Geofencing: The Ultimate Local Business Marketing Tool
Geofencing is an extremely effective method of marketing that can help get more local customers through your door. It works by targeting people by their proximity to your business and sending them special offers to help get them in the door.
Mobile marketing is taken to the next level with Geofencing. A virtual boundary is setup around your dealership using GPS, Beacons & Radio Frequency Identifiers. It can help to grow your customer-base and strengthen your brand identity over time. Geofencing allows you to target internet-enabled devices within a specific geographic area. Customers who enter the geofenced area receive notifications about your brand’s current offers, limited-time promotions, and events where they can engage with your company. Geofencing is a great way to reach out to potential customers and increase brand awareness.
Does Geofencing Benefit My Customer?
In contrast, geofencing offers a plethora of opportunity for mobile users. Interactive shopping & Pick-up reminders, home security, garage door openers, automatic coffee pots and limited time offers to your favorite restaurants are just a few of the benefits. Geofencing can help consumers find new businesses or try new places they may never have known about otherwise.
Benefits of Geofencing for your Dealership
Increase Local Sales:Search Engine Optimization focuses on increasing your rankings on search engines, and the benefits of ranking in the top 3 are quite clear. 54.4% of all clicks on searches are on the top 3 results. Geofencing is a relatively new way to improve your local performance. By sending push notifications to customers within your defined geographic area, you can increase your sales.
Provide Personalization to Your Customer Base: The data that you collect during your geofencing campaigns is of immense value. It will allow you to better personalize your offerings by giving you insight into the demographics of the local population. It also tells you what type of offers interest them and get them in your store. You can use purchase history to determine the products that your local customers prefer and adjust your promotions accordingly.
Connect Your Brand with the Customers Most Likely to do Business with You: Many companies sell their products and services online as well as in the store. Outdoor Power Equipment Dealers do most of their large business in their stores versus online. You already know your local customers are the backbone of your business. A Geofencing strategy can cultivate a strong local following that you can expand over time.
Cheap and Effective: Most companies already utilize Google Adwords, you already have all you need to create an effective geofencing campaign. Google allows you to set location-based parameters for your paid ads and business listings at no extra cost.
Understand Offline Behavior: Understanding how your customers behave offline can give you important insights into how to better advertise to them and give your brand a competitive edge. Brands can use this data to understand how often their customers visit the neighborhoods where their stores are located, how long they stay in those areas, and what kinds of activities they engage in while they’re there. All of this information can help create a more customized and relevant advertising experience for your customers.
Crush Your Competitor: You can apply geofencing technology to your competitor’s as well. Create a geofence around their location so that when a customer gets close to their store, they receive an ad or promotion from your business! You are able to persuade them from visiting the competitor and visit your business instead. This is a fantastic way to drive foot traffic to your business.
Immediate Impact: Geofences are a powerful tool for getting people to take action when they’re in the perfect location to do so. By sending out messages automatically as soon as someone crosses a geofence, businesses can capitalize on the fact that most people only take a few minutes to read messages after they receive them. This makes geofences an ideal way to get people to do something while they’re still in the same general area.
Increased Transparency in Measuring Campaign Success Rates: Marketers can use geofences to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns by combining advertising with data collection. For example, they can create advertising geofences to count how many people entered the areas where they are serving digital ads or were exposed to a physical advertisement (such as a billboard). Then they can create visit attribution geofences around the businesses they are advertising to measure how many people entered stores.
Increase Your Online Presence: In addition to creating targeted marketing campaigns, companies can also use geofence-based advertising to increase online customer engagement. By setting up geofences around their stores (or even just in strategic locations nearby), they can notify people who enter the area of where to find their website or social media accounts. This can prompt people to go online for more information, news, and even discounts from the company. Customers can also go on social media to ask questions or provide feedback, helping the company improve its products and services.
Future Outlook
When it comes to providing a satisfying digital marketing experience, one of the most important things you can do is cater your messaging to your audience’s real-time needs by offering discounts and promotions related to their physical location. By tailoring your call to action to consumers’ interests and needs, you’re much more likely to boost acquisition and retention rates, build loyalty, and increase affinity with your brand.
