Websites Need to Evolve. Websites need to be engaging and interactive. Visit any website today and they're much the same as they were 20 years ago: they're entirely one way for the most part.

Ownership of social media is shifting away from Marketing and Communication as engagement increasingly relates to inbound customerservice-based topics. Rather than social being seen purely as a space for companies to deliver outbound marketing messages, it is the inbound customer queries that allow for meaningful points of engagement and the building of brand advocacy

Social CRM Community tools allow businesses to better engage with their customers by, for example, listening to their opinions about their
products and services.
 

Why Put a “Brain” Behind Your Website? Conversion, Conversion, Conversion

Posted on December 18th, 2014 by Brad Title

It’s always fascinating for us at AutoUSA to learn about the trends in the market, the changes in customer behaviors and the challenges faced by our dealers. This year’s annual survey results highlighted an evolving marketplace, where customer behavior is changing and forcing dealers to examine their processes, and their positioning in the market.

According to the results from AutoUSA’s annual Internet Marketing survey, the following were chosen as the three biggest challenges that Internet departments are facing:

1) Not Enough Leads (26% of respondents chose this as a major challenge)

Dealers don’t seem to be getting the hoped-for volume of leads they want or expect from their websites. This is interesting because two years ago, “keeping up with lead volume” was the number one challenge. In spite of increased spending on websites and SEO/SEM, and increased traffic, it seems dealers are failing to convert visitors into leads.

To me there’s a simple explanation for this. Consumer expectations and behavior have changed in the last two years. Today’s customers want to be in control of the car-buying process, while many dealers also want control of the process. As a result, dealers and dealer website vendors are saying “It’s all about the lead, give me the lead,” while their customers are saying “It’s all about the information, give me the information.” So when a customer visits a website and is bombarded with chat pop-ups, lead forms and can’t find the information they are looking for (such as price or payment information), they are going to leave the website and find the information somewhere else.

This trend isn’t going to change. Dealers must adapt and give customers the information they want, otherwise they risk losing them to a competitor. Remember, a customer visits only 1.8 dealerships on average before making a vehicle purchase. That tells me today’s consumer has already done the majority of their research online before heading out to their top two dealership choices.

Dealers that focus on the customer’s website experience – making it user-friendly, full of helpful content, and making it convenient for the customer to walk themselves through the process – are more likely to draw customers in than websites that are designed solely as a virtual brochure or to get the customer’s information. Conversion tools that are useful to customers, including trade-in calculators, showroom-visit incentives, and payment quoting tools give customers a compelling reason, or even a reward, to submit their information.

Instead of battling for control, dealers should be helping customers with their search for information. Chances are, those who help the most will be one of the 1.8 dealerships visited.

2) Not Enough Staff (20% of respondents chose this as a major challenge)

Staffing issues tend to be a perpetual challenge year after year, according to our surveys. Whether it’s not enough staff, the quality of staff, staff turnover or staff not following processes – it’s clear that many dealers believe that finding, training and keeping the right staff is a never-ending challenge.

But is it really the staff that’s the problem, or is it that many dealerships haven’t changed their sales model to reflect the state of the market? It’s well accepted that nearly 90% of car buyers start their search online. They, like the majority of us, are used to transacting business regularly online, whether it’s buying books, music, electronics, shopping for homes or travel. The Internet is a common tool, but many stores still treat it as a stand-alone department. We continue to see progressive, successful dealerships with high volumes in Internet sales adopt a model where every salesperson is also equipped to handle Internet inquiries so they can scale to serve more “leads”.

3) Quality of Staff (19% of respondents chose this as a major challenge)

As a young sales manager, I was taught by my GM that a salesperson’s failure (and their subsequent departure from our dealership) was my fault. You hire a skill set, train the desired behaviors, and manage execution of the processes so that you have the best-quality staff possible.

There are many new hires who do not receive enough training and are not held accountable when they don’t follow processes. If quality of staff is your greatest challenge, take ownership of that and improve the quality of your staff, and consequently the customer experience, by providing training and expecting excellence.

Salespeople can be trained to follow Internet processes; it’s no different than training them how to take phone calls or how to deal with customers in person, just a different method of communication.

Other major challenges cited in the survey were as follows:

4) Staff does not consistently adhere to written processes (18%)
5) Marketing budget not large enough to accomplish objectives (18%)
6) Keeping up with lead volume (17%)
7) Lack of staff accountability (16%)
8) Lack of management buy-in (16%)
9) Lack of staff training (15%)
10) High staff turnover (9%)

What is your Internet department’s greatest challenge? How have you dealt with some of these challenges?

POSTED BY Josh Vajda

Planning a website redesign can be an extremely exciting process. You have a blank canvas to which you can easily add your own creativity and flair. It's tempting to get carried away.

