Pre-Owned, But Make It Sexy

🎙️ Pre-Owned, But Make It Sexy
Word on the Street – Episode 29
Guest: Matthew Davis, Marketing Director at TradePending
Host: Andrew Street

How do you source better used cars, close more trade leads, and stay top of mind without annoying your customers? In this episode, Andrew sits down with marketing veteran Matthew Davis from TradePending to talk about all things pre-owned inventory, fixed ops growth, and modern dealership marketing.

From website conversion hacks and co-op-free retention plays to hilarious takes on AI and Facebook ads, this is one of our most jam-packed and entertaining episodes yet.

🔍 Timestamps:

• [00:00] – Intro: Why pre-owned inventory is the biggest profitability play right now
• [03:45] – Competing with Carvana & CarMax: The real difference is process
• [07:15] – The #1 website mistake dealers make with trade-in tools
• [12:30] – How to increase trade leads without killing conversion rates
• [16:50] – ValueWatch: The tool that makes your customers actually come back
• [22:00] – Why a plain-text email can outperform your best banner ad
• [26:30] – Instagram green screens + hyper-targeted trade campaigns
• [31:40] – Zuck’s AI takeover: Can Facebook really do it better than you?
• [36:15] – Making co-op compliant creative in seconds with AI prompts
• [39:50] – FBI tip: How to spot a North Korean job applicant 🤯
• [45:10] – Why dealers still ignore service marketing (and why that’s changing)
• [51:45] – The rise of loyalty automation — no lifting required
• [58:00] – The real ROI of branding vs. leads
• [1:04:00] – Your website is broken (and it’s not your fault)
• [1:10:25] – The value of human-centered social content (and ditching hashtags)
• [1:16:00] – Direct mail, mugs, and the power of omnichannel follow-up
• [1:22:15] – In-dealership interviews: giving your store a voice and a soul
• [1:27:00] – Wrap-up: What’s next in marketing, service, and loyalty

📈 If you’re in the trenches trying to grow leads, keep customers, and cut through the noise — this one’s for you.
🎧 Listen now and don’t forget to subscribe.

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Transcript

One of the most important aspects of a dealership right now to preserve profitability it's always important but it really is standing out right now is a dealership having the ability to get a tight supply of pre-owned inventory um sourcing inventory from consumers not relying just on the auctions and getting that those vehicles that have higher demand lower day supply the fewer days to sell I'm joined here in this conversation by Matthew Davis, the marketing director at Trade Pending, where he was in the front seat helping to create the products, the platform, and the strategies that help dealers acquire vehicles from consumers. So if you're at all interested in vehicle acquisition or just hearing a cool guy that has a lot of experience with marketing in the automotive space, you're in the right place. I'm Andrew Street. This is Word on the Street. Matthew Davis, ladies and gentlemen.

Okay. So I was watching, like I was saying, like car dealership guys, kind of my North star, I get all of their content and podcasts and emails. And they're talking about like the number one and two things that dealers are focused on right now to preserve profitability, which as marketers is like an underrated metric to follow is like, are we profitable? Are we growing market share versus clicks and leads and conversations? and it's it's they need good quality tight inventory sourced from consumers would be amazing and then the second thing is fixed ops those are the two areas that they're focused on maintaining profitability i think you guys have a good foothold in both of those channels um What are you noticing right now as far as dealers really wanting to, are they, are there a lot more conversations going around sourcing inventory from consumers? Absolutely. A hundred percent. Right. So everybody can read the headlines and everybody can interpret them however they want to. But the reality is, is that, yeah, like we're going to need cars and it's just, it's not hard to figure out like, all right, so new cars are likely going to get more expensive. That's going to put more pressure on used cars. Used cars are going to get more expensive because there's going to be higher demand. It's already limited supply to some degree on those one to three-year-olds, certified pre-owns because of the COVID stuff. So there's all this pressure on used cars. So shit, we got to go source more used cars. And if you look at the NADA stats they put out every year, every year it creeps up a little bit higher, the amount of inventory that people are sourcing from the street. So that sophistication is just getting worse. more and more prevalent. We were meeting with Tom Eggers, marketing director down at Covert Bee Cave stores, right down there in your neck of the woods. It's like, Austin. And, you know, they've they launched a buying center. Gosh, it was a year or two ago and stood that up. They've got two or three people running that show now. And they're just like they're turning up the dial on that. Right. And so then the question becomes. And Andrew, you said so many questions. I read them all. I was like, oh, my God, this is like we're going to have a real conversation. I'm not going to go through probably hardly any of those questions. It's just a framework for if we run out of things and we're staring at each other quietly. Right. It was a strong use of the GP. Yeah. I got distracted. I forgot where I was going with that whole rambling thing. But it sounds like with trade pending, specifically the trade pending tools that are on, you know, I don't even know how far downstream you go with the appraisals all the way down to setting appointments and things like that. But it's like, are you helping dealerships right now, like really position themselves against like CarMax and Carvana to be able to be really competitive with getting that inventory off the streets? Yeah, there's two ways to think about that. So yes, like you can have our, you know, our trade in tool, our payment calculator, whatever. Right. But if you have, Like people that aren't bought into working those leads or you got a terrible process, like no great tool is going to do anything for you. So you got to have the people in the process in place first. Right. So if you think about competing with those national ad budgets, right, you got to be front and center with those folks. You got to have your process dialed in. You have to be actually clear about what the buttons do on your website. So like if somebody wants to trade in their car and you surprise them and drop them into a chat, I don't care what every other vendor says. Like, that's just like, that's not good. Call your buttons what they say they're going to do. If you want to put somebody in a chat, there's people that want to chat. They should chat. Don't call it a trade-in button. Call it a chat. Anyway, I'll get off that high horse real quick. So you've got that piece of it. And so then there's this, when it comes to trade tools on websites, like, I don't know, I can't think of a more boring topic for everybody to listen to because he's been around for so long, but there's a critical distinction here, right? Do you want to put people into a process that's three to five minutes where they got to go out to their car and get their VIN and upload fifteen pictures? Or do you want to put somebody through like a ten second process? And Andrew, that's a trick question because you probably want both of those situations, right? But you got to recognize like ninety five percent of the people coming to your website are not going to get off the couch