Automotive Digital Marketing Unveiled: A Candid Conversation

In this episode of Automotive Digital Marketing Unveiled: A Candid Conversation, we sit down with the Lewis Brothers from Crossroad Conversations to explore the evolution of dealership marketing. From traditional tactics like radio and billboards to cutting-edge digital strategies, we dive into the tools and insights driving success today. Learn how targeted social ads, audience segmentation, and creative storytelling are transforming the automotive landscape. Whether you're a dealer or marketer, this episode is packed with actionable takeaways for staying ahead in the industry. Listen now! 

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Contact us:

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Transcript

Hey there, welcome to Word on the Street. Today we've got something a little bit different. I did a podcast with the Lewis Brothers at a Lewis Auto Group in Fayetteville. They've got their own podcast called Crossroads Conversations. And they did a recording with me and we were able to talk about some unique stuff like what a dealership can do with a shoestring budget, just testing out five hundred dollars, where to get started and how to connect with a community in authentic ways and striking a balance between old school values with cutting edge digital tactics. We also just talk about their family business and how to thrive in modern markets and exploring the future of automotive advertising. If this sounds interesting, you're in the right spot. Let's get started.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Crossroads Conversations with the Lewis Brothers, where we aim to share real stories about running a successful family business, working for university, and pouring back into the community that keeps our door open.

We're your host, Matt Shelby Taylor, and we bring you relevant mobile business advice and automotive insights that are sure to change the way you look run the business. Maybe you can throw in a plug for free people to us. Alright. Welcome back, everybody. Crossroad Conversations with the Lewis Brothers.

We're your host, Shelby, Matt, and Taylor, and we are unpacking it today. So last week, we introduced dealer o m g, and this week, we're bringing them back. But we're flipping the script, And we're gonna ask them some questions and learn kinda what they do, how they do it, what they've learned that works, maybe what doesn't work, of this size budget, that size budget, and everything else, and kinda show how it makes sense. And maybe as a small business, how it could work for you, whether it be dealer, OMG, or just anything else social wise, to make sure we do that. Absolutely.

And to give you a quick recap, you can always dive back into it and look at it there. But we had a lot of fun answering questions about our culture, the building process of of adding different things into our whole new facility and then continuing to grow on that. More and more of that is packed in the last week's episode, so make sure and go and check that out. Also, you can always check out our our freshest inventory on lewissuperstore.com. You bet you can.

Hey. We gotta talk about what we drove today. Now it's end of the year, so we all packed in what we refer to as a cabin chassis. You know what I mean? And so when we came up, I know you're thinking when I pulled up today, you're like, where's the bed, Matt?

I was like, it's ready to upfit for anybody at the end of the year, you know, whether you want a utility bed on it, a flatbed, a hay bed, or a dump bed. These vehicles we've got in stock, and I think when we counted the other day, we got a little over a 100 vehicles that are classified in the commercial atmosphere that qualify for that section 179. So if you need to save some money on taxes and upgrade your fleet at the same time, we are section 179 experts, so our team can be able to help you out there. But, man, we could tell, experts, so our team can be able to help you out there. But, man, we could tell, but just the way the suspension was working on the way up here, the payload that this thing's gonna be able to haul.

And what that means in real world is it's heavy duty. Heavy duty, like, haul all the way. So whatever bed you wanna put on it, and whether you want something with a bed or you need a van, you know, with a bulkhead, we've got the commercial. And don't forget the commercial service center. Oh, man.

That that is so good. So if you got a RV, if you've got a box truck, if you got a medium duty vehicle, whether you're in a municipality or, you know, shout out maybe Ozarks Electric out there or one of the RV people, We can get you taken care of with our dedicated commercial repair facilities, or we can handle up to rigs 75 feet long. 75 feet long. We we're, building our team of the, specialized technicians to be able to handle that. We are not gonna redo the shag carpet inside your RV.

No. No. We can't do that. Will work on your v ten and your transmission and all things manufactured of the original chassis. So just, if you want your AC worked on from the top, I can look at it and tell you if it does or doesn't work.

Mhmm. But past that, you're gonna need to go to your local RV place, but we've got that. And so all things commercial, we got it handled. We sure do got it handled. Hey.

Today's episode, I'm really excited about because one of the things everybody in this room I know really enjoys is is marketing and advertising. How do you get your word out? How do you get your story out? How do you get your specials out there to all your customers buying? In our case, it's Northwest Arkansas and beyond.

We've got some long time business partners of ours that are coming on, and these guys have really helped us move the needle, and I won't spoil it all before we get to introducing them. They're with dealer OMG. They're based out of Austin, and and these guys have got unique stories. We're going to have Ashley and Andrew both on here. They'll tell us a little bit about their selves.

But then, not only talk about digital, but then they found a niche in digital on how to make businesses successful no matter what their ad budget was. Yeah. And that's one of the things and and we'll pinpoint and give them a specific question and kinda let them expound on that. But we realized you could spend your entire year's budget in social and not really get anything for it. No.

No. You know what I mean? They'll take your money. They'll take your money in a fight. You guys.

No. No. No. No. No.

We're talking about, social marketing. They're what? Post. Yeah. Boost your post and, like, who who do you wanna market to?

It's, like, all these people in China. Like, they're great. Nice guy, but, like, hard to ship a car over there. So, we teamed up with DealerOMG, and and they've just been a great fit for us. So question I wanna ask, to either one of you guys, and you can just pick in, is the shift the evolution of marketing as you guys have got into marketing.

And you see a shift from traditional you know, we're talking newspaper, we're talking radio, to digital. How did you guys find the space that makes sense for your business to be able, you know, you I've heard you guys define this before that you guys are an inch wide and a mile deep. Like, that's how deep you get into it. How did you find that shift of, like, that's our part that we wanna go into, and here's how we're good at it. I could answer that.

Okay. So, Andrew, dive in and tell me how you found it. That. Okay. So, Andrew, dive in and tell me how you found it.