As AI develops more and the market continues to change, it will become increasingly important to be as personalized as possible in your messaging in order to stand out in a crowded marketplace. It is very easy to implement geofencing into your digital marketing strategy. The experts at Dealers Digital can help you determine your target audience and manage your cooperative advertising dollars while implementing geofencing as a part of your strategy. Want to learn more? Contact Us.
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Supercharge Your Dealership’s Email Marketing Strategy
Email Marketing can be daunting! What strategy to use, how to format it. Where to find and how to build your email list. Where to come up with content, the list goes on and on. Although it may be a little scary, email marketing is one of the best ways to connect with and build relationships with customers as well as push them through the marketing funnel. It is key to have a strong strategy in place or you can waste a lot of time creating content that people wont open or not have subscribers to send your emails to.
What Makes Email Marketing Worth the Time and Effort?
Think about how many emails you read and send in a day? Chances are, it’s more than one. There are more than 4 billion daily email users. That is a lot of emails! On average, email has an ROI of $36 for every dollar spent – higher than any other channel. With 50% of people buy from marketing emails at least once per month. So, if you’re not using email to market your business, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity!
Components of an Explosive Email Strategy
It is important that you follow a process rather than just skipping ahead to creating content to ensure that you hit all your marks and create a successful strategy.
Set Goals and Success Metrics: You will need to create goals for what you are trying to accomplish with your email marketing strategy. Use SMART goals. SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time sensitive. An example of a SMART goal is; By the end of the quarter, you want a 5% higher click-through rate on your emails. It is also important to decide which metrics you will use to determine success or failure. In the example above, your click through rate would be your Key Performance Indicator or Metric.
Target Market Research: You will need to research your target audience. You want to gain as much information as you can about them. The more you know the better you will be able to understand your target audience, and ultimately, create the type of content they will care about.
Review Previous Years End of Year Data: Using insights from this data, you can figure out which are your most effective email tactics. Your year end data will also show where your customers were engaged across all channels. By taking a look at the whole picture, you can keep yourself from having to start from scratch, or make the same mistakes.
Segment Your List: This is a vital part of a winning email marketing campaign. This is where you start personalizing based on each clients need. Segments allow you to send more personalized messages, and you meet your customers at different points along their journey. This can increase your open rate, help you to become more authoritative and improve your lead nurturing efforts.
Start with Federal Holidays and Important Business Dates: For each of your key dates, you will need to decide how far in advance you need to start marketing for it. This will give you a good start and make sure that you are hitting important events your customer’s lives.
Grow Your Email List
A growth plan for your email marketing is essential to success. Growing your email list allows you to have a greater reach with your marketing efforts. There are many ways to grow your email list. For example, you can offer an incentive for signing up for your emails, like a coupon or access to exclusive content. This will motivate people to give you their email address because they will be getting something valuable in return.
A well-designed landing page on your website that is dedicated to driving email signups is a great way to increase your list. You can use social media platforms and PPC ads to boost traffic to your signup page. Another variation of this is to add a pop-up to your website. This way, when a customer is browsing your site, the pop-up will appear and request their email. They must then interact with the box to remove it, which in turn can help motivate people to sign up for your email list!
Create Killer Content
The last thing that you want to do is over promise and under deliver. You must provide content that your subscribers want to see, or they won’t be your subscribers for long! Utilizing your target market research, you know more about what your customers like and do, so you can create your content, centered on what your ideal audience cares about.
It is also extremely important to be consistent. Your audience will get used to seeing your dealership’s name and logo. This helps to keep you top of mind when your audience needs a product or service you offer and increases the likelihood they will use your dealership.
Choose a Platform That Best Suits Your Needs
There are many email marketing platforms out there, as well as many all in one marketing platforms as well. A few favorites are MailChimp, Constant Contact and DealerAmp.
Mailchimp– with both free and paid options. Mailchimp gives insights into ways to get more opens, clicks and sales. The free option allows use of free email templates and is relatively user friendly.
