Nearly 100% of dealership or OEM marketing budgets and strategies (both traditional and digital) is geared toward driving business to the website.
But as an industry, we’ve forgotten a basic principle of marketing: the importance of brand recall. Our memory lapse is creating unnecessary headwind in traffic flow to URL destinations.
There are a couple of reasons for this. 1.) No one questions the .com domain approach because we aren’t thinking long term about how the Internet will need to categorize itself. 2.) We expect Google to figure it out for us.
Let’s start with Google. As one of the world’s largest companies, Google does a stellar job of finding and steering shoppers to websites and relevant content – for the most part. Google doesn’t always get it right. How could they?
There are 140 million .com domain names! Google must build the AI, algorithms and human power to sort your name from the millions of businesses such as ones selling flowers, cell phones, vehicles, shoes, adult content, books and real estate, not to mention potentially having your dealership stand out among your competitors.
Dealers are too quick to hand over the reins to Google, and thus lose control over their own hard-earned branding or location-based identity.
We rely on Google to do what it does so well and support our businesses. We generally compensate it through advertising. We think this is as good as it gets.
But what if dealers could take a bit of that control back? What if you could help Google be more accurate, and help your customers remember who they are looking for and where?
This brings me back to my earlier point about the .com domain approach. To get to the future of the Internet, we have to look into the past and the core intentions of why domain names are essentially shoehorned into .com.
read more (wardsauto)
But as an industry, we’ve forgotten a basic principle of marketing: the importance of brand recall. Our memory lapse is creating unnecessary headwind in traffic flow to URL destinations.
There are a couple of reasons for this. 1.) No one questions the .com domain approach because we aren’t thinking long term about how the Internet will need to categorize itself. 2.) We expect Google to figure it out for us.
Let’s start with Google. As one of the world’s largest companies, Google does a stellar job of finding and steering shoppers to websites and relevant content – for the most part. Google doesn’t always get it right. How could they?
There are 140 million .com domain names! Google must build the AI, algorithms and human power to sort your name from the millions of businesses such as ones selling flowers, cell phones, vehicles, shoes, adult content, books and real estate, not to mention potentially having your dealership stand out among your competitors.
Dealers are too quick to hand over the reins to Google, and thus lose control over their own hard-earned branding or location-based identity.
We rely on Google to do what it does so well and support our businesses. We generally compensate it through advertising. We think this is as good as it gets.
But what if dealers could take a bit of that control back? What if you could help Google be more accurate, and help your customers remember who they are looking for and where?
This brings me back to my earlier point about the .com domain approach. To get to the future of the Internet, we have to look into the past and the core intentions of why domain names are essentially shoehorned into .com.
read more (wardsauto)