To be here again. Oh, yes. Can you guys hear me right now? Yeah. Yeah.

I'm good to go. Where you on there? Okay. Good. When you're talking about, like, traditional TV, radio, print, billboards, I've found a lot of ways because my background like, when I first got out of college, I worked at a billboard company designing billboards.

And I found, like, the same type of creative that stop that that lets people understand quickly what you're trying to advertise while you're driving down the highway past the billboard, you're going 81 miles an hour, It's the same type of creative that can stop people's thumbs when they're scrolling through their news feed, through their stories. And my background is design and marketing. And so I worked with billboards, then I started working with radio stations. This is, like, 2,004. Okay.

And then Facebook had opened up an office in Austin, and I was helping some radio and billboard clients set up their Facebook profiles. And I ran into Facebook's office, like, hey. I'm trying to do this, setting up their pages. It seems like profile is not the right thing. Should I do pages?

And then how do I start advertising? And they'd offer they offered me a job as a local business consultant at Facebook. And at first, I was like, no. Well, actually, yes. I'd yeah.

So I had to go through all these rounds of interviewing at Facebook where we were able to work for for a number of years and get a good front row education on how to leverage Facebook's platform for small business. Before my business partner, Keith Turner, and I branched off and, started our own marketing firm, DealerOMG, after finding some success with with, auto dealers. Then we had some patient dealers that sat next to me as I asked them what's the difference with the Internet department and the BDC, and what's the difference DMS, and how can I integrate with your systems, and how do you guys make money? So it was certainly, yeah, it was certainly a pretty linear path from from going from billboards to where we are now. Yeah.

And I think that that definitely defines evolution of, like, a and and see an opportunity, you know, when it shows its head. You know? Like, you you were going into Facebook to kinda learn, and not necessarily looking for a job. And then, like, hey. What about this?

And so then you're like, okay. Maybe I can learn something from Facebook. Let's get on that team. And then you and Keith kinda created this thing and was like, hey. I can build a business to this.

Ashley, how did you get into the, the digital marketplace and kinda what's your background on that? Yeah. So, I feel like everyone in auto has a weird story about how they got into auto and marketing. I was in college for, fashion merchandising, and I started working at a dealership part time helping them create, email templates to send out, and, like, responding to leads late at night and things like that in the, business development center. So it kind of started my digital journey.

But I have watched it go from, you know, email campaigns, TV, newspaper, all the way into social. And when I was in college, I were a couple years into my, dealership journey. Facebook started to become really popular, and I was graduating. And they wanted to keep me around because they liked what I was doing at the dealership. And they were like, there's this thing called Facebook, and we don't really know what to do with it or want to understand it.

So can you, like, take this and run with it? So I just kinda started building everything from the ground up. And I think at that time, we had 4 or 5 locations. And then we grew to 26 locations and it the evolution happened there also with, you know, Facebook and then Instagram and then TikTok. So it was a nice long journey.

So then how did you, transition from wanting to do it from a dealership level then to being able to a agency? Yes. I left that part out, didn't I? Okay. There there's a whole Part of my job, I was actually running paid social campaigns, and trying to shoot content and run paid social campaigns all as one person for 26 rooftops was hard and a lot.

So we kind of found DealerOMG. I think it digital dealer or somewhere. And one of my GMs came to me and was like, hey, we wanna sign up with these people. I think they're gonna help us, you know, do more campaigns kind of the way you are doing them. Because we never really found anybody that was doing boutique campaigns specific to us.

It was always, this is what you get when you sign up for social advertising, and we're gonna push your inventory. But no one would ever help us with service or parts or, recruiting or anything like that. So we had signed up with DealerOMG, at one of our stores, and I got to know Andrew and Dave pretty well. And it kinda just helped me realize my evolution from the dealership of helping I wanted to help more dealers with what I had learned and what I had built in social. So that's kinda what led to that evolution was coming on board with DealerOMG to help more dealerships, expand their social reach.

Gotcha. Very good. Well, it's it's definitely a fun fun growing role in the market. Joined us. I sent I sent a handwritten letter over to the dealer saying, hey.

We Ashley is starting with us. I just want you to know I'm a big fan of the way that you guys do business. We're not trying to recruit a bunch of your staff. It's just, you know, there's a handful of people in the industry that speak English, digital, and automotive can can kinda translate in that little world. And it's like I I just wanted to let the dealer know, we're not coming after any more people.

Like, this just popped up. Yeah. Because I I know what it feels like to get poached. That's a good point. No.

No. It, you know, it it it always happens. Right? Whether you're getting poached from or or you're the one out there poaching, you know, you can't be the nice guy, you know, or the nice person and never, like because I'm sitting here, I'm like, dang, Ashley. We're looking for someone like you.

But I'm not. I'm not. I just I just need your sister, you know. So No. But, you know, so that's one of those things that always happens.

You know? But, so tell me in your in your digital digital marking, you know, if if no one knows anything about what you guys do or how you do, what does a a sample campaign look like from you guys? If I could wave every store's a little bit different with what they need, and it's through a quick 32nd conversation you can start to identify what they need help with. If it's not, you know, just you know, it's always gonna be sales upfront. And And what I always encourage our dealerships to start with, whether they're executing it, their in house marketing team's executing it, we're doing it, is to start with their data.

I feel like it's completely underutilized for dealerships to really understand and and know how to quickly leverage their own database. And it's not just their database, it'll be their website traffic too. So without exceptions, like are the best performing people to reach are gonna be people that are in your d m s, people that are in your c r m, and people that have come by your website. And what that looks like instead of us carpet bombing out of all of Fayetteville, we have a group of people that know who our dealership is because they purchased from us in the past. And as soon as somebody purchases, a lot of our objective is to stop advertising inventory and price in front of them and to start saying thank you.

