DealerIgnition

As part of our ongoing efforts to keep our users up to date with the many enhancements that occur with Dealer Ignition, we are announcing a new version of the application. The biggest change in this release is a redesign of the dashboard. For example:

• The dashboard now has a summary for each module. Each summary gives you a overview of the current state of the module. Below is a screenshot of the Email Summary (log in to the app to see the rest):
• The activity stream is now more compact and more useful. As part of the dashboard rework, we have also redone the activity stream. It now only shows activity for the last thirty days, and the messages are grouped by module:
• The nightly alert email now...

How is it possible to ‘own’ and independent dealer? As a manufacturer of goods part of the concern you have on a day to day basis (you know…..the “What keeps you up at night ?”question) is how you get your marketing message down through your dealer network. Trouble is, you don’t own the independent dealer. You can’t. They are independent for their reasons and that creates difficulty for you and your marketing efforts every day.

So is it possible to actually own an independent dealer who is representing your product and many of your competitors side by side? Of course it is. The idea of ownership doesn’t always have to imply financial terms or even full exclusivity. You don’t need to own anything about your independent dealer other than a piece of their loyalty.

What does that mean? That means there are a few simple things that can be...

We hear this all the time from dealers and other SMB’s alike. The ideal situation for creating business and opportunity through online channels is one that gives the chance to spend as little as possible to get the highest possible return. That’s an obvious one but everyone still talks about it. Why? Well, mainly because it’s not easy to do!

Many SMB’s get sold a bill of goods that organic search is the sole way to go or paid search is the sole way to go to reach the customers that the online world represents. Why does it usually happen that way? It’s easy. The message is coming from a service provider or consultant that only concentrates on one or the other. As a result, there is a lot of half information shared with SMB’s and the net result is confusion as to which way to go at all.

MarketingSherpa...

It doesn’t matter how well known the brand is or how big the marketing budget is. What ultimately determines whether a purchase is made or not could very well occur at the local level.

Consider these scenarios.

1. Ginormo Computer Inc spends $100 million on a splashy campaign to introduce the latest and greatest version of their computers for business. There are ads everywhere and a social media blitz that has posts and tweets and everything else coming out of everyone’s ears. While the advertising is all well and good there still needs to be someone who connects Ginormo’s prospects with products that meet the consumer’s real needs, not just those that are ‘marketed’.

SMB (small and medium business) owner goes to the same VAR (value added reseller) that he has trusted for years to give his company the best technology solutions for HIS business.

The VAR hears about how Ginormo has introduced...

This week’s release went live this morning, and included mostly under the covers speed improvements. The one visible enhancement in this release is a setting to disable the nightly alert email you receive if you have any pending alerts on your dashboard (see last week’s release). This setting is available on your ‘Account Settings’ page:

The setting is located below the field to change your name:

We’re hard at work on some awesome enhancements to the dashboard to make it easier to see what’s happening with your Dealer Ignition account at a glance. Keep an eye out for those next week!

We all get dozens of emails everyday. We all have busy schedules. And we all hate getting emails where we have to read and scroll for our entire lunch break before we figure out what it is about. Or maybe I am doing that to you right now…?

As you write emails, remember to respect your reader, who also has a busy schedule, by cutting out phrases, sentences and paragraphs that just aren’t helpful in getting the message across. When your reader opens your email he should instantly be able to see who it is from (logo/branding) and what it is about (headline/image). Your reader should not have to sift through sentences of “greetings” and “welcomes” before he/she figures out what it is talking about. A clean email just makes life easier.

We like suspense in movies, books and even articles, but no one enjoys a suspenseful email.

Place pages were introduced by Google as part of the Local Business Center in September of last year. The intention is to give every place, as in every place on Google Maps, a page of its own. The idea is that no one should be without some kind of web presence and that includes local businesses.

As with all things Google there are constant improvements that are made and keeping up with the rapid pace of innovation can be daunting. That’s one of the reasons why we talk about these things here at the Dealer Ignition blog. We realize that there is a lot that goes into the successful marketing of a business online.

So what did Google do to make these pages even more valuable? Now you can post updates to your place page. So if you have some form of announcement or would like to run a special between certain times you can update this place page for those...

If you sell a large company’s products in your store who is more dependent on whom? Are you more dependent on the supplier because of their products and brand or are they more dependent on you because you are the local point of contact and sale? This relatively simple question is one that needs to be addressed by manufacturers and dealers alike. The resulting answers could be the difference in success or failure as the world of business and marketing changes due to the online space.

For this post we will concentrate on the manufacturers side of the ledger. The reason for this is quite simple. Your success truly depends on the ability of the local dealer / agent to move your product. If they don’t move it, they can’t buy more from you. Everyone loses. As a result it is extremely important for the manufacturer to be actively involved...

Last night, we pushed our weekly application release to our server cluster. The notable feature in this release is a system that presents users with alerts. This alerts system allows us to better communicate issues or notices to our users. The alerts show on a user’s dashboard:

You can see at a glance if you have any alerts from any page in the application using the alerts widget in the header:

We currently have a few automated alerts that the application will create, and will be adding more as we identify them. We also send a nightly email to each user if he has any pending alerts.

The alert system is the first step in our redesign of the Dashboard to make it more useful. Keep an eye out for more enhancements there in the next few weeks. This release also contains several speed improvements as part of our...

Normally the year in review “stuff” from search engines has little to do with business. While these lists may seem interesting for about half a second it really doesn’t do much for the SMB who is looking to get more business from their web presence. Google likes to play the game of telling us in early December what the most searched terms were and more but they wait until the start of January to tell the business users some important stats that could influence how they look at the engine.

Organic search (and just search marketing as a whole) is of the utmost importance to any business. Here are a few points that come directly from the Official Google blog describing things of interest to those using the search engine to fuel their own revenue engine. Did you know….

- 7 out of 10 US Google users make more than one search query per day. Do you think they are all...