Those words were actually said to me but I'll get to that in a little bit. 

Well the dog days of summer are upon us. The showrooms are filled to capacity and your next available service appointment is in two weeks! Every marketing piece you've done has been a home run. Your biggest problem is where to park all these customer cars and all the managers can think of is how sweet their commissions are going to be. Some are even thinking that, at this rate, I can retire in a couple of years and buy an island in the Caribbean. How many of you DP's and GM's can say that?

I'm guessing very few. The best store I ever worked in was a large Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge store on Long Island. Wonderfully managed and record braking months were the norm. We not only had a marketing calendar but we had a weekly meeting to discuss what each department was doing and how we were doing with our budget. What was working and what wasn't. Every marketing vendor that came through the door had the next best idea. It usually combined all our marketing into one easy to use product. Well I'm still waiting to see that product and I haven't been in that store in 4 years. Don't get me wrong. There are many companies out there that are close. The question has shifted from what to offer your potential customer to get them in the door, to how do we market to them?

Direct mail pieces are a dinosaur. I live in and apartment complex with mailboxes outside and a trash can right next to it. The trash can is always filled with the direct mail pieces that you paid about $1.00 each to send out.

Newspaper ads are huge chunks of the budgets. Those big full page ads...tremendous offers...all in color with that big banner going across the top. Sounds wonderful. I don't get newspapers though and even the publishers will tell you that subscribers to newspapers are at an all-time low. I get my news on the internet like millions of others. Blast me an email and it's likely to go into my spam folder. Phone calls.....I'm on the "Do Not Call Registry". So how are you going to market your store to me? How are you going to get me to come in your service drive?

Back to my Ford store with no advertising for fixed operations. What we ended up doing was going to the community. There are many things you can get involved in that cost little or no money. I got involved with Toys For Tots as an area coordinator. I arrange for a US Marine and the Mayor of the town to come to our store to take pictures and kick off the campaign. We wrapped up empty boxes form our parts department and filled the back of the pickup truck with them. The took pictures of me handing a toy to the Marine Corporal with the F-150 in the background and tire sales banners on the wall behind the truck. The story was front page of the local paper which ran it for weeks. We had collection boxes with our name on it all over town and made our own flyer offering customers a $9.95 oil change if they came in with a toy. The mayor and town council gave me an award during their televised town council meeting where we also announced our "Holiday Safety Night". For that, we had the fire department come over and set fire to a tree to show how to properly extinguish it. We has the police there showing how to install car seats correctly and we also had a full shop of cars having a "Free Holiday Safety Inspection" performed on their vehicles. And luckily for us, Ford was and still is one of the only manufacturers to advertise service and parts on TV as much as they do new cars. That year, we increased our fixed gross profit by 38%.

So if you are working on a tight budget, look at your community. Get involved. Seek out community leaders and ask how you can help. Sponsoring car shows has been very popular for sometime now. 

What are your best methods of advertising? Where are you spending the majority of your advertising? Are you tracking it yourself or do you just look at the numbers your vendors provide you with? What is your plan for the remainder of 2012 and beyond?