You know, like a sincere, quick thank you message to a really small audience. So if you bought in the last 90 year 90 days, the ad going through your news feed can be a sincere thank you. You know, welcome to the community. Please follow our page. Please like our page.

And now we can start to grow our organic followers and use them as, a third party endorsement to put their name in our ads now. But, also, they can be registered, and and they can follow our content. And then, you know, introduce them to the parts department, introduce them to the service manager, introduce them to the to the service tech who's been with the dealership for 25 years, and do what we can with our database and a really limited marketing budget, because it's a really small audience, to try and get customers to go from the sales department to the service department. Because what we're facing as an industry is, like, 30% on average of customers are going from the sales to the service department. And I'm noticing too is, like, that's a a metric of vehicle detail page views and cost per click and lead gen.

It is a big component of of digital marketing, but there's also things that we can start to look at and that could be your service retention rate. And let's run this campaign for 8 months and spend $40 a month to see if we can get people from the sales to the service department, the advertising, and if we can impact that percentage of people and start to grow loyalty with our own customer base. So once we've consumed all the dealers' database to to be advertising to everybody who's bought from us always, there's no reason we shouldn't be advertising to everybody in our database, especially if they still live in our market, Then let's look at conquesting and going after Tesla owners, going after Jeep owners with the new Ford Conquest initiatives. I think that was a long winded way of answering your question there. No.

That that was really great. And I think that points out that it's not just a simple photo of a car with a carousel that says, hey. There's great deals on these cars. It goes out to a blanket. Even if you dive into the marketing a little bit or the the analytics of 15 not 15, 20 to 35 year old males and females in this ZIP code or within 30 miles.

And I love I love that. And I think that's why we're a partner with you guys is that it's a 3 60 message if it's not just selling a car, it's selling the experience. So thank you so much, for you guys, kinda breaking that down of how we went from traditional, to now digital, kinda what that looks like. And we're gonna dive into our first, fun fact quiz of the week. So this is, I'll ask both of you guys what you think it is, but then we won't tell you exactly what it is till then.

So the first question is the automotive industry, has how many employees, how many Americans? So the automotive industry employs how many Americans? The first choice a is 1,500,000. B is 5,600,000, c is 9,900,000, or d is 15,200,000. So just to recap, the automotive industry employs how many Americans?

A, 1,500,000, b, 5,600,000, c, 9,900,000, or d, 15,200,000 auto workers. Hey, guys. We make sure that Craig and our team puts us multiple, multiple poll answer questions, multiple choice. That's what I was looking for. Answers there so we can at least have a shot at it.

Yeah. So I'm not saying, hey, just give me a number. Right? Hey. Before we dive into the next section, I do wanna peel back because I think it's important for the listeners here.

And and, Andrew, this would be a good question for you. And then, Ashley, too, your background being in the automotive dealership, you know, pretty rapidly, the industry changed. I can remember when I first started working with the marketing and advertising, when I was working with my father on this, it was, hey, gorilla market the area. Because before, really, the Internet and digital marketing got big, you could kinda take this approach in certain areas. And if you just did the guerilla marketing, you covered everything.

You know? So, like, you're talking about earlier, if we were on the billboards and and we we got in the newspaper, especially on the weekend edition, and on the radio, we got to drive time. You know, maybe on TV, we got on the sports review or or the weather stuff. We could pretty much guerilla market the entire area without absolutely blowing our budget. And I know Shelby talked about it earlier.

With digital wise, whether it's Google or it's, you know, pre roll or if it's on social, you can put as big a budget as you want out there, and they'll gobble the whole thing up. They'll find the audience. You know, where in the past, you're like, okay. I can make this fit and we hit everybody. Now that's changed.

You can't just guerilla market everybody. So I'm sure you guys have seen the same way, but then what led you all the way down the path of going, okay. I understand digital. I went and visited the Facebook office and that got me on there, but what made it click going, I'm on to something to help people hyperfocus in digital where we're now in a world where we can't grill market everything? In in my experience, it's, like, being at like, the being able to track things in digital advertising can be a 2 edged sword.

It's like the the being on on the drive time on radio, having a, you know, a a coveted spot on TV, getting involved with endorsements, getting a DJ to come by the dealership and set up a, you know, set up a booth outside the dealership. Like, all those things were kinda tough to measure, but it was kinda comfortable not knowing. You know, it's like, we're getting exposure. Business is okay. Let's just keep doing it.

Let's try out new creative ideas. We're now so measurable down to, you know, what's our cost per lead, what's our cost per click, that I think a lot of, like, what makes marketing work, we kinda lose sight of. And we start wanting to game the system of what drives the cheapest result of that one metric we're trying to follow. If it's VDP views, what's the cheapest way to get VDP views? Now we'll call that a win and kinda lose sight of what are who are we getting in front of?

What are they seeing? And something I kinda try to stress with our team is, like, 9% of people click on ads at all. So 9% of people are actually just clicking ads. So if we put all of our attention and our money into the bucket of clicks, that's gonna be just 9% potentially of our customer base. Maybe more Nissan drivers click ads, you know, fewer, Ferrari dealers click ads.

But, like, 9% is just a small fraction of the customer base we're trying to reach. So what's the next smart substitution for that ROI? And it's gonna be reach. It's gonna be visibility. It's gonna be engagement.

It's gonna be the amount of time that they watched a video that we put on their on their Facebook, on their Instagram stories, on TikTok stories. If people are engaging with us, then we can start to, you know, look at more meaningful metrics beyond just those clicks. Ashley, what's your what's your experience been like? Yeah. So on the dealership side, it I I kinda echo what you said.

Like, everybody, especially in auto, I feel like everyone wants that instant gratification. They want the leads. They want to sell the car. So trying to get them involved in shooting a funny video for TikTok or Instagram, they don't always see the value in that because they don't see that ROI right away. So a lot of my time is spent, like, educating the managers on how this is gonna make a difference.

