A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of speaking to a group of Culligan dealers who are doing amazing work across North America.
People like you!
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve received many messages thanking me for my advice during the marketing roundtable discussion. So, I’d like to continue the conversation and share some tips for generating more leads for your dealership.
There were some interesting insights from the marketers up on stage, and I took three key insights away from the chat.
Each can help generate more leads for your dealership or co-op and are quick and easy for your current agency to implement.
#1 Marketing For Your Community > Marketing For The Masses
I really enjoyed the first part of the roundtable!
That’s because it saw a few different viewpoints offered by marketers from across the spectrum of Culligan dealers, and if you know me, you’ll know I like to consider all sides when it comes to lead-gen.
And then, I refer to the data 🙂
Getting back to this early topic then, we spoke about marketing and content for dealers. It brought up the point of whether your dealership is:
- Marketing for the masses, or
- Marketing for your community
So, which should you be doing?
The first approach is aimed at maximizing the number of people who see your ad or set of ads.
This can useful when you’re trying to grow brand awareness over the medium to long term. Some people call this the ‘spray and pray’ method as it often means ads are more generic. This method can make sense, though, if you want your ads to show to multiple age groups, income categories, genders, or people with a wide range of interests.
However, I prefer marketing for your community and letting corporate campaigns take care of awareness and branding for you. And I like it because it’s where we’ve seen the best results after running more than two thousand split tests for local service businesses like Culligan dealers.
Marketing for your community can be much more time-consuming than marketing for the masses simply because you’re constantly testing ad groups, landing pages, copy, and images, to work out what resonates most with your community.
But the beauty of this method is once you start to understand what your community wants, needs, or reacts to, you’re on a path to guaranteed success.
#2 How Much of Your Marketing Budget Should Be Spent On Existing Customers?
This was another awesome segment of the roundtable and, again, has a few different viewpoints.
One of my fellow speakers up on stage, quite rightly, said that you should ‘put your arms around’ your current customers – doing whatever you can to keep them happy.
I liked that answer because I feel the same way about my own clients. They should always feel valued, heard, and appreciated.
But, there’s also the entrepreneur in me that wants to grow my business too.
Which is why I like the dealerships we work with to be focused on growth and to know there’s a way you can make everybody feel nurtured – whether that’s your current customers OR your prospects.
And it goes back to knowing what people in your area want:
What makes them take action?
What really resonates with them?
If your agency puts the work into understanding this and communicates it via your ads, your prospects will feel like you are speaking to them directly.
It’s very powerful stuff because when that happens, people feel good, which leads them to trust your business and – ultimately – to buy from you.
So, my takeaway is this:
You must absolutely nurture your current customers; they are important. However, it doesn’t need more than a few percent of your marketing budget to make that happen.
And it’s also possible to make future customers (prospects) feel nurtured too, just by talking their language.
If your ads and website can ‘speak’ to your community properly, by using the right copy, imagery, and on-site experience, every single person who fills out a form on your website is going to feel good about buying from you.
And that’s a win-win for your dealership.
#3 You Should Be on Nextdoor.
This was mentioned a few times during the roundtable, and I’m happy it was.
In fact, you probably saw me nodding when it was mentioned!
I know that Nextdoor works because we’ve been exploring it for a while now, and it’s one of many places you should be targeting to improve Local SEO and lead flow. However, it’s not the only directory your business should be focusing on.
We know this because we were the first agency by (*toots horn*) several years to optimize and monitor online directories. In fact, our program of listing dealerships on to directories began more than 3 years before corporate unveiled the VOC program!
*Puts down horn*.
Not only are directories like Nextdoor awesome as a search tool for your local community, but they’re also great for your organic SEO: boosting your rankings on search engines and maps.
Ask your agency which directories your dealership is listed on and see if they have any suggestions for increasing your footprint using this awesome local strategy.
Hope these three takeaways help you and your dealership but if you’ve got questions, book some time to chat, and we’ll happily answer them 🙂
Thanks again to the hundreds of dealers who made it on the day to listen to each of us up on stage and to the excellent speakers who shared that stage with me.
Bryan Trilli
