Automate to Dominate in 2020

Double Your Dealership's Revenue by Hiring Staff Who Don’t Eat Lunch, Call in Sick, or Jump Ship for a Better Offer

This article has been published in the print version of Powersports Business. You can view it online here.

The future is here. You can now endlessly clone your Sales and Marketing staff without the added costs typically associated with employing a sales force. This concept may sound like science fiction, but it’s more SCIENCE than fiction. Today’s information technology, particularly marketing automation, makes it possible for dealers to exponentially multiply the qualities they love most about their highest performing employees.

So, What is Marketing Automation?

In simple terms, it’s the use of software and strategies to nurture leads with personalized and relevant content that makes converting prospects to customers a breeze. But let’s not complicate it. Marketing automation combines behavior data points, from what people do or don’t do online, with technology that models and interprets them. It allows dealers to make smarter business decisions. Powerful stuff when you consider the revenue implications.

Imagine if your dealership were to successfully create workflows to automate repetitive tasks, such as follow-up campaigns via email and text messages, social media posts, and online ads. Meaning, a prospect looked at a unit on your website but didn’t take any action. The same listing then appears on their social media feeds, or industry-related sites as they surf the web. This is one of many possibilities to remind your prospects of the fun and adventure they’ll experience when they buy a unit from your dealer.

Contrast that to the analog, slow, and inefficient way tons of dealers do it today. The old way ends up costing lots of money in the form of mismanaged time, resulting in missed opportunities that can equate to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Move Double the Units in Half the Time

Over 60 percent of internet leads don’t convert to sales. Crappy conversion rates plague dealers and account for one of the most significant issues hindering revenue growth. Automation seamlessly fixes this by radically maximizing your conversions.

Even top-performing dealerships often stop short of the average number of touches required for the sales process to begin. If leads aren’t called within 15 minutes, they go cold. Prospects must be followed up with 5 to 7 times before they take action. Leveraging automation will turn your most talented employees into rock stars.

Good Versus Bad Automation

The old way of automating marketing was all about emails being triggered based on time delays or actions, like an email being opened or clicked. Superior marketing automation is based on a strategy centered around your prospects’ needs and wants, an entirely different concept than what we’re used to.

Effective marketing automation uses various channels to communicate; the success of your campaigns no longer relies only on email and website clicks. Instead, your efforts can now be well rounded and based on information from many platforms on the web, helping you better understand and influence a buyer’s decision for their best interest!

Another critical element of excellent automation is for sales and marketing to be in lockstep. When done right, marketing automation reduces friction and speeds up your dealer’s flywheel, which increases revenue. If implemented incorrectly, automation has the opposite effect by adding sticking points that weren’t already there.

The Right Time to Launch

When did Noah build the Ark? Before the rain, my friend, before the storm. But not everyone is ready to take advantage of this innovative technology.

So, how do you know when you’re ready to deploy marketing automation? It’s simple, really — when you have a system that consistently publishes content and generates leads via advertising.

But no worries, chances are you’re ready. Once you have the following in play, you’ll be prepared to launch marketing automation campaigns:

1. An advertising budget in place
2. A proven process of generating qualified leads via content and advertising
3. Clarity on which conversations need to happen with marketing and which with sales
4. Tracking of your leads’ journey across most channels
5. You want to scale your current lead nurturing strategy

So, How Do You Get Started?

It’s quite simple. The following steps will help you implement your marketing automation strategy:

1. Take inventory of all your current marketing efforts and sales processes
2. Map out marketing efforts you need to implement
3. Determine responsibilities for all the different tasks
4. Take stock of all the software your team is using
5. Source automation software that ties them all together

Furthermore, here are examples of how you can put marketing automation to work for you.

Use automation to bulletproof conversions on;

• New leads from your website and online ads
• Email marketing and text campaigns
• Inquiries from Facebook Messenger.

Nurture lead and customer relations by;

• Serving ads based on your leads’ interests
• Automatically requesting reviews
• Triggering customer perks and benefits
• Upselling without human intervention
• Following up based on participation

In a Nutshell

?Marketing automation is a game-changer; it increases revenue by saving time and allowing your staff to focus on things that matter, like developing better, stronger relationships. Done right, it will enable you to scale your business and spread more fun. The more fun and adventure around the world, the happier and more fulfilled our lives, and those of the people we touch will be.