Know someone might not see it today and come by a car, but, you know, social is there to educate and entertain. And the more you educate and entertain, the more they like, know you, and trust you, and then they're gonna come by from you. So it's really just kinda teaching them the long game, I guess, is the best way to put it with the Yes. Social media and that digital marketing. Yeah.

I think you're dead on there. Yeah. No. I think that makes sense. I just kinda wanna walk that up.

People out to help with creative at dealerships now. And, yeah, trying to help dealerships, like, create ideas of, like, hey. Let's not let's not shoot this vertically. Let's shoot it or or not shoot horizontally. Let's shoot it vertically.

Let's make it with the intention of it being in stories and reels and unique platforms that other dealerships aren't using yet. Yeah. I think that's important because that's a shift of a mindset. And, you know, we went through that. Now if we had Craig in the room when we were talking about our whole marketing department, we had to peel back the layers and go, okay.

We're now hiring somebody to be a great salesperson or a great service adviser. And then all of a sudden, we wanted to get them to be good at shooting video. You know? Like like, we know we know that that's a platform that they need to use to grow our customer database, but they're not any good at that. So I think you're on to something that is simple as, like, hey.

Rotate your phone the other way. Let's let's go in and actually show them. And we found value in than actually having somebody internally to come up with that content so that then they could use. Yeah. Absolutely.

A person's fault? Yeah. It's been Is it Craig doing that? No. Right now, we actually have, we got a team under Craig, but but David, who is is really good with Adobe and Creative, he was a sales professional we had, and we ended up moving him into that position where then he's helping us capture the content.

He's putting it in the right format, and then we put it in the marketing channel in Slack that then everybody can grab and can use. So it it's professional. It's got the same message, and it's ready to go. And was that deliberate? Like, you noticed that he had a good, penchant for making content just personally or for the store and then he said, okay.

This person, let's get him out of sales? You know, we do a a good amount of that. We were just talking about it in a manager's meeting yesterday. You know, if you know an employee will show up on time and have a great attitude, but is not maybe not hitting all the KPIs for that specific department. And not to say that David was or wasn't or any employee was or wasn't, but we just see that they don't have that twinkle in the eye of their 1st day that you hire them or a weekend to it.

That's just a conversation needs to be had. It's like, tell me, you know, tell me what other things excite you or, you know, what you might be interested in doing, and here's kind of our growth plan. Do you see a fit for here? And we do that often Mhmm. With our employees.

And so that was the thing with David as we challenged, our team. Hey. We need you to make your own creative social so that we can springboard off of it because there's there's a whole lot to be said about organic coming from this person's profile and this person's profile. And he was really good at that. And then that was something I just kept saying to these 2.

It was like, hey, David is really good at this. And he was good at sales, but I was like, let's have that conversation and see if that'd be something that he'd wanna do full time for us. And when we asked that, you could see his his face light up, like, I could do that as a job. Mhmm. You know, the other was a side product, you know, of what he did to create income to sell cars.

I was like, yeah. You know, that's something that we're looking in. He was like, oh, I would love that. Yeah. Absolutely.

He he took off with that. So it's her own. Grown. You're good. Good.

Good. He took off on his own? Yeah. It's like because that guy is a I was just saying he took Yeah. He took off.

Sorry. I think I got a a short delay. But, when when there's something like that at the dealership, it's a huge, it's a huge piece of ammunition for somebody like us to capture some of that content and just have it archived to where we can put it in front of specific audiences. If he's doing a fun walk around of a a Jeep Gladiator, let's get in front of everybody who's looked at Jeep Gladiators in the past and start targeting them with that same ad that he's created of the walk around. And then having some like, I wish more dealers had, like, a Craig too who can get in the nuts and bolts and in the weeds of of what's working, what's not, and, you know, the data, and then have somebody that has more of the the right brain artist, you know, coming up with a creative side.

It's a good a good one two punch in our in our experience. And that just, like, parking there for a second, that's something we always haven't won at. Mhmm. You know, we we have lots of ideas and we kinda put so much effort to each idea for so long. But, that's something that we've talked about and, Craig and team, we've focused them to help us with that.

And we do so much, and it's important to us. We like doing it, but it's also like just like I talked about the Red Bull thing, of the content that's entertaining or informative. We've challenged them. Like, last week, we, we had local one of our local, football teams that went to the state championship. And, so we were supporting them.

We've sponsored their field and kind of sponsored other parts and pieces through that. And we said, hey, we need to be at their pep rally and get some of that organic content of supporting them. And so then it was it was a great thing of us kind of a plan coming together. Here's how we're gonna support them. We got beanies for all the boys because and then the coaches and the whole team because it was cold out.

You know, it was a way for us to support them and give them something that they needed. And so then we said, hey. Here's a pep rally. So I gave to Craig. Craig took him and team.

They went out there. They created the content, and then David edited that content, put it on Slack, and so then everyone could organically take that content and support someone else. But in the same time, we're talking it's on Red Bull's page, I e Red Bull is us. And we're saying, hey. We're so proud of the Farmington Cardinals.

Hey. We're so proud of the Elkins Elks. Look what they're doing. And it's just powered by Lewis Automotive Group. So getting our team to be able to put that whole thing together, we're just now getting our legs on that.

But it we have big things coming, you know, of challenging that team to be able to help us that of all the things that we support and sponsor. So we're not constantly just saying, hey, buy this for this. Absolutely. Hey. A fun thing to challenge both of y'all and either, either of y'all can answer it.

But and this is kind of to to open it up and broaden it to to be where anyone asking, hey. I'm not really in marketing a whole lot. I don't have a whole lot to allocate to that. But say anyone comes to you and they say I've got $500 to spend in this excess amount, what would you tell them to do with that $500? I've always just pointed people to just boosting a post and stepping on the gas on a piece of content that seems like it's getting a little bit more traction and just seeing what it looks like to go from, you know, reaching the 80 people that organically see it to reaching with with 5 with I think you said $500.

