Guest Poster – DealerRefresh | DealerRefresh Automotive Dealer Forums

5 Top Reasons your GM is Causing Employee Turnover

It’s never easy to look in the mirror and face the truth (really, what is the truth?) wondering why there’s so much turnover. Where the average turnover for YOY is 100% – asking yourself everything from is it the on-boarding, quality of personnel, management, or is it me? Why are people quitting me, BUT not …

Google Introduces Their New Review Monitoring System

Latest HOT Discussion in the Forum Blumenthal Reports – Google Introduces Review Monitoring System Mike Blumenthal (the KING of local marketing) reported today, “Google Intros the Mother of All SMB Review Monitoring Systems” According to Mike, “The system, a new module for the updated Places for Business Dashboard, not only shows Google based reviews to …

Best Practices Dealership Marketing

A Better Analytics Tool To Improve Customer Experience & Conversion?

Using ClickTale to Improve Conversion While building our new website, www.actontoyota.com, we were continually asking ourselves a number of questions in an effort to create a site that ultimately improves page layout, enhances the visitor experience and, above all, increases conversion rates. For example, we asked ourselves: What can we do to improve our pages’ …

Best Practices Dealership Marketing

The SEO Apocalypse

After the Google Penguin update, I find many of my old tactics are void. For those who don’t know, Google went on the attack April devaluing and penalizing sites using spammy SEO tactics. Many sites were hit and devalued on the search engine results pages. I watched sites go from 20,000 unique visitors a month, …

Industry Events

AutoCon 2012 Review with Jay Campbell

As a 19 year representative of the “Vendor Community” and long time attendee of the various Digital Auto Conferences, it was refreshing to experience a show from the retail dealership perspective. As the newly appointed Digital Marketing, Internet and BDC Director of a large Western Lexus Dealer, I was hoping to fully immerse myself into …

Best Practices Industry News & Trends

Multichannel Marketing Increases Sales and Retention – Study

Since the dawn of time, dealers believed that automotive marketing vendors are trying to push more point products on them in order to upsell and increase their commissions: Search Marketing Search Engine Optimization Social Media Chat Video Mobile eMail… Dealers are absolutely right. We are. But are we taking you down the garden path? A new …

Best Practices

The 4-Hour Work Week – At The Dealership

Can You Sell Cars Working 4 Hours A Week? Can you imagine? Instead of working 60 plus hours per week, you show up at 9 AM on Monday and weekend is just four hours away! What would you do with all the free time? I would probably play enough golf to be on the PGA …

Best Practices Industry News & Trends

The Power of Misinformation

[highlight color=”#fde1c3″ font=”black”]This is a guest post from Bill Playford. If you don’t already know Bill by his name, you may recognize him from the videos he and Joe Webb are featured in. Bill is Vice President and Chief Rocket Surgeon over at DealerKnows. We were on the phone earlier this week discussing some of the false claims in …

The Mobile Movement for Your Dealership

This is a guest post by Shawn Petley (eCommerce Director). Shawn and I were discussing mobile strategies in relation to some of stats coming out of the Google Mobile Playbook. Before we ended the call, I asked Shawn if he would like to write an article around our discussion highlighting some of the data from …

Best Practices Dealership Marketing

Cars.com Is Launching New-Car Features and Enhancements

You may have seen some comments from me on the message boards, but for anyone interested in who I am (Nick Hummer) and why I wrote this (short answer: because Jeff asked). I’m currently the Director of Advertising Solutions at Cars.com, working on my 9th year in the company. Assuming Jeff invites me back, you …