and go get their van and take pictures. So if you put them into that process, right, you're going to kill their website conversion. So if you're trying to source more inventory, and compete with all these other folks that have million-dollar ad budgets, you need as many hit-bats as possible. You need as many of those trade-in leads coming possible. And the way you do that is through lots of trade-in leads and having good people in process to back it up. And then the other bit of it here, and then I'll catch my breath. Hold on, let me get my trade-pending mug here. I'll tell a story about this in a second. So people are going to be holding onto their cars for longer. So when they are ready to trade, you have not been serving them television ads for two years with Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard about Carvana's value tracker. You've not been serving them tons of advertisements about your service lane or whatever. So that's our newest, exciting, latest thing. product called value watch it's pretty much just like carvana's value tracker except instead of coming from carvana it comes from the dealership it lets people sign up get their monthly value of their car emailed or text it every single month and what does carvana not do they don't do service know they got that one little dealership that they purchased but they don't do service so in that email that texas says check out our service offers as well so people that are pushing off buying a new car because the prices are going up or consumer confidence whatever it may be they're now being reminded yep here is our service specialist you should be coming to us for service and when you're ready to trade in you're a top of mind whether that's three months from now or three years from now How did I do? Was that a passing grade on that answer? Can you say it again? I wasn't listening. I don't know if you heard it, but there's like a huge lightning bolt that just crashed behind you when you pulled up your trade pending mug. Huge thunderstorm rolling through right now. There we go. I love what you said about people not going out to get their red number and stuff, because I am like that too. If I'm laying in bed and I see an Instagram ad or Tik TOK ad, and I want to buy something and they don't have PayPal or Apple pay. I'm not going downstairs to get my credit cards to buy something. Who are they to even think that they could trouble you with that kind of effort? Right. It's disrespectful on their part. Is it like a multi-step form now where the first form just collects their information and the second form, now the dealer has the information and then the second, secondary, third, tertiary or whatever forms... that flow through there that's when it starts to be able to collect then and more meaningful information for actually getting the appraisal you would think but no they actually make people go through like forty questions first before you put in your contact information so as a dealer if you got those kind of tools on your site then people are abandoning at that they're abandoning that process before they even get to that stage we looked at one just the other day. And it's like, they actually give you a little trade in range before you put anything in. So it was like, well, why would I give you my contact information? Now you give me a range. So some real head scratchers out there when it comes to user experience. Okay. So like the dealers who are lighting it up right now that you can observe from your desk with getting a healthy flow of tight inventory from consumers, Is there something like outside of process and having the right widgets in place and tools? Is there something that they're doing with like outbound or inbound advertising to help really stimulate those appraisal forms? I mean, I want to hear your answer on that because this is what you do, but I'll give you. I'm seeing myself up for the record. I don't know. Why don't you tell me? I mean, we... We do every month we publish for our customers. It's like a little dinky like knowledge base site. And in there, it's an article. It's like, here's a plain text email that as a dealer, you can send your customers segment however you want to in your CRM. But just don't do anything fancy. No banners, no headers, no fancy graphics. Just like it's an email coming from your desk, the GSM, the GM. And it's just like, hey, here's what's going on in the market. If you're looking to trade in, click here. If you want to know how much you can afford, click here. If you want to service your car, click here. And those work surprisingly well just because it feels like it's actually coming from a person. But, I mean, Andrew, what are you seeing people doing a great job of in terms of outbound marketing to drive? Matthew, I'm so glad you asked. Here is my theory on this specifically. And we've tried different things with, like, graphic design stuff. But for, like... An appraisal tool that's baked into the website. Is that right? I don't know. What was it? It's an appraisal tool on the dealership's website. Yes. Yeah. A trade-in calculator, whatever you want to call it. I've been trying this with some things and you don't need a lot of, you don't need a lot of money or creative genius, but like just do a simple, like what I've been doing is like, Instagram green screen, where it just like takes out the background, you can put whatever you want, and take a screenshot of the dealerships landing page that the customer is going to go to that has those buttons on it. And then behind me, I'm gonna, you know, start the graphic with Everybody driving a Ford, we're doing a Ford acquisition push all during the month of May. Your Ford's never gonna be worth more. And the next screen is like, come to our website and click our three minute appraisal or a sixty second appraisal or whatever it is right here and point at that button and walk them through those first steps. And then the video, if they tap it, they go through. But if they keep watching the video, you can just articulate what those steps look like. and why it's valuable for them to do this right now to get the appraisal. And then from the social advertising side, which is where we're really baked in, we can do email and other things, but just to go through their newsfeed, go through their stories with that video of a honest faced person that either works at the dealership or doesn't, that's just pointing out how to go through the flow. And now instead of just blanketing everybody in the market, you can use any of these data providers and target people driving specifically Fords. So now it stands out where that person's gonna share that message with somebody. Be like, do you know somebody driving a Ford? Right now we're doing a Ford, blah, blah, blah. And now we're targeting those high value, quick to sell, great pre-owned vehicles for us to be able to have a profit on, but also customers wanna buy them. We can target people driving those specific vehicles. And if we're close, maybe that person's name is on the vehicle registration, but their wife drives it. And they could send that message to their spouse or whatever. And try to ramp up those leads off the streets doing something that I imagine like CarMax and all those other big players aren't doing. Yeah, I've got two responses to that. The first one, you guys are welcome to take and use this, but I think what you should be doing on social media is A-B testing different ad copy. One says tariffs are amazing and one says tariffs are terrible. Yeah. and just use that drive out to a landing page, you can probably source like the most amount of cars ever doing that. Feel free to use that. The second one is, I don't know when the news happened. It's like