Yeah. 500. At a $10 cost per 1,000, you get 50,000 impressions. You know? So all of a sudden, 50,000 people can see that post.

And just see the engagement, the comments, you know, potentially some sharing, and just get a small feel for what it feels like to start getting, more exposure through people's news feeds, maybe through their stories. And then that'll help kind of, like, give you a sense for what it feels like to to get those additional eyeballs. Ashley, what would you do with $500 in a perfect world? Yeah. I I agree.

Either boosting or putting money behind some kind of community outreach that that you're doing, like you're hosting a pet adoption event or something that you're doing in the community, that goes so much farther than saying, I have all these jeeps for sale. We're gonna put $500 and send it out to as many people as we can, to try to get them to come buy a jeep. People want to know that you're involved in the community and that you care, and you're not just there to sell them something. So, yeah, I would definitely put it towards something that's involved with, community outreach. Let me peel the layer back and and challenge all even a little bit more.

And and the reason we came up with that $500 was we've got all types of business leaders out there that are listening to this podcast. So they may be a plumber. They may be in the HVAC business. You know? They may have a dry cleaning business or whatever else it may be, and they they're going, hey.

We we've gotta grow our reach. We don't have 1,000 to spend every single month, but, hey. I got $500. What what what should I do? So that's where that question came from.

So now let's take it a layer deeper. As you said, okay. $500, we could put it behind some type of post. How would you spread it out? You know, if they're sitting there going, okay.

I'm willing to invest $500, and it's a lot to them. How do they spread that out? You know? Should should they just do it on 3 day campaigns? Should they spread it out over 30 days?

Should it just be on one post with the CTA to it? If you don't mind, try to kinda unpack maybe some tips for our audience out there. Facebook makes it easy and so does Google to put in your credit card and start spending money. As you guys alluded to earlier, like, it's it's easy to start spending money. It's hard to really measure what you're able to get out of it.

That that's actually meaningful to your to your business. And it's different if you're an HVAC company compared to a dealership that has a BDC and a big call center on what your infrastructure is like that can help. It's like I I think when I start talking with a new dealership, it's kind of getting a quick feel for what they have internally that we can start help start start helping to highlight. Like, if they've got a big BDC with, some assassins in it that are twiddling their thumbs because they don't have a lot of leads, let's really focus on a lot of lead gen even though they're gonna convert to sales at maybe 2%, but just to get them busy versus another dealership that percent, but just to get them busy versus another dealership that doesn't have a lot of people that are able to work leads. They we don't have any automation set up yet.

Let's dial back on on lead gen for a store like that and just focus on the blocking tackling of getting traffic through the website, getting traffic to, you know, their trade in appraisal tools, getting service reminders to people who who bought from us in the past. So if there's somebody with some technical ability to simply export an Excel document from, the DMS and import that into Facebook Ads Manager, that's gonna be the the hot ticket for the dealer to be able to target everybody who's purchased over 2 years ago and spend that $500 right there, and that could be 20,000 people. So with that $500, you get 50,000 impressions. You're gonna get each person a few times each, going through their news feeds, starting to reconnect with customers who haven't shopped you in over 2 years, and could simply be like, follow our page, like our business, you know, not buy anything, but just simply remind them about where they purchased their vehicle and an opportunity without thinking for more than a second, except for just to tap a button to reconnect with you guys. Hey, Andrew.

I think you hit on something that's really important there, and I was hoping you would go into a couple deeper pieces, and you did is it's you gotta ask another question of, okay, I got $500, but where do I have bandwidth available in my business? Mhmm. You know, before I open one of these valves, can I handle it when it starts flowing out the other end? And and you hit on that. So I'll I'll let you expound on that just a little bit for our listeners on how can you identify could you handle more phone calls, or do you have a BDC, or or where can we open a valve up before we just invest the money Or you can actually handle it, and it you don't have a bunch of messages that come in, and then they just sit there dormant.

Yeah. It's it's looking at it's easy up upfront to look at sales because that cures all, and that's, you know, the number 1, 2, and 3 on the GM and a lot of the principles radars is sales. And what do we have from an inventory level? What incentives do we have? And if we have a ton of pickup trucks, we don't need an incentive to come down from the manufacturer in my experience.

We can have a manager special, and let's just make it up right now, and let's agree on it, and let's run that on these different channels that we can quickly control, maybe radio, TV, but definitely on social, definitely on display networks and OTT, where we can run all of our inventory that's been on our lot for over 80 days, is now in the manager special. And here's everything that we can throw into the, discount or the perception of a discount or perception of an offer or, you know, an extended service contract that comes with the purchase of the vehicle to, you know, being able to dig into the assets that the dealer has to help ignite sales. And, like, we were talking about with Ford right now, we're as as an industry, automotive can't target on social, especially on meta platforms right now because it's considered credit, and so you can just do a 15 mile radius around the store. But if we as a dealership can pump in our data or as advertisers can pull in DMV records is how we're targeting a lot of folks, or insurance records. If they say that they have a vehicle, if they have a Tesla, let's go after every single person in this market driving a Tesla and talk to them about the incentives and the reason to switch over to the Mach E or the Ford lightning.

And same with, you know, Jeep drivers getting into, getting into a Bronco right now because there's $2,000 incentives in all these manufacturer, cash offers. So for us to look at sales through a lens of not just let's drive website traffic, but let's work a little bit with the assets that the manufacturer is providing and that your lot already has. And then a lot of dealers, it's like, hey. Can we do a little bit with services? Here's everybody who's purchased from your dealership who's not doing routine services.

Let's start with those people. But then a lot of times what we find out is a lot of dealers are at capacity. It's gonna be a worse experience if we if we start getting more people into the service department. So maybe we should start with recruiting some techs. Let me try to help from my desk to do what we can do to to get more applicants so So you guys can be more selective on the text that we're hiring.