Unfortunately, most designers and creative teams will use this opportunity to focus entirely on the visual design of the site, and overlook SEO, content, and functionality.

Sites with a history of good search traffic can see most or even all of that traffic vanish after a redesign. That new site may look great, but that won't be much consolation to their owners!

Yes, it's important to have a great looking website. It needs to look great if it's going to convert your visitors into paying customers, but traffic, conversions, and functionality are what will ultimately govern its success or failure.

So, what are the key considerations when implementing a site re-design?

1. Have You Done Your Research?

To design a website that's going to deliver results, you need to know who you're targeting. The design, functionality, and SEO focus should all be dictated by informed research. That means market research, keyword research, and community mapping.

This should be your first port of call, not an afterthought. If you have this information from the very beginning you can then use in in every aspect of your redesign.

Benchmarking your existing data will allow you to identify what is currently working, and what has worked in the past. Be sure to evaluate which pages are the most popular, convert the best, rank and deliver the most leads/sales. Doing so will fuel the new site with proven techniques and allow you to gauge the site's success post-launch.

2. Website Structure

A redesign isn't simply a chance to give your website a fresh look. It also gives you the opportunity to reorganize the way your site is structured.

To make sure your information architecture is set up for optimal visibility and conversions, your priority should be analyzing the effectiveness of your current site:

• Which pages convert the best? 
• What's the most common route through your website? 
• Do some pages have a high bounce rate?

Use all of this information to improve the architecture of your new site.

Mobile phones, tablets and alternative devices must also be considered. There are a few primary approaches:

• Responsive
• Adaptive
• Mobile site
• Apps

Each approach has their advantages. You'll want to consider factors like site goals, personalization, site complexity, timeframe, and budgets.

3. Redirects – 301 & Canonicals

Inventory all pages, incoming links, and pages that rank well from the very beginning. Don't forget about subdomains.

As the URL structure is changed, a redirect strategy will be incredibly important to retaining any SEO rankings and rerouting referral traffic to the new pages/URLs.

Audit and analyze where all incoming links are coming from, and going to. This can be done using tools like Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO, among others.

Once you have an inventory of backward links, you'll want to map them along with all pages to their new location using 301 redirects. This is also a great time to establish your canonical strategy for "www", index files, and other forms of duplicate content.

Tip: The redirect strategy will likely change based on design, navigation, and content, among other factors. Knowing this in advance will help alleviate future frustrations.

4. Navigation

How easily your site can be navigated, by both human visitors and search engine spiders, will have a significant effect on the visibility and success of your new website. You need to look at site structure from two different standpoints:

• How are people going to find your site? This is where you need to be thinking about your URL structure. Can it be shortened? Are there lots of unnecessary characters? Does the URL give pride of place to the term you'd most like that page to rank well for?
  A redesign gives you the chance to give your entire URL structure a reshuffle and cut away any dead wood that may have developed as part of your existing site's development. Your new URL structure and sitemap should make it easy for the search engines to see what each page is about and make sure that you're using the most important terms for each of your campaigns.
• How your human visitors will navigate the site once they've found it? Which pages have you identified as your primary entry points? What action do you want visitors to each of these pages to take? What journey will they need to take in order to take that desired action? Can you do anything to shorten this journey or increase conversions?
  By taking an informed, data-driven look at your existing site structure and optimizing it in line with your new site's primary objectives, you have a chance to drastically improve the performance of your site.

5. Where Does the Content Fit In?

We all know that content is the most important aspect of any digital campaign. So why is it still so often an afterthought when sites are designed?

The quality, visibility, and relevance of your content will be the most influential factor in determining the success or failure of your new site. Shouldn't it be given some attention during the design process?

One primary consideration is what type of content will be published on-site.

• Are you going to have a blog? 
• Is that blog going to be mostly visual or will you be publishing long, informative articles?

These questions should always be answered before you start designing the site. This gives you the opportunity to effectively integrate the blog into the overall design of your new website. It will also give you a chance to make sure that visitors can always find the most relevant content for them – and that they can find your blog, no matter what page they're on.

Another consideration is whether you'll be offering any other content through your site.

• Will you be publishing whitepapers, eBooks, video tutorials? 
• If so, how will they be delivered? 
• Will you offer them in return for an email address? 
• Will they be available to anyone, or only available to members?

As with each of the previous points, considering your content before you finalize the site design will make it far more functional, profitable, and effective.

6. Technical SEO

Your site's position in the SERPs depends on many different factors (more than 200, according to Google). This means that your redesign gives you more than 200 different areas that you can look to improve, condense, and build on to increase your search visibility, site authority, and trust.

