People often times ask if they should schedule their social content posting when marketing with Twitter and Facebook. The short answer is yes, you should certainly schedule. For every industry, including automotive, there are times of day that see more activity…

In hindsight, it’s easy to see that it was only a matter of time. Facebook has been such an amazing marketing tool for businesses for a couple of years now, allowing effort and proper strategy to circumvent spending money on the platform. If a business worked hard and applied the proper techniques, they could perpetuate a formidable marketing strategy that helped with branding, drove traffic,…

The worlds of public relations and marketing have gone through two major changes in the last decade. The first one came with the mass adoption of the internet as our primary source of information about businesses. The second came a few of years ago when social media became a mainstream method of letting your friends, family, and often the rest…

“How can I get more traffic?” is one of the MAIN questions people ask me.

But last weekend, while I was preparing for a presentation, I had a HUGE “AHA!” moment.

Looking for “traffic” is a HUGE mistake.

Why?

Keep reading.

The #1 reason why you don’t want traffic

Traffic makes us focus on the raw numbers, but…

I stopped using Carfax years ago and will never go back.

For a while now we've been discussing the concept of posting "sharable" content on your website to support your "money pages" and "SEO pages". Here's a quick breakdown of the three to act as a refresher:

• Money Pages - These are the pages that are designed to generate leads.…

Are you in good hands? Sounds so cliche, but it stands to question, whose hands are you in anyway? Is your month cradled in the hands of Lady Luck-gambling on a good month; or are you fixated on grabbing the reigns and taking control of your career?  Your mom was right, there is safety in numbers. Safeguard your month by insuring it with more than enough…

I am BEYOND proud of John Hinderer Honda and their AWESOME Business Development Center!!

And ESPECIALLY Rob Stewart. Rob is a new employee at the dealership (less than 4 months). He had no prior automotive sales experience. This man made almost 3,000 phone calls himself, he followed the Dealer Synergy process EXACTLY and POOF! He is responsible for almost 80 units getting delivered LAST MONTH!

I have been in Automotive Internet Sales for almost 14 years…

http://www.internetsales20group.com

http://www.dealeretraining.com

http://www.facebook.com/dealeretraining

http://www.twitter.com/dealeretraining

Stan Sher, CEO…

To continue with my training discussion, we make all of our staff go through proper and intensive training, sometimes "boring training", get them wound up and fired up with this new found knowledge, with this great plan. Then comes the hard part.....We forget to provide the tools necessary to do the job for one reason or another. Whether it's budget, shipping or timing, sometimes we drop the ball. If "WE" are going to put forth a plan, then make our team go through the training, formula and…

Hootsuite has been on a tear over the last year. They've picked up a bunch of agreements with the various social media sites. They have a hip interface and a good reputation for quality of service, uptime, and ease of use. I like Hootsuite and use it for many of our accounts, but it's not my primary social post scheduling tool.

I like…

http://www.internetsales20group.com

The Internet Sales 20 Group

Recently the Internet Sales 20 Group just concluded in Downtown Chicago and it was a huge success! It wasn’t just a “regular” workshop or…

How many people have gotten a bad review? Yes you suck! There is somebody out there who’s going to say you suck. You don’t. You’re no better or no worse than the dealer, restaurant or hardware store down the street. I hope your better. But you are going to get a bad review. You cannot satisfy 100% of the people all the time. But, A BAD REVIEW IS A GOOD THING!!!! If all you have are good reviews you are less believable. If you went to a restaurant website and…

Are you tired of having your staff complain about "The Training"? Remind them that they aren't perfect and neither are you. If we all were "perfect" at our jobs, then none of these training companies would be in business. We do our training, and maybe if they saw us doing it they wouldn't complain about the "boring training". Make the training fun. Turn it into a competition. Have prizes or rewards of some sort. Then show them what it's like to make a good commission or cut time on the…

This is a picture of some money.

If a vendor offered you all this cash, you wouldn’t refuse it, would you? But at ActivEngage, we find that some dealers are turning their nose up at big mounds of cash. We’re asking our friends to reconsider throwing away money by neglecting a big part of their dealership operations.

I’m speaking about …

I am writing this from the airport in Manchester, NH as I head back to Wilmington, NC.  Hurricane Sandy has left her mark on the North Carolina Coast and is heading north for what forecasters think will be a huge event.  I'll be glad if I just make it home today.       Many of the homes up here are equipped with back up generators to handle loss of power issues.  Stores were selling out of extra water and batteries as folks prepared for the worst.  I think we can all agree this is just being…

How do we define “thought leadership,” or more specifically, how should the term be applied to the retail automobile industry? According to Wikipedia, the term “thought leader” was coined in 1994 by Booz Allen Hamilton, a Fortune 500 corporate consulting firm, and it was used to describe individuals or firms that introduced business ideas that “merited attention.” Without question, thought leaders tend to be the most successful people or organizations within their respective fields. However,…