And then yeah. And just my experience, it's just like if if the advertiser can be in the front seat next to the dealer and help drive that strategy through a helpful conversation, it goes a lot further than just saying, hey, cost per click is down and clicks are up. Things are great. And the dealer's like, woah, hold on. Things are not great.

Not on our side of the desk. And, yeah, to to find a conversation where we can kind of make sure that what the advertiser's doing from their desk is aligned with what the dealership actually needs. Yeah. That's important. Absolutely.

Hey. We gotta dive into our fun fact of the day. It's, you know, before closing out there. So, both y'all can dive into there. But the, automotive industry employs about how many Americans?

Your answer was or your, options were either 1,000,000 or 1,500,000, 5,600,000, 9,900,000, or 15,200,000. You don't have any ideas? I was gonna go high. D. K.

D. Yeah. I was gonna go 15.2 as well. So that's much higher than what I was thinking. It's actually 9.9.

Dang. But, yes, y'all y'all are closer to. They employ over 9,900,000 Americans in Automotive. It it's connected with so many. Now I think those facts came up even more so during COVID.

The automotive industry and this is talking about just automotive employees, but I heard this somewhere, and I might be off a little bit. But the automotive industry, all the suppliers, you guys, everybody connected to the automotive industry equaled up to, like, 50% on one of the stock exchanges behind the company. So when you start thinking about the transportation and the advertising and the suppliers and the it's a big industry. It is. It's the backbone.

It's the, like, it's the, purest form of, like, capitalism where we have a product, somebody wants it, we can help service it. You bet. And you guys I think you guys had a question a few weeks ago about the 3 point harness when who invented that. I would have gotten that one right. You would have got it right?

Yeah. My wife has a Volvo, and I see it on the wall at the dealership. They have, like, a big picture of the guy pulling on his 3 point harness that invented it. You were closer than we were. Funny.

We were just thinking, like, over to the road of, like, basic. But, yeah, I I that's situational awareness we talked about. But yeah. Absolutely. That's good.

Okay. Let let's let's call it a little bit deeper on the advertising side. And both of you guys have been through the transition of of traditional marketing of whether it was billboards or, Ashley, from your standpoint, you know, if it was in the dealership with just trying to get some of the ads from your fash fashion merchandising background on trying to get it to look correct, stuff set up. And then we're like, okay. We need to go digital.

And, Andrew, you've kinda walked us through on there there's a whole different segment of different digital platforms. You found Facebook, and then you dove deeper into that, which has been a success. What's next? What what do y'all see coming on the horizon? And we'll start unpacking this piece by piece.

But what do you guys see that's next? In the social platforms, do you see that social will be in in multiple different platforms depending upon the demographics you're going after, or or what's next? Let me stop there and let y'all answer. Ashley, I wanna hear I'm just so curious. What do you think?

Oh, me? Yes. Well, I feel like it's kind of already going that way with the demographics. And just by my personal experience knowing, like, what platforms I'm on and what I'm kind of shying away from. So I do feel like you need to advertise the different demographics on different platforms already, because it's definitely moving in that direction.

But, I mean, I guess we'll see what happens with TikTok. I feel like that was the next one up for being able to identify end market shoppers, and all those things, because I am a TikTok user, and I've seen kind of the growth that Instagram went through with all of that. TikTok has kind of gone through the same thing, and, they're starting to allow advertisers on there more. They have TikTok shop where you can advertise things, to your followers. So they're definitely trying to grow in that space, but, I guess we'll see what happens if we're even allowed to use it Yeah.

In the United States. And and, Andrew, before we go to you, I'm gonna I'm gonna dig a little bit deeper with Ashley here. Okay? So you gave us a little bit of a vague answer there. So let's talk about virtual platforms.

If you had to identify social platforms for businesses, okay, where we could get some exposure, we could get some either clicks, conversions, ROI. Give us maybe a 30,000 foot view or let's come down just a little bit of which social platform you would pick for which demographics. Gotcha. Okay. So I would pick meta, because right now, they have the most, data to target who you wanna target.

So, if you want to go by demographics, especially those that are it of car buying age, and you're not focusing on younger generations that might not be ready for car buying yet, I would definitely go with Meta and hit Facebook and, Instagram. So do you do you separate those 2 Facebook? What age group are you going after with Facebook? And then does that change when you switch over to Instagram? Yes.

I would. So Facebook, I would definitely target maybe 30 and up. I don't personally know anybody that's under 30 that uses Facebook. And I I mean, there might be some people that use Facebook that are under 30. But I I personally don't know any.

And Okay. So then we go to Instagram. Well, what's that look like? A TikTok in there, or are you And then and then who else do you throw in there? Do you throw throw a TikTok in there?

Are you throwing any other social platforms in there? Do you know? You're gonna throw in that space in or something? No. Just throwing it out there.

TwitterX, whatever they call. I don't know. Are you doing anything with LinkedIn? I'm just I'm throwing it out there to see. Yeah.

LinkedIn would be great for recruiting if you're recruiting, because that's where a lot of people are looking for jobs. K. TikTok, if you wanna do more of, like, a, overall branding, it's a great place to do branding right now, especially if you wanna hit those younger followers, and try to kinda tee them up to buying a car, even if they aren't in the market yet. Okay. That's good.

And I can see by the look on your nonverbal communication, you can't wait to jump in. I'm just so intrigued. I asked this with so many people. Like, my I think my kids' friends and my, like, trying to figure out, like, what the next generation's really tapping into. Sure.

Do do you do you guys see ads on Roblox? What kind of row what okay. There's no ads? What is the is there a pop up in between? Oh, that is an ad.

You didn't know that was an ad. I'm just trying to figure out what what's around the next corner. You know what? That kinda brings up to is as growing up, is there some relevance in younger generations seeing awareness of products no different than the cereal boxes when we were growing up? You know, that the kids were grabbing that, then it was influencing the parents.

