Welcome back to the Battle of the Big Cats: Round 2. Last week, Chris Leslie argued that Adwords is the Up-Bus of Today.
Josh Mitchell has something he’d like to say about that. Let’s get ready to rumble…
First and foremost, saying Google Adwords is the “broke-down up bus” is like saying that Google is broken. Google is the number one search engine with over 1.6 billion unique monthly visitors. As an industry, we spent years on traditional advertising like TV, newspaper, billboards and radio. What’s the ROI of those??? I think we are still waiting on that answer.
It’s not that the digital up bus stopped coming. We just have to be better and smarter with how we spend our money.
Fancy as What??
I will agree that, if you aren’t careful, an ad agency will throw a bunch of fancy terms out to close a deal. It’s called the confusion close. Is that really their fault or our fault? Using multi-point attributions, you learn where your customers are instead of the “spray and pray” that we have been used to. Acting like a 21 year old in Vegas making it rain.
We all want to know what advertising is doing and if it is working. The “ceiling” happens when you only take care of your backyard and think you are done. We are no longer competing with the guy next door, our OEM and 3rd party sites. It’s an open playing field. S, yes, it once was cheaper and now you have to pay to play.
The way to compete is to be different.
The reason why our results haven’t been what we want is because it all looks the same. As dealers, we say we are different yet we look and do the same thing as everyone else.
We are a fast-paced industry. The issue comes when we change everything that was working and wonder why we didn’t get the same results. You have to double down on the ad dollars that ARE working and just add to them when you have a special that your OEM is going to advertise the hell out of.
Otherwise, we get lost in the noise.
Bright side
As dealers we have to understand all of this digital fancy talk. We are spending our money and we have to hold ourselves and our venders accountable. Google Adwords is dead when Google says so.
Instead, we have to combine YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and any new social platform in sync with all of our digital advertising. We are no longer talking to our local markets. We are talking to that customer that is 100, 200, 500 miles away or more.
So I challenge all of you to look in the mirror and ask yourself, are you staying up with everything coming out or are you just allowing an agency to spend your money at will?
