When we first started our company in 2013, we had a vision of what our services would look like. We chose SEO, social media marketing, and content marketing as our core business because those three disciplines offered the greatest needs for car dealers. In other words, we knew would could have the biggest impact on car sales for clients by focusing on those services.
The gap in those areas is by far the largest when it comes to good versus bad. The best websites in the industry can outperform average sites by a small margin. The top PPC service can be a small percentage more efficient than the rest of the services available. Display, retargeting, email, classifieds… the gap was always small between good and bad. If you have the best of the best working for you in these areas, you’re only a little better than a competitor that has comparable products.
In SEO, social, and content, the gap is huge. For example, a popular social media company was delivering pretty good content, reaching a little over 1000 local people a month and getting 130 website visitors sent from social. They charged $1400/mo. The first month after we took over, we reached over 34,000 local people and drove 1700 local car shoppers to the inventory on their website. For a little more money they were able to see huge increases and were able to attribute sales boosts directly to our efforts.
We see the same situations with SEO and content marketing. The problem with all three of these disciplines is that the majority of dealers don’t realize that the difference between great and mediocre are so large. Pitches sound so similar but results can be exponentially better with the right strategy and an aggressive partner.
The Whole is Greater than the Sum of the Parts
It wasn’t just the disparity that attracted us to these disciplines. Perhaps more important is that they work so incredibly well together. Activities such as posting high-quality unique content on the dealership’s website is something that some companies are starting to do, but that’s usually where it stops. As we have noted many times in the past, building content is not enough. You have to support that content with offsite signals such as links and social shares. As a result the promotion of content through our social media efforts helps the social media presence of the dealership, but it’s more than that. It helps the SEO as well.
Let’s peel back the onion even further. Some companies are building PPC landing pages for quality score and conversion. Others are building SEO landing pages for organic keyword ranking. Even others are building socially sharable content to post on Facebook and other sites. The funny (or sad, depending on your perspective) thing about all of this is that when the strategies are laid out properly and expertly delivered, these don’t have to be three separate processes. The foundation of proper content marketing means that pages are built that meet the goals of SEO, social, PPC, and even other disciples like email and buzz marketing. Rather than seeing dilution as can happen when one tries to do too much with a page, we found that the foundation can be built so that the pages work better for all of the individual disciplines and goals.
In other words, when you build a marketing campaign that keeps multiple goals and disciplines in play, you have the opportunity to make them work even better than if you do it all individually. The whole truly becomes greater than the sum of the parts.
The Challenge for Car Dealers Today
Very early on, we realized something important that we hadn’t anticipated. Most dealers and nearly every vendor placed the three disciplines into their own silo. Some would do SEO. Others would do social. Some would do content and call that SEO. There are even those who do two or all three, but they keep them as separate entities. This was obtuse to us, but that was the shape of the market. We knew that if we wanted to promote a truly holistic strategy, we needed to do some educating first.
Over the last year and a half, we have posted articles and videos, spoken at conferences and webinars, all with the purpose of educating dealers about how closely these three disciplines are tied together. We showed how to kill as many birds with as few stones as possible. We demonstrated how making all of the actions play together yields incredible results. As we grew, we continued to promote the process through hiring the right people and making adjustments as the strategies evolved. The result is finally here. We call it Octane.
What is Octane?
It’s easy to bundle different products and services into a package and call it a strategy. Unfortunately, you usually can’t just throw a bunch of ingredients into a pot and call it dinner. The flavors have to work together. They need to make sense.
Octane has been the name of the strategy that we’ve been applying since late 2014. Some might wonder why we waited so long before unveiling it to the public. The answer is a little embarrassing. The team that’s responsible for delivering the product, my team, is also the team responsible for our own marketing. We made this decision consciously in the beginning because we knew that the strategy is so powerful that we would want to apply it to our own marketing as well.
Then, we hired VP of Sales Jeff Glackin. As it turned out, we really didn’t need much marketing once he turned on the sales machine. The steady flow of business that has been coming in this year has kept my team busy and growing. We have been so busy we hired Christine Robertson, creating the role of Director of Dealer Strategy to integrate her dealership experience into the Octane product. The results have been better than we’d hoped.
In short, we delayed official launch until now simply because we underestimated how incredible our team would be. Now that summer is here, it’s time to unveil the most important digital marketing service to hit the automotive industry in years.
Octane is a strategy more than a service. It has one primary goal and three ways of accomplishing it. The primary goal is sales. There is nothing else that matters. It is designed specifically to increase a dealership’s sales starting the first month that we launch. The ways we accomplish this are simple:
- Increase Conversion on the Dealer’s Website: First, we look to see which pages are able to convert the best. Then we find the pages that need help with conversions. On an ongoing basis, we add pages that are designed to draw in more shoppers and convert them into leads, phone calls, and showroom visits.
- Position Offsite Properties to Support the Dealer’s Website: All too often we see a good dealership with a good website that has a poor supporting presence. It could be ill-positioned social media pages and profiles that are doing nothing to make the dealership look good in the community. It could be a poor reputation that’s preventing people from even clicking on the dealership’s website in the first place. By taking control of the whole package, we are able to make people more willing to consider doing business with the dealership.
- Drive ALL Traffic to the Website and Showroom: If there’s one thing that has been proven time and time again in our industry, it’s that the easiest way to increase sales is to get more local car buyers to visit your website, see your inventory, check your specials, and make contact. It’s more than just adding traffic, though. It’s about driving the right traffic to the right pages at the right time.
To say it in a single sentence, Octane funnels car shoppers from multiple places that they visit directly to the pages on your website that can convert while making certain the supporting pages and profiles are conducive to good business. Think of it like a supercharger. We take whatever engine and body you have now in your “digital car” and make it much, much faster.
We d0n’t build websites. We enhance them. We work with any automotive website platform to make it perform better. We then drive traffic to your website through search, social, and content marketing. Octane is not the cheapest service out there, but it’s definitely the most effective. That’s why we have to offer exclusivity within a market. It’s simply too powerful and too greed-inducing to be shared by more than one dealer or group at a time. It’s also why we do not charge setup fees and we do not have contracts. We are so certain of its effectiveness that we stand behind our work based upon results and results alone.
We work best with dealers who care enough about their business that they put in the time, effort, and budget to be dominant. We work best with dealers who never settle for anything other than the absolute best. We work best with dealers who are looking for a true marketing partner. Find out if we’re a good fit for you.
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