndon Abell and Jessica Zadlo met with PSM Account Executive, Christopher Baugh to create a plan for converting their happy customers into an increased online reputation and to grow their business.  They signed up for the full Digital Marketing package including: Reputation Management, Email Marketing with Marketing Automation and a Firestorm Website.

Each product on its own is major player in a dealer’s marketing tool-belt. But when they are combined the effect is extremely powerful.

All American Harley-Davidson launched their Digital Marketing products through PSM in January 2019.  Since then, they’ve grown their Google reviews from 101 to 169.  That’s about 10 new reviews per month, every month.  Additionally, they generated 96 new customer reviews on their custom review site: allamericanharleyreviews.com

The cool factor is that these reviews, along with the customer photo appear on the homepage of their Firestorm Website as a scrolling review widget for prospective customers to see.  It is automatically updated as new reviews roll. 

And, when a dealer uses the Reviews Mobile App (which is included in the Reputation Management package) the customers get a text & and email thanking them for their purchase and including a picture of them with their new bike – which then shows next to the review that the customer leaves for the dealership.  Talk about some killer authentic social proof!  And it’s all integrated to work together seamlessly. 

Dealership: 

After rolling out the Bullseye Program, I wanted to do something a little different this month and feature one Metric Dealership & one Harley Dealership who just experienced their first Bullseye Campaign.

Solution: 

PSM is never going to be the company who goes after the masses. It is our firm belief that marketing does not create enthusiasts. However, with the right marketing, you can drive customer retention and carve off market share with a three-part data strategy. The first group of folks the Bullseye Program focuses on is your Active Customers, people who’ve spent money with you in the past 12 months. Our job is to keep them active and increase the number of times they visit your dealership this year so they spend more money. The 2nd group we target is your Inactive Customers. This is the single biggest opportunity dealers have to grow their business. As I mentioned above, the average dealership has less than 30% of their customer base actively spending money with them. We know the average customer in the powersports industry spends $750 per year in Parts, Accessories & Service…which means, if they didn’t spend it with you, there’s probably a good chance they spent it with someone else. Our job is to reactivate them so they begin spending money with you again. Lastly, we go after Conquest prospects. These are people who ride what you sell, live in your backyard, but have never bought from you.  Essentially, these are your competitor’s customers and other orphan owners in your market area. Stop and think about this... between these three groups of people, they should really make up the majority of the proven riders in your backyard and ultimately the majority of your sales over the next 12 months.

Once we identify a Dealership’s Buying Base, we carve them up into unique thirds and target the first 1/3 in month one, a different 1/3 in month two and the final 1/3 in month three. This allows us to touch every real opportunity a dealership has to sell a unit in their market once per quarter, four times per year. By rotating through your Buying Base, it ensures you drive new and different traffic each month into the dealership, generate new and different leads and load your sales staff up with new and different Sales Appointments & Hot Leads each and every month of the year (more on that later). We call this an ‘Evergreen Strategy’ because it will continue to produce new opportunities every single month of the year. 

Unlike the Sharp Shooter Program, the Bullseye Program runs over a 2-3 week period and you can choose to anchor it with an event or without one. Once we have the data strategy in-place, we begin by targeting these folks on Google & Facebook, but in a different way than what you’ve probably experienced in the past. We can now target a specific mail file & email file, which allows us to serve an ad to exactly the right customers and prospects over the two-week campaign.

We also target your Buying Base with direct mail. We send millions of pieces of mail every year on behalf of hundreds of dealerships and we know when you put a good offer in the hands of a Powersports Enthusiast, it gets results. Direct Mail triggers a more emotional response because of physical touch; customers have to pick it up, hold it in their hands and decide what to do with it. Plus, it’s one of the only legal ways to target someone who rides what you sell, lives in your backyard but hasn’t bought from you and it’s a proven winner.

Anyone who clicks into one of the emails or fills out a survey is Onboarded; meaning we connect their device to their contact information. This allows us to track every page they visit on your website forever. When our system sees one of your customers or prospects hits an inventory page, we automatically send them a one-to-one Buyback Email. 

Then our in-house Call Center picks up the phone and sets Sales Appointments and identifies Hot Leads for your team to knock down (folks who said they’re interested in upgrading their ride but couldn’t set a specific time to do so).