Constant Contact– They offer a free trial, however there is not a usable free option after the free trial. There base plan starts at$9.99 a month and includes email templates. Sign-up forms and Posting to social media. Constant contact is a little more user friendly, but that does come at a price.
DealerAmp– is built specifically for Outdoor Power Equipment Dealerships. It is a one stop marketing automation and messaging platform that takes your dealership marketing to the next level. DealerAmp manages your dealership’s follow up, two-way texting, sales pipeline, scheduling, social media, email marketing, and so much more. This software is packed with features specific to the green industry and will replace all your current marketing tools with just one platform. Schedule a Demo to learn more!
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This article originally appeared in the September edition of OPE Business.
Promoting Your Inventory (For Free) on Google
It is no secret that all OPE dealers have been affected in way or another by inventory shortages this year. Every dealer I have spoken to has spoken at length about the long-term implications of the disruption in the supply chain. But what about the inventory you DO still have on your showroom floor? The cupboard hasn’t been left completely bare, it’s just the shift we are seeing is that customers who may have been looking for a lower end model, might be more easily upsold to a more robust machine. So how do you make consumers aware of the models you do have available?
When the pandemic hit, online retailers were obviously in a much better position to serve customers than physical retailers who don’t have online stores, further widening the gap between online and offline retail. Outdoor equipment dealers should have been more insulated from this because most manufacturers don’t allow whole goods to be sold online. Yes, I know that there are a handful of online stores that are selling zero turn mowers on the web, shipped directly to your door, regardless of OEM rules and regulations. But for those of you who play by the rules, you are left to figure out how to compete in the online space. Enter Google.
Last year, in response to the pandemic, Google announced a program that largely flew under the radar that allows physical merchants to use Google Merchant Center to carve out a presence in search results normally reserved for shopping ads that shows local inventory available for pickup at a local store. This program was aimed at leveling the playing field for local merchants who could offer the one thing the online retailers cannot – the instant gratification of same day local pickup. So, when someone searches for a specific model like a Cub Cadet XT2, the search results at the top of the page will show shopping ads for local retailers that carry that model or models like it. Local consumers will now be driven to your storefront, instead of to an online store. According to Google, a shopping 76% of people who conduct a local search on their smartphone visit a physical store within 24 hours and 28% of those visits result in a purchase. Clearly, the dealers that make the effort to optimize their local presence, will reap the benefits.
It takes a little technical know-how to get set up in Merchant Center so that your on-hand inventory is consistently accurate, but once you are set up, the process can be automated so it is truly a set it and forget it marketing tactic.
Adding products to Google My Business
I’ve spoken at length in the past about the important of Google My Business because it’s the single most important (and free) tool that you can use to promote your business. If it’s been a while since you’ve logged into your Google My Business profile, you may not have noticed that there is now a Products section where you can add equipment directly to your profile.
This is a more manual process, but with a few clicks to upload a product image, add a product name and description, you can create an entire online catalog directly with your GMB profile. Adding rich data like this not only increases your exposure to local shoppers, but it helps the overall visibility of your profile.
You can also manage your profile directly from the GMB app on your smartphone, making it easy to add products, directly from your showroom floor, including used equipment or hard to find parts. These products can be categorized by make, model or type and they do not expire so ongoing maintenance of this section of your profile is minimal.
Google has done an admirable job of attempting to champion small and medium businesses in their struggle to compete against larger companies with seemingly unending resources. Google My Business and free local inventory ads are specifically designed to put local businesses on even footing with large chains and big box stores by providing customers with local shopping options. All you have to do is take advantage of the tools available to you.
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Brett Morris is the owner of Dealers Digital, a digital marketing agency for outdoor power equipment dealers and dealerAMP, a marketing automation platform for the OPE industry. He can grease all the fittings on a Woods Batwing in under 7 minutes.
This article originally appeared in the March edition of OPE Business
When we signed our very first OPE dealership as a client in 2014, the owner asked us to audit what they were spending online and analyze all of the tools they had bought into. So, we went through will all the awkward conversations to terminate deals with folks like the Yellow Pages and every side deal they had signed with multiple local media outlets.
