Mets Kramer and Ron continue their discussion on the Digital Dealership (2 of 4)

Yeah, doesn't it, though? What do you mean by a channel that you're going to bring content to, which is what we talked about in the last podcast, to your clients, the audience? What do you mean by channel?

A channel could be anything. It's the media or the platform or like a TV channel, different channels. Your TV has 500 channels. Each one is meant to do different things. It's sold differently. And so the audience in the end of that channel is different. So if you think about it, like in that kind of old analogy, if you're selling, putting commercials up on a particular channel on a TV, you want to know who's hanging out on that channel. If it's the sports channel, you're going to find sports people. If it's the home channel, you're going to find people who like houses. And if you're going to try and target a particular audience.

it's good to know who's on that channel and i think the same happens now and one thing that's you know often not considered long enough in social media is you know who's on that channel you know what kind of audience member is on facebook which one is on linkedin you know what should i what channels exist and what's the difference between them So those are channels. It could be something like a billboard. It can be a brochure. I mean, those are all, it could be your, it came up with this idea. It could be your invoices that you send out. You know, it's a channel.

I think, in fact, I'm glad you did that. It's any vehicle that we use to communicate with the marketplace, the audience. It's an invoice. It's a purchase order. It's everything. Yep. We're seeing it rather dramatically in. television today, where if you look at the evolution, we had the three to five channels. Everybody's on ABC, CBS, NBC. Then we start having cable instead of an antenna. Then we start having satellite. And then those folks start lumping things together and presenting a package to us, a gold, silver, bronze, these channels. So in effect, they're doing that to us as they put things like you talked in the last podcast. I think that you've got different levels of software that people are using at the same time. And the vendors, the suppliers are constantly which one gets the best results and why. That channel's the same gig, isn't it?

Channel it. I mean, we do it as people, right? We post something on Facebook. There's well-known addiction to the like button, but that's your feedback. That's how you measure what's happening on each channel. And so when we look at those channels, we both get, some of them have built-in feedback and some of them, we just have to understand, you know, what are the, how the channel works.

Do you have the, do we have? granular enough email addresses, can we get it to the parts manager, to the counter people, to the technicians, or is it just to the dealership and three to four people?

I think you can get granular data on everyone. Like that's the beautiful thing. It's no longer, you know, sending a postcard by mail. All you know is it showed up. Hopefully, you know, it showed up at the door. that you paid it to get to. But when you send an email, you know a lot more about it.

You'd be advocating that we obtain and maintain emails for everybody in the company that's an influence in the purchase.

Correct. Yeah, I would. And I would think there's value in classifying where they fit in.

I agree with that 100%. It's very difficult to do. It's mind-numbing data that we'd have to pour through, right?

I honestly think that between data enrichment, some team member interaction already, because these are the people that you're talking to. If you're a dealership with more people, people are interacting with these people. And so it's in these interactions that you can actually start to qualify who their contacts are, whether these are the contacts that are showing up on work order contacts. You know, then you know that they're service side people. There is all kinds of data enrichment to find out more about the people like demographics you can do. And then you can see how people respond. You know, like if. You can see what kind of emails they're opening, what's interesting to them. That helps you also classify. Like if I send out an email on our inspection app and all these people open it, I assume they're more interested. If I cross-reference that a little bit, I can understand that, yeah, this is a group now that's interested in this topic.

And now I can give them more detailed information about the same topic because I know that that audience, even though I haven't manually gone through everyone, I'm just... Taking what I learn, taking what I see and how people interact, and then changing my behavior to affect their behavior.

Yeah, it's about us adapting, isn't it? What I did, you might have noticed two or three weeks ago, I sent out a bunch of question survey type stuff over LinkedIn and Twitter and Facebook and a bunch relative to the length of the podcast. What do people like? And we got about 2,500 people coming in saying, you know, somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes is about the extent of it. Some guys and gals were saying three to five minutes. Well, I can't compress the information we're trying to transfer. So we're making the adjustment. And then you've got Google Analytics and other statistical products that you can get. What are people looking at? How long are they there? So that if I've got a message. whether it's an audio message or a read message, and it's three minutes long, I get a lot of people coming in,500 people come in, they leave after 30 seconds. Obviously my content didn't get anywhere. Yep. And I've got that to contend with on each channel.

Fair comment?

Exactly. I mean, each of these channels nowadays has all kinds of feedback on top of the, understanding of who's in it that you should be using to fine tune the message. And so we go back to like looking at understanding what the various channels we have. And then once we have those channels, understanding what audience, what the audience wants to see in each channel. So now that we have channel, know what the kind of audience is, understand the kind of content that is desired in that channel. We're kind of ready to mix our product definition with what we understand about the channels.