Results:

This H-D Dealer finished with over 55,593 impressions to riders in their backyard, over 200 leads for their Sales, Parts & Service Departments, almost 1,200 visitors to their website, over 350 Newly Onboarded Customers and 43 Sales Appointments & Hot Leads! Needless to say, they finished the month strong.

This Metric Dealer finished their campaign with over 93,000 impressions to riders in their backyard, over 200 leads generated for their Sales, Service & Parts Departments (including 94 Unit Leads!), almost 1,700 website visitors, 428 Newly Onboarded Customers, over 1,800 Buyback Emails sent and 63 Sales Appointments & Hot Leads! 

What’s Next?:

Next step is to call us so we can build your Buying Base and develop a marketing plan to finish 2019 strong! August provides some perfect excuses to kickoff a 90-Day Bullseye Campaign with New Models, Dog Days of Summer & a push to Labor Day. With just five short months to go in the year, it’s more important now than ever to drive as much traffic through the doors and generate as many leads as possible this summer! Check out the insert for killer campaign options for August and for more information on how the Bullseye Program can help you achieve your marketing goals in 2019, call me on my direct line 877-242-4472 ext: 112. Happy selling.

As I am writing this, school is getting ready to start back up, so I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon and talk about the 3 R’s of email: ‘Readin, ‘Ritin, and ‘Rithmatic.

There’s an art to effective email, but it’s more like finger painting than Da Vinci. If you stick with the fundamentals, you can make some really neat things happen. But you have to stick to good, basic, fundamentals.

‘Readin – The very first goal of your email is for it to be read. If it doesn’t get read, you’ve wasted your time. 

We live and work in a niche market. Only a small percentage of people ride. Given this, it’s important for emails we send to appeal to that whole group each time we send one. If you want to set yourself up for failure, only send emails out referencing special financing on new units. That’s about as close to a bullet in the head as you can do to your email program.

Only a VERY small percentage of people in your email list are interested in buying a new unit at any given time. Like maybe 2%. 

The best practice is to have content in your email that corresponds with each department in your dealership. Mention your parts department with an offer or two, and service. Show a used unit, and for those Harley guys reading this, Motorclothes. 

The point is, you have more than one department in your dealership, and each represents an opportunity to pique the interest of, and create a sale to a customer. Each needs to be represented in your marketing. If the only thing you’re sending me is email offers for 0% on new units, I’m going to get bored of you really quickly and either stop opening your emails, unsubscribe, or mark you as spam.

‘Ritin – There are some foundational best (and worst) practices when it comes to the actual writing of emails. Let me go ahead and get 2 of the biggest writing worst practices out on the table first….

SUBJECT LINES IN ALL CAPS WITH LOTS OF EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!!!!!

Just knock that the hell off for the love of God. That was cool for like 15 minutes back in the mid-nineties, but since then anyone who receives emails like that has an immediate visceral bad reaction and is significantly less likely to open it than if it were just typed and not SCREAMED. All caps is understood by literally everyone on the internet as yelling, and throwing 14 exclamation points at the end comes off with the same level of desperation as that ex that can’t understand, “Why can’t you just love me?” Stop it. We want our emails to be friendly, not creepy or off-putting.

The absolute best email subject lines create curiosity, or appeal to the desire for gain, or fear of loss. Here’s a couple of good ones:

• Top tips on storing your motorcycle for the winter

There’s an additional fun fact that may not be as well known: email service providers hate them. Your deliverability WILL suffer (from both sins I mention here). Have a good balance of images and text. You’ll have better open and response rates.

Extra party foul points for not linking the images to anything. In doing this, we’ve literally emailed a billboard out….

Best practice in creating emails is, as I mentioned earlier, presenting every department, so that no matter where a customer is in the life/buying cycle, there’s potentially an offer that will appeal to them. In crafting emails this way, your customers will begin to open your emails, and even look forward to doing so because there will be a reason to do so if it’s not always about special financing.

Bonus points if you include small blurbs, or a paragraph or two of content in each email that passes on best practices for riders, or interesting local or dealership info. 

It doesn’t have to be a lot to be interesting.

‘Rithmatic – All of this leads to this part: The math. Following best practices leads to better numbers overall. You get better open rates, click rates, and my favorite math – bank deposits.