Over the years I’ve met dozens of dealers who consistently tell me the same thing:
“I know I should be more proactive in promoting my business, but there just aren’t enough hours in the day and I don’t have time to learn how to use all of these new tools.”
Most dealers are inundated daily with sales reps and promises of new, flashy technology and how it’s going to change the way they do business. Except it hasn’t. Because technology is only as good as the people you have using it and the quality of the data you have to feed it. But this may finally be the year where technology and utility meet.
When email started to become prominent in the late 90s, it was supposed to kill the telephone (it didn’t) and when social media took off in the mid 2000’s, it was going to kill email (it didn’t) and when everyone got a website, it was going to kill newspapers (well, this one is basically true).
The point is, that instead of emerging technologies replacing each other, they’ve all become blended into a toolkit that work best when you use them together, rather than independently of one other. So, in the past where you just had newspaper, television, radio and billboards to deal with, now you have thousands of tools and channels to utilize for your business, each purporting to make your life easier, but only if you can figure out how to make them all live in harmony.
Enter marketing automation.
Marketing automation isn’t a new concept by any means. The idea has been around for many years with large software companies selling the dream of completely automated customer journeys that just churn out leads and close sales. The problem is that it took a lot of work to set up, even more to maintain and didn’t account for the nuances that every small business inherently had, not to mention that the price point of traditional enterprise software was a massive barrier to entry for small businesses. But as technology goes, tools have matured and in 2021 it’s much easier to make those pieces fit.
Here are the major components you’ll need in order to start putting those pieces together. You can expect to hear a lot more about the pieces that make up this marketing automation toolkit in 2021:
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Software: Most dealerships have a Dealership Management System that houses all of your key contacts, your inventory and more. All good business owners know that the cost of acquiring a new customer is much higher than maintaining an existing one. In fact, 50% of sales from existing customers when using marketing automation, vs. just 30% without. For example, setting up a program that sends a message to a customer at regular service intervals after they’ve purchased a new piece of a equipment is an easy, hands-off reminder to the customer that results in a consistent stream of booked service appointments. Does your DMS have a built in CRM? If not, it’s time to make this your first step.
Business Texting & Messaging: Business texting is one of the most quickly adopted technologies for small businesses in the last ten years. In fact, 78% of US consumers say that receiving a text message is the fastest way to reach them for important services updates and over 90% of text messages are read within the first three minutes. Texting also gives you hours of your day back by eliminating the need to call on customers for service reminders or parts inquiries. By combining marketing automation and business texting, you can notify a day’s worth of contacts with the click of a button and free your employees to get back to other tasks.
Chat Bots: Chat bots are expected to help reduce business costs by up to $8 billion by the year 2022. Why? Because with the power of artificial intelligence, chat bots can now answer the vast majority of the mundane questions you answer over and over again in your dealership. Plus, when added to your marketing automation plan, you can now interact with a potential customer in a meaningful way even without a live agent. For those customers that are searching for equipment at 2am, it gives you a way to collect some basic information in a conversational manner vs expecting the customer to complete an online form to get a quote because they know there is no immediate gratification for their query. In fact 64% of the public likes chatbots because they can deliver a 24-hour service, 7 days a week. When paired with marketing automation, you can collect the user’s information and automatically route that to the appropriate person in your dealership to handle their query so there are no more bottlenecks in your operation.
At a minimum, dealerships now have access to affordable tools to help maintain ongoing conversations with existing customers. But how can you take the next step and use automation technology to help you acquire new customers? For that, it’s important that you have an understanding of the marketing funnel to see where your customers are coming from and where they are in their buying journey. All of these tools are design to save you time and nurture customers down a conversion path that you simply can’t do manually.
With marketing automation we are finally seeing technology and affordability uniting to make your life easier, just a few years later than we were promised.
Dealers Digital owns and operates dealerAMP, an alternative to Kenect, Podium, Birdeye and DP360. If you’d like to learn more about how dealerAMP can help your business save time and money with an integrated business texting, reputation management and CRM platform, schedule a demo.
