Dealerships that are proactive in obtaining, engaging and retaining customers are pushing the gap wider between themselves and their competitors.

These are the dealerships with effective staff who don’t sit around day to day waiting for customers to walk on the yard complaining about how quiet it is.

In the last Dealertalk column in the Autotalk magazine, there was a slight error.

The website Peter Aitken referred to giving social media advice was in fact  www.HubSpot.com rather then www.hotspot.com

The online shopper! Ten years ago most of us only had a very vague idea of what constituted an online shopping experience. We may well have thought at the time this was a very risky process and confined to only those foolhardy enough to trust their credit card information to that big black hole within the World Wide Web.

Somewhat different today! With little hesitation we will book and pay for airline travel, accommodation around all corners of the globe and purchase high priced consumer durables such as residential property and motor vehicles, often sight unseen.

By Peter Aitken, ClearedgeNET

It was my intention in this article to write about how a dealership could effectively respond to an inbound vehicle internet enquiry as well as give you my thoughts on who in the dealership may be best placed to handle the enquiry?

When I considered the planned topic I thought no, the content would be just another tactical backgrounder. Hence, I decided to defer the tactical article for the moment and concentrate on a big picture view of digital marketing.

In my earlier articles I referenced the need and importance of having an overall dealership digital marketing strategy. The dealership operational requirements of today often get in the way of a longer term planning process.  A greater amount of time in the average dealership is devoted to what I would describe as dealing with the “transactional alligators lurking in the operational swamp”.