recently, I think it was like Zuckerberg, the Facebook guy, he came out and said that you should trust us to build your audiences and develop your creative for you automatically. How do you feel about that? Say that again. I keep getting these weather alerts right now that are coming in because there's a storm rolling through town. Oh, you're really not even paying attention. This is your show. I'm turning off these weather alerts that are going on my computer and on my phone right now. so zuck came out as an interviewer or facebook something or other i just when i get my marketing news every day i just kind of gloss over it and it's like zuckerberg tick tock okay whatever but this one was he said that facebook can do a better job at building audiences than you can and they can do a better job of making the creative assets as well too using ai so you should trust facebook Just give us your money, and we'll create the ad. We'll create the content. We'll create the copy, and we'll build the audience for you. Trust us. What could go wrong? Here's where they are. They're at the intersection of having the most mature signal as far as any other platform really understanding. You mean it's mostly old people that still use Facebook? Is that what you mean by mature? It's aunts. It's uncles that buy vehicles. then that's also on instagram they're collecting it but what they do have is they have a pixel on carmax on every car dealerships website they have facebook marketplace data about who's shopping for what types of vehicle in facebook marketplace who's going to these dealership websites what they're clicking on where they're going so they know who is in market so as like the advertiser, like in my experience as advertisers, we're like so predisposed to wanting to like get into ad campaigns and adjust things and tweak things and think we're gonna outsmart the program. When actually, if you just like turn on automotive inventory ads, just like the inventory with cars and prices and don't touch it, don't ever touch it. Unless you really have to touch it for some reason, it'll get smarter and smarter and smarter and realize you're advertising cars to people who are buying those types of cars. And whether it's like, you know, messages for credit challenged people or, you know, high end luxury vehicles, it starts to figure out pretty damn quickly who you're going after. It's making it sound easy. Like I'm going to start my own agency tomorrow and call it dealer GMO. And we're just going to Facebook. Remind me after this call, we're going to send them a cease and desist. So that's for just merchandising inventory. But for the other messaging, like the nuance of what we're talking about with like the trade-in and the acquisition campaigns and the loyalty and the services, that's where a relatively more sophisticated agency or a dealership even can use their DMS data. They can use DMV data to target people driving specific vehicles and get out ahead of Facebook trying to figure out what you're doing. And on the AI front, it's mind-blowingly amazing right now to be able to make co-op compliant creative without getting a film crew and a photographer and go out to a mountain in Georgia. You know, like to shoot the right type of content. But we can just create it right now. And so we're leaning on just being as good as we can at making the right prompt. And then... The machine does all the creative. And then we do the editing to make sure that thing looks right. And now we just have amazing creative. And now the work of one graphic designer can be twelve graphic designers. I'd like to share another story if I could. This one's about AI. It's about something else that I read today. And on LinkedIn, North Koreans are creating, using AI like a whole crap ton of LinkedIn profiles and applying to jobs. And they're basically infiltrating Fortune five hundred companies. and they're getting a job at the Fortune five hundred company. And then they'll have like three or four people like working at this job. So Johnny, the employee is like an amazing employee because he does he's like more productive than anybody else they've hired remotely like ever. But Johnny is like stealing intellectual property. He's putting malware on people's computers, that kind of thing. But one of the ways they spot fake applicants, this is like an FBI tip, is they asked the person on the interview, how fat is Kim Jong-un? And so as soon as they hear that, they're like, like their minds blow up and they hang up the call. Because you can't be saying anything about the Supreme Leader. on the North Korean like pipeline. In fact, we're probably this, this is now probably flagged or it on the street is central. It's fine. We can talk about them actually. So I threw this in like our company, like Slack security channel and lo and behold, we had a case of this like recently where somebody was applying for a job and it turned out to be an AI bot. And we said, you got to do an in-person interview and they wouldn't do it. That is crazy. That's not going to help anybody source inventory or sell a car, but thank you for letting me tell that story. That's unique. That's a thing that's out there. If you're building out call centers, people are doing a lot of near-shore, offshore stuff in automotive and even dealerships building out their own virtual BDC with people in the Philippines, people in South America, and whatever. Let's be aware of the pitfalls that you land in. You're a gracious host. You have malware and all of a sudden you're hacked. You're very tolerant of me today. I appreciate that. How so? Just let me ramble. We can get back to your chat GPT produced questions because they were really good. They are. Yeah, no. It helps me stay. What was your prompt? Something like I'm talking to Matthew. Here's his LinkedIn. He's with Trade Pending. Here's their website. I want to have some good questions and then tie in some of these things that make me look good. about running advertising against, you know, onsite tools and it said, okay. And it cranked out something pretty good. Um, okay. So we've talked a little bit about vehicle acquisition, which is your bread and butter. And what's the second biggest, like, well, is that the biggest thing that you guys are leaning on right now, as far as kind of like the product you think dealers are sinking their teeth into? Yes. So certainly the trade-in tool, the guaranteed offer tool, those are the bread and butter. We've had them the longest. The payment calculator, we call it payments. The trade-in tool is called trade. The offer tool is called offer. You can see a theme here. Yeah, self-evident. It's pretty impactful marketing when it comes to product names we do here. So those are all certainly big. But if you also think about if it comes back to people processing product and product being like which kind of tools are you using right so if everybody's ramping up their acquisition game and you're just calling and emailing somebody you're texting them trying to source that car or had that conversation which is what everybody does and it works to some degree you can look at your conversion rates on that but if you send them a video like hey saw that you're thinking about trading in your honda let's talk right and get that personal video from a person right that is going to help anybody stand out above and beyond what they're getting you know you get a little thumbnail and it's like you're waving it looks looks good like that stuff that stuff really really works no doubt okay and that's translating into people filling out applications people coming in for trades um and I know that you guys I don't know, but I'm pretty positive you guys have been doing like a pretty concerted focus on helping dealers with loyalty. That is correct, man. What a great, great question. I'm glad you asked. Yeah, that's so. the average person holds onto their car for like forty five years now or whatever that number, maybe it was like twelve, but it's a long time or it's the average age of the car on the road is approaching twelve, thirteen years. Right. So what does that mean? They need to service it. And then you come back and like you got Jiffy Lube, you got Lube Jiffy, you got the tire stores. Everyone's advertising to these people year round, thousands of times a year. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong here, but dealerships typically don't do a lot of service marketing, yet it remains like the most profitable side of the business, right? So you want people coming back into the dealership. How do you do that? Well, the first thing you have to actually have to, your offers need to be on the website and what they cost. So if you don't have that, they can't find it. Well, they're just gonna go someplace else that actually does advertise. the service offers and what they cost. So that's kind of step number one. And then it comes all the way back around to how do you communicate that in a way that provides value to people, not just pounding them over the head every couple of weeks or any type of channel or medium like, hey, check out our specials, check out our offers. Right. So that's where the whole value watch piece plays in just extremely well. Right. Here's that monthly email. I get it. I signed up for it. You guys can sign up for it, too. It doesn't cost anything. track my vehicle's value, get that number every single month. And by the way, here's what we offer for service, right? So that's how we're trying to help dealerships stay top of mind for a couple hundred bucks a month. They don't have to lift a finger. Their trade-in leads are automatically enrolled. Their payment leads with a trade-in attached to it are automatically enrolled. We're rolling out the integration for sold data, for service data. So all those people who have bought in the past over the last eighteen months who have served in the past are enrolled in these automated texts and emails. Of course, they can opt out. But now, bam, front and center every single month in a way that's providing value to the person, not just pounding them with offers. That's how we're thinking about loyalty right now. No, it's more relevant. And according to like. was like a line graph maybe it was a bar graph showing where dealers are focused on right now according to a survey to preserve that profitability and fixed ops was the first one or the second one i forgot i think it was number one i saw that same number one same email yeah do you does does it seem like they're starting to put more focus on putting their attention their energy their dollars into growing their service departments It's just the pendulum swings one way or the other. It's just kind of where are we in the cycle. When there's pressure on selling, it shifts over to fixed. When there's opportunity to sell and make gold on the variable side, that's where the emphasis goes. But I don't know. I think it would be great to actually speak with a handful of marketers at dealerships and say like, Do you dream of marketing your service specials, your service offers, but you're just not allowed to carve a budget out to it because you can't put co-op dollars behind it? Or you do when it's wildly successful? What the heck's going on there? Because I just don't hear a lot about it, but it seems like one of those areas where there's just a ton of opportunity. And I'm noticing a lot of, especially these mid-sized dealer groups, have budget they do have budget for the service department a lot of times you end up talking to bobby the service manager that helps with a bunch of the stores get some of the budget to go after the customers who have purchased but defected or you know something slim but it's not the complete red-headed stepchild it had been years ago when i would talk to a general manager and he's like no no i need lee i i need lee it's it's already the sixth of the month. We need to get, you know, it's like, we got to get sales flying right now. And then we're gonna hit reset next month. Ashley, did you get much love with service department when you were doing this with Jermaine or with the previous dealer group you were with? No. And we, we should have focused on it more, especially with content. Yeah. It was mainly sales. Just, We got new models in. We need to cover those. This is what we need to push this month. Make all the videos about QXAD or whatever. So yeah, it was mainly sales focused, which is great. Service always kind of takes a back seat, I feel like. My wife wants a QX, I noticed they're one point nine percent financing on new inventory right now. Oh, pretty good. That's like paying you to get that car. No kidding. But like pumping. budget behind services. And a lot of times too, I think maybe with like, with what you guys are doing too, is it's a lot more measurable all the way to the person booking the service. Like, like the RO you can check, you can track the transaction, but yeah, it's like e-commerce kind of where instead of it going to a lead and then it's kind of a little nebulous and somebody needs to get belly to belly to complete the transaction. I can see them all the way through to the thank you page or that they got to this stage and they keep dropping off on this stage. That's worth looking at. Let's talk about like, how can, what, why are people dropping off right here and not ending up? Is there, is it not mobile friendly? Is it something like, what can we do as marketers from our desk to help with services? And it's a lot like it's trackable. It's targetable. It's just giving people the excuse to go back to the dealership. Yeah. Here's another idea you guys can take. So when you launch your service marketing podcast, you can call it belly to belly. Okay. I found out there's like seventy five people that have word on the street as their podcast name. yes i always thought that matthew davis was just my name regular name and then when i entered into the professional world and there was like three other matthew davis's within like a twenty mile radius like oh my gosh yeah i had a i had andrewstreet.com which is my name oh you own that i owned it for a while then i just let it lapse because i wasn't doing anything with it and then somebody swept it up and made it a wheelchair website What does that say about you? It's pre-owned what pre-owned wheelchairs? Well, I mean, it's kind of oddly fitting because it's still like in mobility. Yeah. It's transportation. It's sourcing those quality wheelchairs out of consumers and getting them into, uh, some, some fresh, some fresh, fresh enabled bodies. Where do we even go from there? I don't know. Let's talk about growing service revenue online. So you talked about getting some marketers. to talk with us, like potentially grabbing people that work at dealerships or have worked there. They're doing some cool, innovative stuff with dealerships marketing outside of just cookie cutter stuff or kind of like what the OEM is pushing on them. And like last week, I talked with somebody who is Aaron Dobrow, who's got an amazing dealership corporate website. So it's like, they've got maybe five or six stores, but then they've got one nucleus, amazing, bad-ass website. That's fast. It's super responsive and you can get inventory sourced. You can do trade in a print, you know, you can do all these different things from their corporate page. which kind of opens doors for us as advertisers to start using that as a lot of our marketing efforts and saving a lot of