Three key areas you should pay close attention to during the redesign process are:

• Page load times: Far too often companies launch a site that looks great, but only if you wait around for long enough for the homepage to load. Unfortunately, visitors to your site won't put up with it, and as a result, neither will the search engines. Your redesign should be seen as an opportunity to speed up your site, not slow it down.
• Compliance: This area is also often overlooked by site designers. If you want your site to work in the modern online marketplace it needs to conform to recognized standards. This means it needs to adhere to section 508 and W3C compliance factors as well as EU Cookie laws (if applicable).
• Coding: Your site redesign should be seen as an opportunity to give your code a spring-clean. As you know, search engine spiders can only read text. Images, videos and other web elements can all hide and disguise this text so that search engines have difficulty reading it. This means that they are also very unlikely to give your pages high visibility for those disguised terms. To ensure that your site has the greatest possible search visibility, you need to make sure that your code makes it as easy as possible for the spiders to crawl your site. If you're in any doubt, use a tool like this to see your pages from a search engines point of view.

7. Testing

In an ideal situation, budgets and time would be unlimited. If we had the budget and time, every single component of the site would be pitted in a death match fight to the death based on analytical data. This would include all wireframes, mock-ups, images, color, content and the list goes on.

Obviously, we can't do this. But don't forget about the advantages gained if we could, and remember to incorporate testing into your process.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is quickly evolving into an entirely integrated discipline. A website redesign is a major event in any digital marketing campaign, so it makes sense that this process should also be as integrated as possible.

If a site is going to deliver real value, it shouldn't be left to just designers and aesthetic considerations. Your SEO team, copywriters, sales team and social media managers should all be heavily involved, right from the start.
By Brad Miller

http://dealernetservicesonline.biz

Face-to-face sales interactions are typically viewed as the most valuable activity by Sales Leaders.  5 years ago they were right. Nothing was more important than executing in the trenches.  But during those times, the trenches were out in the field.  In this post we will explore how the trenches have changed. Today, getting in the door is more difficult than executing face-to-face sales calls.

Today your sales people have multiple product specialists, overlays, and management support.  But these resources don’t engage until they get in front on someone.  The vast majority of training is focused on selling once you are face-to-face.  But buyers are much more informed today. This fact makes getting in the door more than half the battle.

The primary differentiator of today's top Sales Rep is the ability to prospect.  This could be prospecting for new business or different buying centers within existing customers.  Both are difficult.  Both are where the potential is.  Managing a relationship or taking orders from existing customers are table-stakes.  Opening new doors is a unique and difficult skill.  Few are really good at it. 

We have captured 5 modern prospecting best practices from top performers.  Download this tool to rapidly improve your prospecting results. 

I recently had a discussion with a Sales Leader about his team’s ability to prospect. 

He told me that, “Prospecting is a basic skillset all my reps should have.”

I asked what skills he was referring to.  He couldn’t articulate their prospecting strategy.  He basically told me they should make cold calls and “beat the streets”.  I then asked how they make phone calls and what their success rate is.  He gave me a blank stare.  "What do you mean?  They call and explain who they are and why they are calling.  Then they ask for an appointment."

As shocking as this example may seem, it is the norm.  A majority of sales people are terrible at prospecting.  They call the same buyer each week hoping something has changed. They open a phone call with what their company provides.  They knock on a door and leave a business card.  The success rate using outdated methods and poor messaging is under 5%.  And Sales Managers wonder why their people aren’t prospecting.

 

Why do sales people inflict so much pain on themselves?

 

• They are instructed to use outdated prospecting techniques
• They are resistant to change and make excuses such as, “our buyers aren’t on social media”
• Most sales training is focused on execution once in the door
• Organizations inhibit the use of modern prospecting methods
• They make the mistake of relying on someone else to prospect

 

How to get in the door:

 

1. Approach the right doors - some doors aren’t worth approaching.  Is your sales team focused on customers with the highest potential to buy your solution?  Or do they call on low value prospects and saturated customers?  Clearly define your target audience first. 
2. Buyer Centric Messaging - have you ever had a feeling that an advertisement was meant for you?  It may have been 1 out of 100 advertisements.  The goal is to make every communication speak directly to your buyer.  You should understand them so well they think you have their job.  Speak directly to the buyer’s fears, objectives, and personal wants.
3. Use Social Listening – understand what your buyer cares about.  Is there a better way than watching their behavior first hand?  This works whether using social prospecting, email, or phone.  Your buyers will give you the answer to the test and you aren’t cheating. 
4. Refine Writing Skills – produce succinct, clear, and compelling copy that drives an actionable response.  Think of how many more emails you send than conversations you have each day.  We communicate via the written word much more frequently than orally.  Yet we focus most of our time on improving oral communication skills.  Your prospects spend more time reading about you than listening to you. 
5. Incorporate Social Prospecting – LinkedIn is not a clogged channel.  Email and the phone are.  You can use relationships to get access to buyers.  Using social is more effective and less painful than cold calling.

Use this tool to spread these best practices across your sales organization.  Prospecting can be enjoyable and effective if approached correctly.