You know, is there a trickle down effect there that sometimes we don't look at? Because we're just look. We're so honed in on a certain demographics. Yeah. There is.

It's so tough, like, for for automotive brands and and dealers to think that far out from really trying to make an impact on that next generation. But I don't know. Do do you feel like kids ever make an influence on what cars their parents buy outside of that? So that they definitely do, and I don't know how many people wanna admit to it. But kids make a lot of decisions for the entire family.

Like and I'm not talking about cars, but I'm talking about my family. And I'm like, why did we buy this stuff? And so, well, Junior said they want it. But it's funny. I didn't think about you were asking them, like, what's next?

And then Andrew says in Roblox, I'm like, oh, a couple of my kids are on Roblox. But I remember a couple years ago at Digital Dealer, maybe last time we saw some of you guys in person, I went to a I don't know what it was called, but it was like automotive AI. And the guy at the time that was over a, a store in Florida that was super futuristic thinking, went into, VR. And so he was talking about VR. And so he was he'd kinda teamed up with the company to be able it was with the Lexus store, I believe, the ability to put these goggles on, and it was during COVID.

So if the model was not on the floor, that they could walk through the entire process of the vehicle. So then they talked about, I think, the meta goggles had come out. I I don't own a pair, so I'm not really good in this language. But people were buying billboards and people were it's crazy. They were buying land within what is that called?

Is that within the meta? Is that The metaverse is what The metaverse. Thank you. Yeah. So where people were already planning, that was really futuristic thinking.

And it's it's so hard for us because that's an advertising aspect. Mhmm. And, you know, if you think about, Ashley, you know, you you be in the fashion marketing, you know, there there was plenty of people that could say, you know, on TikTok shop, you can put some little trinket thingamajig, and it's easy to transact. You know, supplemental sales, it's easy to transact. In automotive, we it has to be further out there.

So how do you get plant in that next metaverse You bet. To make it transact. Do you see it do you see that do you think that happens? Does it go that far, or are we just trying to sell the cars in December? I think the metaverse is toast.

Like, nobody really cared about the metaverse except for Mark Zuckerberg. And it was easy for us to get some PR Yeah. Like, excitement on our end and be like, hey. We just transacted the 1st metaverse Yeah. You know, vehicle where, like, I I don't know.

Like, what what we were talking about is what you had brought up with, like, AI, I think, has got such a huge opportunity with every single vertical from HVACs to car dealerships to marketing agencies to everything. And it's, like, simply, like, I think that the way to tow into to AI for a dealership like, I did a whole presentation at at n I a d a about AI and some ways to start using just chat gpt. And somebody in the crowd was, like, I use it for reviews. I'm like, oh my god. That's actually way better than any of this stuff I was talking about.

For, like, you know, a tangible way for a dealership to use chat gpt chat gpt or Gronk or any of those other platforms and get something that they can actually use where it's not hallucinating or it's not, like, you know, wildly off where with a decent prompt of, you know, telling the machine who you are. We're a dealership. We care about our culture. We care about our staff. We care about our employees.

We're really empathetic to people who don't have a good experience or or they do have a good experience. But then, like, prompt it and then say, here's a review. Hopefully, it's amazing or maybe it's middle, like but it it can prompt it can give you a really good response, and then you can say shorten it. And now we have, you know, I I think it's a good entry point for a lot of dealerships to just try it. I know a lot of dealerships are, and they're way further downstream with, analyzing data and making faster decisions and things like that.

But just a simple way for it to actually transact into something that you can use, is getting into AI. And then down the road, it's gonna be AI is gonna be crunching all of our CRM information and telling us some things we never even knew about our customer base and who's our most profitable 100 customers and what are 5 other 500 other customers that have the same attributes. It was exciting, like, on on that side. I don't know. Do you guys ever see the metaverse anywhere anymore?

No. Not really. I think you're more on to something with the AI, and I think there's a lot of people just right on the cusp of embracing the AI. They like the idea, but just like you said, they're trying to figure out how do I put this into my day to day activities to make me more efficient, you know, to to give me the correct information I want without having to pull 15 reports. So I think those small pieces you're talking about are of great value to business owners.

They just need help on how do they integrate that. You know, it's not necessarily embracing it. It's it's where where do I use that? How how do I integrate it into my day to day? So do you see more of that going?

So, Andrew, we gotta kinda walk through the same pieces with you is, okay, we've thrown out the metaverse. We got your opinion there and and don't disagree with you. What will the relevance still stay there with Facebook? Does it just keep growing deeper with the same demographics? Does that ever broaden out, or do you need to look at social in this more complex layer depending upon who you're trying to market to or at what layer you're trying to market?

We're constantly advertising on all the platforms. Finding the best return still through meta platforms, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. I wouldn't sleep on WhatsApp, especially if you have, like, a Hispanic buyer or or or not even Hispanic, but people from out of the country who communicate back and forth between that country to start chats on WhatsApp from Facebook, Instagram ads. Okay. So that's Meta Platforms.

We've done a lot with WhatsApp or or not with WhatsApp, with, Snapchat. Never really found a ton of return. TikTok advertising, it's it can get there. It helps. It really helps if we have good creative, and that's very few and far between with dealerships that have, TikTok feeling content.

So we end up running just inventory on TikTok. The targeting is not there. The cost per click, the cost per lead, the cost per sale, and our experience has been not as good as as Meta's platform. We're doing Pinterest. What we see is a much smaller audience, but it's a really engaged audience on on Pinterest where people, are on Pinterest deliberately.

They don't see their friends and their family and celebrities, but they're seeing things that they're shopping. So if somebody's looking for, you know, things for a nursery and we start to cater them to them with the SUV and a minivan, we see those people that click through, come to the website, spend a lot more time, and they engage with the dealership a lot more than on any other platform, which is a lot smaller of an audience. Yeah. So it's we're certainly testing out all the platforms, especially from a paid side on who we can target, how we can track it. And I wanna keep it going meta with with most of my eggs until the times change, and then we'll have to scoot sideways into another platform.