Firestorm email goes a long way towards helping you create better emails with hundreds of different powersports-centric designs that contain the building blocks for great emails. If you haven’t seen Firestorm email yet, give us a call and let us walk you through it: 877-242-4472

I’ve written about this before, but there are only 2 types of dealers:

2. Marketing-Driven Dealers. This type of dealer controls (and therefore creates) their own success by marketing to their buying base with the right media and good message every single month.  I’ll jump into the buying base subject below.

While there’s no denying a great economy, a great location and a hot OEM make a difference, being a Marketing-Driven dealer is still the way to go. In fact, the best combination is to be a Marketing-Driven Dealer with a hot OEM when the market is booming!  The challenge is you can’t control the economy. There are peaks and there are valleys. And no dealer can impact the national popularity of the OEM they sell. You can hope these things work in your favor, but hope is not a strategy. 

Have you ever read Stephen Covey’s book, “7 Habits of Highly Successful People”? 

My favorite of the seven habits is the first one… Be Proactive. It’s all about taking responsibility for your life. You see, life doesn’t just happen. Whether you know it or not, your life is completely designed by you. The choices, after all, are yours. You choose happiness. You choose sadness. You choose decisiveness. You choose ambivalence. You choose success. You choose failure. You choose courage. You choose fear.  Every moment, every situation, provides a new choice. And in doing so, it gives you the perfect opportunity to do things differently to produce more positive results. 

Unsuccessful people really struggle with that concept. I mean, they would never choose to be unhappy or unsuccessful, so it must be something or somebody else’s fault. Business is like this too… we get to choose our actions, good or bad, but our choices have consequences, good or bad.  All of the problems, challenges, and opportunities we face fall into two areas. The Circle of Concern and the Circle of Influence.

The Circle of Concern represents all the things over which a person has little or no control, but yet impacts their life. Unsuccessful people focus their time and energy here. They must find something to complain about!  Again, they’d never choose to be unhappy or unsuccessful, so their ‘bad luck’ could never be their fault.  Here’s a word to the wise… if you can’t change it, MOVE ON!

The Circle of Influence represents all the things in your life that you CAN do something about. This is where successful people focus their time and energy. It just so happens that marketing falls in this area. That’s why you’ve got to make the decision to consistently market to the right people using the right media with a good message, and this is being a Marketing-Driven Dealer. 

It starts with your buying base. As a refresher, these are the folks who live close to your dealership and fall into 3 buckets:

1) Active Customers – these guys have spent money with your store in the last 12 months.

2) Inactive Past Customers – they’re past customers, but they haven’t spent money with you the last 12 months. 

3) Conquest Prospects – these are the enthusiasts who live in your top-performing zip codes, but they’ve never spent money with your dealership. 

The majority of your sales over the next 12-months will come from these 3 groups, and the key is consistently staying in front of them, so YOU earn their business when they begin to shop.

Our new Bullseye program is designed to scientifically go after these folks and give them a reason to respond, provide their name, email address, phone number and tell you what they’re most interested in purchasing right now. Then, our staff picks up the phone and calls to set appointments for your sales team so you can sell more units and make more money!

We also utilize our Onboarding System to identify which customers are viewing inventory on your website, email them an approved buy-back offer, and our internal Call Center makes live calls to these folks too. 

I’ve got more to share with you about our Bullseye program and how it predictably grows your sales. For more information give me a shout at 1-877-242-4472 or visit www.psmmarketing.com.  

- Tory

The only four ways your Dealership can grow is:

4. Raise the average value of each customer.

With quality marketing, plus quality training, all four ways can be accomplished simultaneously. By focusing on these four objectives when making your plan you can begin to gain clarity and focus in an otherwise overwhelming and cluttered plethora of options.

Back-to-school lesson three: Your online reputation matters. Consider this. Nearly everyone of your customers is researching your products and services online prior to purchasing. Even if they are an existing customer and stumble upon multiple negative reviews it could impact your business. The consumer’s ability to post online reviews on their smart phones while still standing in your showroom floor creates a very transparent customer satisfaction environment. All other advertising, whether intentional or not, usually directs your customers and prospects to the web. Therefore, if your online reviews are negative, then all other marketing dollars are wasted. If you don’t have a pro-active reputation management service like we offer you need to get one. 

Back-to-school lesson four: All marketing must focus on the right message, to the right target audience, via the right media, at the right time. We call these four critical components of your marketing the Four-Legged Stool. If one leg of your marketing falters it can easily collapse your entire effort. First is a compelling message. It’s what you say about your dealership, yourself, and your products and how you say it. The features, the benefits, the offer, the call to action, and the deadline are all critical pieces of your message. Why should your customer buy from you versus any and every other available option? 