money from just individually looking at each rooftop in its own little silo thought that was amazing i thought it was super cool and it's like what what do you think other dealers who are looking to build like a corporate presence should look at he like listed all the vendors so um and it sounds like you've got also a network of a bunch of marketing directors at dealerships uh that would be interesting to talk to They would. And if they're anything like us, most of them like talking about themselves and about what they do, because for that brief moment, you can like step outside of your job and how you feel like you're failing at it. Twenty four seven. And then you get to go talk to people and be like, you know what? Actually, we're doing some cool stuff. And some of it's working totally. And in my experience, too, it's like they live in it so deeply and They don't realize how much they know that other people don't. You just assume everybody does. And also when you start talking to a lot of people about it, it's kind of like going over their heads, but they're like, Oh my God, hold on. Where's my pen? Like I need to, what was the name of that provider who made that corporate website? I feel like that would be terrible at automotive retail marketing. Yeah. I know how to tell a story and do the kind of fluffy stuff, but man, they do some intricate, nuanced stuff. You guys do that. You're essentially like a marketing arm, sort of. We're a puzzle piece of what they're doing. Don't sell yourself short. Right. I mean, we're not going to you're not going to get a great puzzle if you don't have this puzzle piece connected to some other ones. That's right. And it's a small puzzle. It's not like a five thousand piece puzzle. Like you guys are a really good corner piece, like on like a right hand piece puzzle, like really puzzle looks stupid without it. But it's like. Like a dealer marketing person, like. I feel like there's different types. Like a lot of dealers kind of hire people sort of fresh out of like creative schools. And it's like that person wants to do the hashtagging and the stuff on social and the organic stuff and do kind of the... uh, lightweight, feel good stuff. And then all the way up to like a seasoned pro that's a little long, like that's a saber tooth tiger of the industry. That's like unlocking co-op budgets and organizing events and finding a third party sponsors, you know, all these, um, much further downstream things than just like the organic content. Totally. And from our desk, it's like figuring out who they have, what resources they have at the dealership, and then what we can do from our desks to help that person, help unlock that person, help make that person look good in front of their boss, and ultimately help impact the bottom line. But yeah, I don't think I would be good at it. I don't think I'm organized enough to be a marketing director at a dealership. Oh my God. Speaking of hashtags, I also read, I'm glad there's no fact checking on this podcast because everything I'm saying, I believe is true, but it might not be, but I'm pretty sure it is like the head of Instagram. Something or other was like, you guys can stop using hashtags. I saw that. It's like, we, they don't matter. We don't use them. It doesn't help in any way. And finally, finally, somebody fesses up to it. I'm like, we can stop the madness now. I just started getting good at it too. I always got into like, just making long, stupid, creative ones that were like a run on sentence. Right. And everyone's like, Oh man, he's so clever. He made a funny hashtag. Right. I feel like that wore out like, twelve years ago on Twitter, but I, Yeah. I mean, it was, there was a time where it was like helping to index things for people to be like, oh, cool. Yeah. That guy's got a Raptor, a Ford Raptor and he hashtags Ford rap, you know, then you tap that and you're able to see other people who've done it. Um, but yeah, I don't, I'm not going to miss it for a heartbeat. Not either. Actually, I posed the question maybe a year ago. There's this wonderful CMO community on Slack and there's like four thousand people in there. And I posed the same question like, hey, I'm trying to like do hashtags matter anymore like on what channel because I have no idea nobody could respond with anything there's no data no research no opinions it was just like crickets in the room everyone's just like we're not going to talk about this don't upset the hashtag please like yeah they're like hey we have like our billing is in place for providing Highly relevant hashtags. Don't disparage our hashtagging process right now because, you know, it's part of what we do organically. Yeah, we had a dude that I went skiing with randomly. He's like the Instagram growth expert. I didn't even know that until I got back home and I connected with him online. He's got a zillion followers and all of his contents about how to grow on Instagram. And he came on this podcast with us a couple weeks ago. And his name is Brock Johnson. Shout out. But he just like he just interviewed all the head guys at Instagram and they straight up said, you know, for one, it's like a bit of a veil for where the algorithm is going and why people are getting suppressed. And this shadow banning a thing, is it not? But he also talked about hashtags and it's certainly not a thing. I don't think it hurts. It doesn't hurt. I'm recalling I learned this from your podcast. Thanks for listening. You watched it. To all your listeners out there. Thanks for tuning in. I just watched the one-minute clip. It was fun. Five or six years ago, it used to show you in your results if you looked at where your views came from on your reels and stuff. It used to show you that it came from whatever hashtags that were searched. It hasn't for a long time. So, um, I don't think it's really been working for a while. You know, it does work is to pay and get in front of people. I'd work. So I'd worked at face when it was Facebook, just Facebook. When it was like just a desktop website and we'd like run ads just on the side of people's walls was like when I was there. So it's had quite a transformation since then. But it was like, you know, getting people to like a page was a big thing. That was the push for us. And then. A ton of your followers would see that content. So it was all the people that liked your page would see the content. So I was like, okay, let's get more people with more people. Let's trick them into following our page. So if you like Ford Mustangs, then like trick them into liking this Ford dealership too. Everybody would see the organic content. It was free advertising and then it got shut off immediately. where all of a sudden it was like dwindled down to like one or two percent or three percent, whatever, insignificant number of those followers would see it. I'm like, cool, let's stop. Let's stop doing content like we were trying to provide content as an ad agency. We get these super creative journalism student writers that just couldn't emulate what it was like to work at the dealership. And they didn't know the pulse of the staff and the service department and the inventory. And Susan that's been working there for twenty years and her daughter now started working there and all these cool stories that you can actually capture with the content while we're trying to do it from our end. And it was like the lowest margin, highest scrutiny, worst thing that we were providing. And so we stopped immediately, too, and just started it. running ads and be like, cool, you've built out this audience. Everybody felt like the, their followers are being held hostage by Facebook and Instagram and not these platforms, but let's be the ones that are paying. Let's be the