From the CEO + Archives
Spending 77% of your advertising budget on a 6 percent decline…
by Steven Wagner on May 19th, 2010
I recently was with an employee talking about a very well known brand. One we would like to do business with. It is a highly recognized brand with dealers in almost every city in North America. The brand does not sell online and have thousands of dealers nationwide. A perfect fit for Dealer Ignition’s solutions!
We went to The List to get some additional information about their marketing budget.
We discovered that they spend $45 million a year in advertising. They are supporting their dealers with national advertising. But upon deeper analysis, we realized that nearly $34 million was in national magazine advertising. So 77% of the total budget is being spent in National Magazine ads.
The web was $501,000, or roughly 1.1% of the total marketing budget!
So...
Read More »Welcome to Monique and Justin
by Steven Wagner on May 12th, 2010
We’re glad to have two new team members at Dealer Ignition, Monique Ravesloot and Justin Wilson.
Monique started work at DI a couple weeks ago and has already made great progress getting up to speed as our Brand Ignitor. She will be managing our client accounts and ensuring everything is in place to drive the success of their dealer networks. Monique has a great background in project management and consulting, and brings buckets of experience to the team. We’re tickled to have her on board!
Justin is a design intern who has joined our creative team to help build all kinds of cool stuff for our clients. He will also be supporting our sales efforts, pulling together marketing collaterals and all kinds...
Read More »Clicks to Bricks – How walk-in traffic was determined online first.
by Steven Wagner on April 8th, 2010
Would you allow your stores to have a dreadful showroom window?
Probably not, but how many websites offer little current information, are hard to use and cannot be found by search engines? More than we would all like to admit.
Your dealer websites are their second primary location! The key to retail is location, location and location. The web is a location.
In working with many dealers we see two groups. The first truly embrace the interent as a major investment. The second still take a skeptical look at the internet. More research is proving that customers see retailer websites as the primary source for considering doing business with them.
Our promotional network came from a field sales survey that found:
...
Read More »Local Search Engine Marketing Growing in Importance
by Steven Wagner on April 6th, 2010
In following up from Frank’s post from yesterday, I found this graph from Marketing Sherpa. The significance of local online marketing to most marketers. This graph highlights the growing impact local search has.
Consider a story of one of our clients dealers. I recently asked him how important online is to his dealership?
He said extremely important. He told that he recently opened on Sundays. He did not advertise it anywhere besides his website. He had a full dealership on his first Sunday. When he walked his showroom he asked customers how they found out he was open on Sundays.
They replied, we searched online and found your website and saw that you were open on Sundays. We had a full Saturday but wanted...
Read More »How Dealer Ignition can help or eliminate the top SEM challenges
by Steven Wagner on March 29th, 2010
Marketing Sherpa’s chart of the week highlights the top 5 challenges for Marketers.
We’ve posted the chart and share how our services can help some of these challenges for you. We don’t promise a fix for all of them. But the top four challenges can at least be dealt with head-on with our services. 
We’ll start at the top and work our way down this list.
1. Increasing competition for natural search rankings. In the game of online marketing, links are the highways of gold. So connecting your branded website wo all of your dealers through our landing page creator is one example of how we build your organic rankings.
2....
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