You know, as as a business, Andrew, do do you do you have a team or an individual that they're assigned to working on testing the waters in other areas? Or is that collectively everybody? Or how walk us through how you make sure that you're constantly looking to see what's next, and you're testing that before you recommend it to your clients. It's funny. This is like an issue of contention internally.

They're, like, well, we should just pay for it and look at it and see if it works. I'm, like, well, let's we have a lot of dealers that are trusting us right now. Here's a new platform, a new ad type. Let's be the first in the industry, I mean, at least the first in this market to really be testing it out, and let's not put in a ton of money, but let's agree, hey. We're gonna move $500 out of this that's not working on on Meta or or with OTT.

We're gonna move it into, TikTok inventory ads. Are you comfortable with that, mister dealer? And I wanna run it for just 2 weeks. We'll run it for the whole month, but let's just look at it for 2 weeks and if it totally sucks. Let's pull the plug and agree that that was fun that we tried it out.

But if not, let's let it keep running. And then let's look for a system in our on our end where we can start to, get more eyeballs on it. So it's usually my my business partner, Keith, will start running a test. They'll report to to our team, our leadership team, and then he's like, okay. This is something interesting.

Let's get more eyes on it. And kinda, like, with what what you guys do, it sounds like internally with with your dealerships. It's let's have a a process whether it's through chat that that you guys have with Slack. I think you guys said you use Slack. Right?

Yes. Not every dealership uses something like that. That's cool. But it's, you know, ways for our team from the bottom to the top be able to escalate things that are interesting. And if we see some success, like, what can we do, to either fix it or get rid of it?

If it's not working and if it is working, what can we do to grow it? And a lot of times it's like, okay. Let's do this. Let's get out in front of all of our customers, letting them know the success we saw in this little tiny microcosm and if we can, start testing it out with their stores. That makes sense.

That's some good insight. We appreciate that for sure. It's it's been a great conversation. We appreciate you guys joining us today. Just kinda giving a an inside look at at the different layers of marketing and the different avenues and sources to use.

So next, we jump into our frequently asked questions. Hopefully, Craig sent this over, so it's not just catching you off guard, but we'll we'll test you out here. We go into this section to kinda let the audience know behind the scenes. You know, what what's your frequently asked questions that you get from everybody? And and here's what we heard.

Andrew, so here's your question. What is the hardest thing about the marketing business? So that's what is the hardest thing about the marketing business? Okay. You know, I think it's kinda like people don't really understand the 2 components of, like, marketing and advertising.

I didn't know this forever, and and what the difference is. And advertising is a tail end and the money being spent for the billboard. It's the ad being placed on the radio station and the the the TV media buy and the strategy that we're launching on social and on search, and here's the dollars behind it. Where marketing is the look and the feel of the the brand. It's the dealership.

It's the market that you guys serve. It's the employees that you guys have had for 25 years that have a plaque on the wall that are inspiring customers to come back and do services there, that are inspiring younger techs to stay and to reach those objectives and reach that goal and see that somebody has made their whole entire career inside the walls of your dealership, and what that's done for not only them, but their family and their community and how they've, you know and the pricing of the vehicles and this the what you guys have in stock. So, like, to grab all of the the essence of what that brand is and then put that into what is gonna be the paid advertising parts. Where it's easy, I think, for advertisers to more and more be put into this position of wanting to hit specific metrics and us as advertisers wanting to sell to you that here's what is important and it's VDP views and it's vehicle detail page views and I'm gonna pump you with vehicle detail page views and the more the merrier and now we're done. And now what your customers see from their end is not that brand.

It's not that service technician. It's not that your family has done all these things for the community, but it's that you guys have inventory and prices. And my challenge is that we've lost the marketing, and we were just so focused on the advertising aspect that, you know, it it's you're, the customer who's gonna be buying the vehicle sees us as a place that has a lot of inventory for the cheapest price. And it completely starts to commoditize the brand that we're actually trying to advertise. So that's my challenge is is is getting in front of people being, like, we need to have a little bit more we need to have a little bit of creative behind what we're doing that resonates with the customers beyond just cars and prices.

No. That's that's good. And, Ashley, over to you. What is the most frequently question you get about marketing today? So my most frequent question, I'll go back to, when I was a, dealer consultant talking to dealers.

Most of them asked me for help with organic social content, and they pretty much don't know where to start. So pretty much I, you know, have to educate them on how to start with organic content, why it's important, and then what what we can do with it on the paid side. I I think a lot of dealers ask that over and over again, and they'll even ask us if we'll do it for them, because they don't wanna invest the money to hire somebody to do content for them. They wanna have the receptionist do it along with her other duties, or throw it on to some, you know, someone else in the dealership, instead of hiring somebody or, like you guys did, promoting someone who was good at it at the dealership. I would say that's my most frequently asked question, is how to get started.

And, I would say hire somebody that likes to do it, and that's their passion, and just start consistently posting content. You have to just start somewhere. Right? Mhmm. That's right.

That's good. That's good. Thanks for sharing that with us. I think that's important. Well, thank you guys so much for taking the time and diving in with us.

Andrew and Ashley with DealerOMG, kinda giving us behind the scenes of marketing, social marketing, the future of social media marketing, what we thought maybe would work and didn't work, and all the fun and parts and pieces of how they've helped us and other businesses, how they could help. So So thank you guys so much for your time today. As we wrap this thing up, remember, you can visit us at lewissuperstore.com or crossroadconversationspodcast.com to see all the previous episodes. And like and subscribe to see all the future ones as we continue to bring in guest and to grow to be able to bring you relevant information within the area of Northwest Arkansas and all over the United States of how we can be a help. So thanks so much for joining us.

Matt Taylor Shelby. It was a pleasure, guys. Thank you. Thank you so much.