Okay. So I'm one of these guys, old fashioned as I am, you want somebody to own a channel. Their life is going to depend on how successfully we deal with that channel. So you went in your blog a couple of days ago, you mentioned. LinkedIn seems to be aiming at professionals, corporations, brand development. Facebook is smaller contractors, more social type of thing. Instagram is brand announcements, et cetera. Is that the same type of thing you're wanting to do with these channels?

Yeah, I think every channel has that kind of definition on it. It's a rough definition of the type of audience that you expect to find there. And typically the feedback will tell you that.

So I need an owner of that channel. I could have 20 different owners, correct?

You could. Absolutely.

So that's where it starts in my mind starts to become very complicated. Most dealers in my experience don't have a marketing department that I could give this to that be able to pick it up and run with it. Is that your feeling as well?

I think most dealers don't. I have it most like the people that I've seen on the smaller side of dealerships are doing it themselves in the evenings or they have a sales rep doing it in the bigger dealerships that I've spoken to. They have, you know, their social media or their marketing department and they're doing it on their own and they have the opposite problem. They're too disconnected from the rest of the business. It's definitely social has made it more challenging. to integrate marketing because it's a social aspect. When you had an advertising department that made billboards, it was pretty easy to get a meeting and decide what do we want on the billboards and then they could just go off and do it. But when you move over into social channels, it's about people wanting to engage. And I think we've touched on this in the past.

It's like you have to find a balance between having your sales rep spend 20 hours a week posting LinkedIn content because he's trying to build his engagement with his audience, with his customers, and having someone who isn't the sales rep and doesn't actually have a relationship with the customer, but bring... the expertise and how to do it and the focus of owning the channel, whether it's LinkedIn or Instagram, et cetera. So I think you have to have kind of an interesting mix between the channel owner and what the purpose of the channel is, which is to build, in the case of social media, which is to build social relationships between the customer and your internal people.

And in fact, this is a real change. marketing at an equipment dealership 20,40 years ago was about brochures, trade shows, conventions, mailers, handouts, that type of thing. And that really, it was felt that that was an influence on the sale. Marketing to me is anything and everything that involves getting the customer to say yes to buy something. So now as we move into the social media world, And we've got Facebook, for example, with 2 billion subscribers or users all across the world. And when we talked originally about the digital dealership a couple of podcasts ago, you talked about the audience relative to jargon. Now we've got this universe, that audience is much larger. We started in the last discussion, well, in the previous as well, with the segmentation, defining the segments. And the last one. What products and services are we going to be giving to that particular? Now we're in the channel.

This puppy is starting to layer up to be quite complex.

He has like a three-layer chessboard.

Yeah, yeah. And I'm not good at a two-layer chessboard. But that really is what we're talking about, isn't it? We

are. We're multi-dimensional kind of matrixing, building strategies. for the different. And it doesn't have to be that there are as many squares on a chessboard as number of strategies you have to have. It's merely applying that idea that there are these different dimensions that have to intersect to make your digital marketing work well.

Now, do you think the digital dealership is aimed more at the equipment side or is it the product support side?

I don't honestly think it makes any difference.

Okay. How about the acceptability of it? Do you think the equipment side is more prepared for this type of thinking than parts and service?

That I would say so, yeah. I think the advertising, the concept of advertising and marketing, I think is more at home in the equipment sales side. It's been done more.

Right.

With my time in running parts and service, we didn't do a lot of. thinking about marketing too busy just running the day-to-day um but on the other hand you know when we look at the really small market share percentage upon doing some analysis of both parts and service you realize like that's why like how much opportunity is missed because we're not thinking you know what are our what are our service products like what are they really yeah and how are we going to present our service you know

Adaptability and adjusting to the reality in the marketplace is critical. And what you're pointing out is equipment sales have done a much better job of marketing, understanding their market and exploiting it than parts and service. As you said, we're too busy trying to keep up. We're working in the business, not on the business. And we haven't had the headcount to allow us to do that. But that's kind of a beautiful way of ending up on the channel, isn't it? The channel explodes the means with which we can communicate to our audience. Yeah.

There are lots to choose from.

Any other closing comments you want to give on the channel side of things before we move on to the next?

I think probably the most useful thing would be that it's important to understand them so that you don't fatigue your audience on the channel.

Yeah, I think that's great advice. We can create too many tracks.

Yeah. And then the other piece was that the channel has its own algorithm, right? Especially we talk about social. And so you can have a channel, you can have an audience on it. If you're not thinking through the feedback and what you're seeing and what you're putting out there and what the channel prefers, you might be... yelling into an empty room because the algorithm simply will not post your content.

Yeah, exactly. That's a good way to close this. Okay, Mets, thank you very much. And thank you folks for listening in on this podcast. I look forward to seeing you at our next podcast with Mets in the near future. Mahalo.