ones that are paying to get in front of not only them, but people that look like them and their friends that can see that their friends already follow your dealership and we can put their name, you know, let's be the ones that are going to be fast and spending. And this is like, when not a lot of dealers, when dealers weren't really spending. And so we had some whoppers coming in, spending twenty five, thirty thousand dollars a month just on Facebook. It was crushing. It still works super well. You just got to be creative because there's so much, so much noise, not just other dealerships, but there's just so much noise. And how to like, that's what keeps me up at night is like thinking about like, okay, how can we stay creative? Like, and not fall into this pit of metrics of the lowest cost per VDP view or whatever. How can we keep. messages out there that are, that are relevant. Yeah. And then you can get into the entire, you know, brand versus demand debate there. Like, so to what extent is it just important to have the brand name exposed versus everything has to be held accountable to a return on investment. Yuck. That's such a tough argument to debate. It's a conversation though. That's not hard to have, but what happens is cause like, two percent of dealers are branding on social. So according to Facebook, two percent of the dealers are actually branding, which gives us an opportunity to not just run carousel ads. Let's run a big story ad that takes up people's entire phones. And I don't care if people click on it and come to the website or they fill out a lead form to be super cool if they did. I just want them to see it and watch the video. And so we're going to look at that as reach and frequency. Can you agree that that's an important metric? And the dealer says, cool, I like what you just said. And then a few months in, they're like, okay, let's double down on this. Let's double down on leads. Yeah. In theory, you would see all the other kind of leading indicators like, yeah, pay, we're getting sales cycles are shortening. We're getting more people through the door, that kind of thing that the branding can impact. Yeah, you're right. It's a fun conversation. I think you guys are in the middle, in the trenches of this customer flow on the website. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And where people fall off, where people shine. Is there some insights that you could provide? Because I should talk with this dude about websites. Right. I'm thinking I'm a website expert. Yeah, we have a website. Yes. We've got that going for it. No. So there's a handful of things. And I think... If we're going to be honest with ourselves, we might as well, since we're fact-checking on this podcast, we're telling the truth here. It's mostly the vendor's fault that dealer websites are rough. And there's a ton of ways you can kind of start to qualify that answer. So one, there's the platform themselves, the ones that have been, you know, they're a decade or older and it's built on top of older technology and it's hard to kind of really innovate on top of that. Then there's some newer ones out there and they're so full of themselves that you don't even want to talk to them. So there's the platform piece. And then you've got all the, essentially the third party providers that are tacking on, there's agencies that are tacking on and everyone's throwing a script or something or checking something else at Google Tag Manager. And then they cancel and you forget about it and you end up with seventy-five scripts on your website and you only need ten of them right now. That impedes process. We heard a ton about that at Pash's DMSC last week. That's a real problem. It's a real challenge. And a lot of the website tools are building tools or have tools that help you identify that and cut it out. But most people don't even think to look at it. And then lastly is kind of the bucket of the CTA wars, as we like to say. And that's all of us third-party vendors coming in and saying, like, we got the greatest widget ever. of all time and put it on your website and god bless this industry because people are willing to try they're willing to experiment like no one's really like stuck in their ways necessarily that's a really really great thing it's not always great when people want to cancel to try something you know it's not going to work for them but seeing this proliferation of freaking buttons And it's like the chat pop up, a value your trade pop up, a payment pop up. Then there's, you go to like an SRP or VDP and there's ten calls to action. And you're just like, oh shit, what is going on? So like less is more, right? And the reason for all that is because everybody's got to sell. But no one's really taking into account the big picture of like, here's what's actually going to be beneficial for the end user. And what's actually going to derive the most results. That's... I mean, it's pie in the sky to think that you could have people kind of come together and agree on that, but it's our job as the responsible vendors or partners in the space to try to educate on that. Like, hey, you could have three trade-in buttons on your website, but do you really need three? You probably just want one. And what do you want it to do? Do you want to try to fully appraise a car online? So you have a pretty perfect number or do you want to try to capture as many people as possible? What's your strategy? All right. Let's point you this way or that way. That's the idealist talking right there. I don't know the reality of that, but no, it's, it's true. And it's like, it's, Like that's what I like about Google analytics, not necessarily just like it's a reporting thing. That's the barometer for success of any marketing you're doing, except for it shows like a cool cross section of everyone's sort of falling off here. And this source is bouncing really quick. It's not because maybe it's, um, a bad advertiser. It's like when I see our trafficking bouncing really high, it's like, have we looked at it on mobile? Have we looked at the flow of somebody clicking on this ad and what happens next? And like what we see is hopefully we catch it quickly and we're not looking at our ads on these big, beautiful monitors. Cause nobody's going to be looking at our ads on beautiful monitors. We're going to be screaming past them on their phone while they're, you know, sitting on a subway or whatever. And then they tap on it. And if it's just terrible experience, they're going to bounce immediately and not go back. Yeah. We'll fall into a retargeting and stuff, but that's where we see a high bounce rate. It's cause like, okay, cool. Yeah. there's two different pop-ups that are overlaying each other in that landing page. You can't even get off, like sometimes you can't even get off of that pop-up. And so there's nowhere to go except for to leave. That's why our bounce rate's high. We don't need to fix it this second, but let's just stop advertising to these landing pages right now. Like this second, let's just pause those. Let's alert our, our contact there that we need some work around, or can they pull one? You know, there's always a story to unfold by just initially seeing this data, being able to tell something like a coolest bouncing fast. Now let's figure out why. Yeah, no one's immune to this, not even us. We don't do the same level of advertising as a dealership here at Trade Pending, but we do a fair amount. And once every three or four months, we'll catch something that we missed. And we're looking at our little ad in auto remarketing. I'm checking my email in the morning, and there it is. I'm like, part of it's because I have old man eyes now. But I'm like, I can't read anything that our ad says. I