Promoting & Advertising for Auto Dealers - It Is All About Value Received

For most businesses in 2011 its a quandary. What used to be the basic time trusted means of promotion and advertising to get customers and potential customers in your front door do not work anymore and are not cost effective. Yet what should retailers do ? Its a jungle out there .

The big 3 car makers ? Nobody wants little foreign econoboxes? Newspaper ads are king, along with radio weekend shots. Yellow pages - which were the gold mine before. No one reads yellow pages anymore except for older highly conservative buyers. Even if you do place ads in the "Yellow Pages" phone book it is horrendously expensive and not worth it. Even the Yellow Page is going online.

Lots of luck. It's a brave new world. Poor Rip would have a difficult time not even knowing words and phrases like neither "Craigslist, EBay nor even the measures by which ads are evaluated on Goggle targeted pay per click PPC ads. Sure to the greatest degree the rules stay the same - that its all about getting potential auto buyers to the door yet the vehicles have changed over 360 - or perhaps for some consistency from the old days - 310 %. .

Yet if you are a dealership owner or even auto sales manager or person then there are definitely trends that can change the way that do business, your outlook, the profits and paychecks of your workers. Potentially it may also affect whether you are in business 3, 4 or 5 years from now.

No matter what there are some basic considerations to consider when setting up advertising and potential advertising campaigns no matter what any advertising "account exec" (a salesperson no matter what they call them) tells or advises you. Their job and role , just as yours is to ultimately sell cars, trucks, SUV , service and financing, theirs is to sell their product - advertising.

First of all remember that advertising is an overage expense, a variable ultimately not even a fixed cost. As an example in point if you sell 100 cars a month with no advertising what so ever and then set and spend a monthly total advertising allowance of 100,000 a month in total avenues what did that ad cost you.

How do you judge the performance of your advertising - and on top of that segment per segment? First things unless you have some measurements of sorts you are running blind in the dark totally. Next judge in terms of cost per a unit vehicle sold. Just a short time ago a budding Search Engine Marketing SEO type met with what was considered the most innovative and best "marketer" in that area in his local area. On top of that the firm sold a range of products from somewhat premium mass market cars (in which a lot of competition in that market segment existed), to a highly premium luxury product line. These buyers would overall want to be reassured of the prestige element of their large outlay and purchase; the first group would have to be drawn away from the crowd.

When the alleged expert marketer was asked in the interview about his advertising focus he answered proudly "We advertise in the major local newspaper exclusively". He even stated the confidential price per car ad placed he had negotiated with the "paper" in the highly read weekly auto section. Talk about turning the tables on a salesperson. Salespeople it seems are the easiest not the hardest people to say, no matter what they say or savvy they believe they are.

Yet when the question was asked to qualify value "How many people came in to view or phoned about that ad/vehicle "per ad.

T The corollary being - how many times did you have to run that ad to sell that or a car? Ultimately the question to be answered was one of value. That is how much per vehicle on average do you have to spend in the newspaper format to sell a car. Next what percentage of the car profit or gross value does that represent?

Finally the final question should be - how does this compare to the options on your desk or table options that you now have available - included internet promotion options?

In the end it's all about value received for output units or money spent especially in relation to other advertising and promotion options available on hand.

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