The next leg in the stool is your target audience. Who specifically are you trying to reach? With less than 6% of households owning a powersports product it’s very easy waste a lot of money marketing to those not interested. How can you most effectively ensure that the money you’re spending on marketing is reaching those most likely to respond?

The third leg in the stool is the method of delivery. The media choices are overwhelming from radio, TV, movie theater commercials, direct mail, social media, Google Ads, etc. What media will you choose to send your message in an efficient and affordable manner without wasting money marketing through in-effective and wasteful media to those disinterested? 

And the final leg is timing. By hitching your wagon to relevant information in the customer’s day-to-day life and current ownership cycle you can significantly boost your response by making the message much more compelling. Holidays, birthdays, service reminders, new product launches, etc. are all timing related messages that can significantly strengthen response. 

Back-to-school lesson five: Your marketing should be designed to not only capitalize on those in the market to buy now, but to also establish the desire for purchase for those NOT currently in the market. In today’s market many of your prospects are not just undecided about whether or not to buy from you, but undecided about whether or not to buy at all. And this is one reason that most dealer (and OEM) advertising has a serious flaw. The ad is built under the assumption that the person is already committed to, or is currently shopping for a new vehicle. Thus, the advertising assumes the decision to buy and focuses on product, place, and price. Few back up one very important step to first establish the desire, and therefore ad spend is underutilized. It is the equivalent of trying to sell burgers to an audience with no appetite. 

This is one of the BIG differences in our new Bullseye multi-channel marketing system. It not only accomplishes the critical objective of backing up one step to establish the desire for new and used units, but does it for P &A, MotorClothes® and Service too. All in one integrated campaign. 

Since starting his business, Matt’s continued to see increased growth and demand for his products and services. His passion and commitment to quality are building quite a reputation for him and a growing market share. But, he knows that his quality reputation is paramount to his continued success, he must be proactive in his direct-marketing to reach prospective customers that haven’t yet been influenced by word-of-mouth from his loyal customers.

Matt met with PSM Account Executive, John Ambuehl in late-2018.  They worked together to create a digital marketing plan that would target prospective customers in Matt’s backyard who were searching on Google or browsing Facebook.  The ad campaign was crafted to match Matt’s budget while still having a major impact in his local market.  

John and Matt were able to customize a plan to give Matt’s ATV & Offroad the kind of ROI that a small-to-medium business owner must get when they are putting together a marketing plan.  PSM’s history of creating SEM campaigns for dealerships all over North America at all different sizes, brands, and marketing goals, allowed their team to create the perfect fit for Matt’s dealership.  There was never a feeling of trying to force him into a templated solution created for a generic “powersports dealer.”

The customize campaign kicked off in January 2019 and has seen extremely positive results.  Over 11,000 people in the Tulsa, OK area have seen Matt’s ad on Google. His campaign has over a 16% CTR (Google considers a 2-3% CTR to be a strong campaign).  But, even better is the almost 7% conversion rate.  That means 120 people in Matt’s backyard have seen his ad, visited his website and then…FILLED OUT A FORM, generating quantifiable leads for Matt and his team each month. 

In fact, here’s what Matt had to say about the level of service he received from John during the set-up process and how the campaign is performing for his dealership:

“John went above and beyond during the sign-up process with digital. He explained everything in detail and left nothing in the dark. We have been with them 6 months now and our sales have sky rocketed!!! Thank you John and PSM team!!” 

Rossiter’s Harley-Davidson has been owned and operated by Rick Rossiter for over 25 years. They encourage you to stop in with attractions for everyone! From unique art sculptures to the owner’s personal collection of early model motorcycles and a super friendly staff.

 Two of the biggest challenges in marketing for a Powersports Dealership is finding the right target audience and then actually getting a message delivered to them. Many dealerships rely strictly on Social Media and Email Marketing only to accomplish this. Here’s why this is a challenge:

Facebook: Without boosting your post, only about 5% of customers will see it. So if your page has 5,000 followers, you’re talking about only reaching 250 people.

Email: The average dealership collects 25% emails at the point of purchase. An excellent email open rate is 15%. So for example, a dealership with 10,000 customers in their database will roughly have 2,500 emails. If they are able to achieve a 15% open rate, that means they’ll reach 375 people.