totally forgot to check it on mobile. happens to the best of us andrew yeah i kind of like that was a lot of my presentation at first like years ago when it came to like creative for dealers and they weren't really comfortable with social yet or with search they were you know they were into search but it was like what uh Like, you know, they're used to radio and TV and billboards. I'm like, it's kind of like a billboard. Like we're going after people that we think are a good fit, but if they don't stop, they're going to just keep scrolling. If we use a bunch of texts, they're going to keep scrolling. Nobody got time to read that. It's just like a billboard because people are going sixty miles an hour past it. And we got to give them a simple call to action. That's the click right here. And where does that go? Is it going to a lead form? So it was good stuff. So what else? What are you guys cooking up right now? That's awesome. I know you've got video products, you've got trade-in tools, you've got appraisal tools, you've got service department help. Yeah, so you're like rattling off everything. Like, thank you for that. Just covering all the bases. So we're putting more emphasis on... customer loyalty, ownership loyalty. So we have the ValueWatch product. There's just a ton of enhancements that we're building around that so that we're providing our customers and dealers the ability to stay in front of their audience, which they own, right, and their market in ways that provide value to them and aren't just pounding them over the head with more commercials. Like, please continue pounding, but let's give you some other alternative means to reach people to stay in front of people so when they are ready to transact whether that's to trade in or to get some service or to buy a car you're right there top of mind with carvana and carmax and i think that's a great example of this a couple months ago some neighbors uh getting rid of a car they didn't need anymore and then the question like to the neighborhood email listserv was should i do carvana or carmax it's like there was no nothing in there about taking it to a dealership just wasn't even coming on like it didn't enter anybody's thoughts anywhere and so being the student of the industry that i am i'm like well yeah here's what you can expect if you go here to car mexican carvana but you should also really take it down the street to so-and-so dealership because i'm an industry insider and you can tell them i told you no i didn't say that but you know you get what i'm saying right so there's a ton of brand awareness opportunities in markets that's beyond the community events, the sponsorships that I think we can help with. I think so too. I think it's like a lot of what I'm learning is that some, sure it's inventory that people know car dealers sell cars, but it's educating people on things that aren't obvious because they're not reading the same stuff we're reading and looking at the same stuff and market trends and understanding that you get a seventy five hundred dollar rebate right now for electric vehicle purchase. And that might be going away quickly. And tariffs may add a lot of money to the purchase of that EV really soon. So if you're going to buy, you know, to to have messaging in our outbound marketing for dealerships help to educate people. It's always about why not as the right time, but to help give some, you know, shine a spotlight on a specific area of like, Hey, here's what you should probably know right now about getting a vehicle. What are you guys working on that's new and exciting? what are we working on right now? That's the most exciting. Ashley, actually, and I work on the market right now, but we were doing like, we, we just integrated with Fortelis. We integrated with fluency, like just platforms that get us into CDK and just a lot of their DMS data. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. It's cool. I mean, it doesn't sound as cool as it really is because it's like marketing nerd. Cool. But yeah, well, It makes us fast. It makes us be able to automate things to where when customers purchase, they stop getting sales ads and start getting thank you ads and follow our page ads. And here's the service department. Here's our service manager. Here's Hector, who's worked in the service department for twenty four years. And here's why he specializes in the brand that you purchased. And here's why it's valuable for you to come back. Yes, that's cool. So the vision, the goal is for us to be able to work on unique metrics beyond just clicks and stuff, to be able to think of your service retentions at thirty percent. Let's look at this in ninety days and here's the efforts in the budget I'm going to use to try to grow that to thirty five percent within ninety days of people going from sales into service. and let's look at that let's have that be the metric we look at and then we'll back it up with all these other metrics to see if it's working if customers are actually engaging with it so that's fun what else getting more video content we're testing out new platforms like tick tock we've got email since we own all this data about what consumers are driving we're doing a lot of email marketing on behalf of dealers too so getting them in their inbox and their news feed and their stories and they're real. So the same person's getting the hell out of our message where we're surrounding people to where they're like, hey, I see you guys everywhere. You wanna buy my vehicle? Yeah, I think that's the fallacy that marketers that we have that like we're hitting all these channels and we think that everybody is gonna see them everywhere. And the reality is it's like, we're lucky if like five percent see it on any given channel of like who we're trying to reach. I made that number up. But I mean, gosh, that's one of the reasons that we do a ton of print advertising here at Trade Pending is because I have a theory that probably only fifteen, twenty percent of our addressable market will actually see anything we ever put out on social media. You're doing print on behalf of Trade Pending or on behalf of dealers? On Trade Pending, like from our marketing approach here. I'm giving away all the secrets here, but fortunately, probably none of the other automotive software marketers are going to listen to this. I think he might've been our first listener when you listened to my last podcast. Yes. My parents always give like some kind of cursory listen when I do something like this. But so we mailed out like mailing out like thirteen hundred of these mugs. And like another like fifteen hundred to say best GM ever. Like what person doesn't want to have a mug that says they're the best ever? I love that. And then in theory, when our SDR team calls them four hundred times, they will eventually pick up and say, like, oh, yeah, I got the mug. Thank you so much. And hang up or they'll be like, you know what? I've really enjoyed this mug. I'll give you five minutes. Tell me what you got. And they've been distributed already in flight and flight. Cool. We put this together by our our vendor twenty group. presentation? I don't know if it was. Was that when April Simmons came on? No, it was the one in Dallas. There was a vendor in there who sends out. Oh yeah. That was Scott at a volley. Yeah. We've had this thing cooking for months. Okay. It takes a long time to get mugs from China and now they're more expensive. We're having to, you might not ever get, you know, we're re on shoring our off short mugs, something. Yeah. Damn computer chips, whatever is in there. Yeah. I mean, these are the conversations we were just talking about this morning is like, when does it go from marketing qualified lead to a sales