This is the biggest reason the average dealership has roughly 70% of their database not actively spending money with them; they simply aren’t hearing from them. When customers stop hearing from you (regardless of your effort), they develop a sense of apathy and stop coming around.

To combat this, the Sharp Shooter Program focuses on a three-part data strategy. 1st, we focus on your Active Customers, people who’ve spent money with you in the past 12 months. Our job is to keep them active and increase the number of times they visit your dealership this year so they spend more money. The 2nd group we target are your Inactive Customers. This is the single biggest opportunity dealers have to grow their business. As I mentioned above, the average dealership has less than 30% of their customer base actively spending money with them. We know the average customer in the powersports industry spends $750 per year in Parts, Accessories & Service…which means, if they didn’t spend it with you, there’s probably a good chance they spent it with someone else. Our job is to reactivate them so they begin spending money with you again. Lastly, we go after Conquest prospects. These are people who ride what you sell, live in your backyard, but have never bought from you.  Essentially, these are your competitor’s customers and other orphan owners in your market area. Stop and think about this... between these three groups of people, they should really make up the majority of the proven riders in your backyard and ultimately the majority of your sales over the next 12 months.

Once we identify the right target audience, we put a 12-month marketing plan to touch your buying base 52-104 times per year. We know at that frequency, we increase the number of visits to your dealership they’ll make each year, therefore increasing their Annual Customer Value. We’ll also reactivate those customers who haven’t spent money with you in the last 12 months and drive new blood through the door. We use up to 12 different, direct marketing strategies to guarantee your message isn’t getting delivered once, but multiple times per campaign. By simply giving customers more opportunities to respond, we drastically increase response. Each media channel incentivizes folks to complete a survey to tell us who they are and what they want to buy from you…generating leads for every department in the dealership. As long as your message focuses on what’s in it for the customer and you commit to the process, you will absolutely own this group of customers and make them immune to other offers from other dealers.

There were 211 surveys completed, which created a total of 201 in P&A, Service, and MotorClothes, PLUS 50 responses for a new or used bike. 

There’s a new buzz of excitement around the office here in Atlanta. For nearly a decade, we’ve cranked out the single best way to drive traffic to dealerships in the industry – the Sharp Shooter program. It’s worked week in, week out, month-to-month, year-to-year, during the riding season and outside the riding season. The Sharp Shooter has been amazing, and we have the data to prove it. Back in 2009 when we first launched the Sharp Shooter, we had done all the research and combined the best of all marketing worlds at the time to craft a program that incorporated marketing best practices to cover all 4 bases for a perfect campaign: right market, right media, right message, at just the right time. And it worked.

It was revolutionary in the industry, and we were all very proud of how we were able to provide a valuable service to dealers, handling the marketing end of their dealerships so they could focus their energy on selling more units and making more money.  

Fast forward a decade, and now we have a new program we’re rolling out that we think is as exciting as the Sharp Shooter was. It’s called the Bullseye program. Because we’re fun like that. 

Over the past several years, dealers have shared with us the pain points they have when marketing, and we’ve developed this program to help.

The Sharp Shooter is event based marketing – which is a great way to market, but not all dealers can successfully host events. Sometimes staffing is an issue, parking lot size, location, weather, and a host of other things can come into play that make events difficult for some.  

The Bullseye is targeted in much the same way as the Sharp Shooter, but doesn’t have to be event driven. This helps dealers for whom hosting events is a hardship. 

The media methods used are a little different with this program as well. We still use direct mail – easily one of the best marketing media on the planet – and it isn’t permission based, so it makes conquest easy. But instead of callblasts (like with the Sharp Shooter) we use a combination of Google Ads and social media to reach out to prospects.

Side note here: there’s nobody in the business better at using Google and Facebook to market powersports dealerships than PSM Marketing. Yeah, I said that. 

We’ve been partnered up with Google for over a decade. We’re Google award-winning Premier Partners. We participate in Google focus groups, beta new Ads and Analytics functionality, and participate in new product reviews. 

Another pain point for many dealers that we’ve been hearing about for a long time is lead follow-up. We generate leads for dealers. A lot of them. For many dealers, efficiently following up with leads and turning them into sales is a challenge. As part of this program, we can use our in-house call center to follow up with your leads, set appointments for your sales team, and let them focus on what they’re good at – sales. 

Give us a shout and we can cover the program in more detail and show you how it can work for your dealership.