qualified lead? When does our sales team call them? And we're in the opinion of like, as soon as we think whatever, when people start engaging with us. Right. Yeah. Whenever you, whenever you deem a marketing qualified lead to be, right determines the response like for us if somebody signs up for a webinar that probably not calling them right away to sell them software they just they came to learn something they're they're way they're way up up here like they're way back there in the funnel like back right over the bird where is it it's hard to do backwards there we go hey buddy but if they've asked for a demo freaking call like two minutes what are you waiting for Yeah. Yeah. We've got some scoring and it's like, as soon as somebody opens the email, then clicks on a video that's in the email, then they download the guide. Is that enough? We've tried scoring so many times and just, I think that might work if you're dealing with like thousands and thousands of lead leads a month, we don't deal on thousands of leads a month. So it's like, all right, somebody did something call. Right. Right. They say, how dare you? I just barely dipped my toe in the water. Yeah. Most, most of the stuff we don't even send over to the sales team when it happens. It's just like, Hey, here's a report of things that happened this month. Take a look. But obviously if somebody's just like, if somebody wants to buy a car, the quicker you respond to them, the better it's going to be. Somebody asks for a demo, your software, you need to be responding in minutes, not hours, not days. Yeah. That's what I say too. It's like, we're trying to build out the same system for their dealership. Let's show them the system up front. Hey, you just filled up this lead form to download a guide. I hope it's useful. Like, have you been able to open it up? Yeah. I see you haven't opened it up. You know, like who cares? It's maybe a little bit invasive, but that's exactly what we're trying to set up. We wouldn't be in marketing if we were afraid of being invasive. Totally. Totally. So you spent some time in dealerships doing some man on the street interviews. How did that start? Well, Gary's the same thing. Well, it's great. So a couple of years ago, we bought into the idea of, I've been trade pending for five years now. And when I first started, there was really no marketing. So just kind of building all the fundamentals in place over time. Let's just get the basics in place. And it was okay. It was really easy to look around and see all of us like automotive software vendors looking and sounding the same. Everybody's doing the same shit. Everyone has the same ads. And it's all like amazing feature and benefit. Buy now. So like, all right, we're going to flip that. We're going to just build brand awareness. We're going to invest heavily in video. And so that's where that came from. The first time we did interviewing people on the street, I sent out some college interns to do it. It didn't work well. Well, I mean, what did we expect here? God bless them. They put forth a great effort. And so then I went out to try to do it and you know, it's really, it can be really awkward to stop people on the street and ask them to talk about cars. I've gotten a lot better at it. And so then we're like, well, you know what? We should probably just go interview people in dealerships. And they're a captive audience because they can't go anywhere. And usually like the GSM or the GM says like, hey, you got to talk to this guy. So we come over and ask them questions about the automotive industry. It's a ton of fun. It's a great excuse to go get into a dealership, to talk to people and meet people. Like you said, they kind of get the pulse of what's going on. And as marketers, we have a couple of jobs. Like one... of first and foremost we have to understand our market then better than like anybody else in the company we got to know where it is we got to know where it's headed because if we do that then it becomes really easy to do the second thing which is help the company make more money and so using that man on the street to be able to actually talk to people to talk to car dealerships like hey it's fun to do i think it's good content That's debatable if you've seen it. But it's still, it's a great way for us to just understand what the heck's going on with our customers and what the people are feeling. People on the street. I'm a big fan of it. I like it because I've tried to do it too. And my theory is like, instead of getting drones and this high quality footage for social ads, it's like use what people use on social and it's just your phone, hold it vertically. You know, the highest tech thing maybe could be like, that we add to the equation would be like a little mic lapel mic or something and then ask people what they love about working there what's your favorite experience about selling a car you know what how you seem to have been here for a long time and you've been bouncing around within the same group like it seems like you got a loyalty what you tell me but you know stuff that we can use in our ads to give a soul some vibrancy to the dealership and at first i would just go to a dealership that we're working with and people didn't know who I was. And they're like, Hey, they're trying to get me into a car. And they realize I have like a bag and a laptop. They're like, okay, who are you here with? Does he know you're here? Do they know you're, you know, it's like, you gotta get the, the skids greased before you go and start trying to shoot a dealership. Ashley did this too. You were going into, but you worked for the group, but yeah. Yeah. I would just call and say, Hey, I'm coming over today. I need these five cars pulled and cleaned. And I want to talk to Jeff and Sam today. And the managers would like make them do it. Jeff and Sam are trying to hide when you show up. Yeah. Like, oh, they would. Yeah. Well, Sam, once he was going to get a haircut, but he didn't. He's not going to do this. Yeah. I think we're getting better. I like to think so. I like to think we're doing what we can from, from our end to be more creative and outside the box, not us, but like you, us, you know, a handful of people that, that we work around. I want everybody else to stay in the box. I love it. Yes. They get like, please. Cause that just gives us the latitude. Programmatic and automation while we still push the envelope on more of a what marketing is and it's creative and what's the message and who's seeing it versus let's have a robot run our ads. All the little fine little points of a campaign and tweak this to try to get a better conversion rate or better CPC on that. But none of it matters if your strategy at the top sucks. Amen. Ashley and I are pretty biblical these days. Well, Matthew, I think we've talked about it all. We've talked about trades. We've talked about acquisition. We've talked about the flow for customers getting through to completing their trade and appraisal tool. We've talked about fixed ops. We've talked about North Korea, talked about North Korea. We talked about AI. Yeah. I'm not talking Allen Iverson. I'm talking about the real deal automation. Um, And thanks. How do people, how do people connect with you or follow you? Matthew at trade pending.com is the email address. Pretty easy. And then, you know, if you look up trade pending, you're not going to, you could throw a rock and find my face on some posts somewhere. I'm easy to find. Yeah. Well, keep it up, man. We're big cheerleaders of what you're doing. And yeah, let's make some excuses to do some work together. Thank you, Ashley and Andrew, for having me on and for letting me just talk about myself for over an hour. It's been great. Appreciate that.