Andrew Street and Sheila Pogue reveal an innovative and cost-effective approach for auto dealers to leverage social media and vehicle recalls to boost their dealership service and sales.
Andrew Street and Sheila Pogue reveal an innovative and cost-effective approach for auto dealers to leverage social media and vehicle recalls to boost their dealership service and sales.
In the competitive world of automotive sales and service, dealerships constantly seek new and creative ways to attract customers. Traditional advertising methods often fall short, with many dealerships struggling to reach their target audience effectively. Andrew and Sheila share Dealer OMG’s innovative approach to gaining consumer traction with personalized recall ads specific to the consumer’s make, model and year vehicle.
[Andrew Street]
If you’re interested in outside-the-box ways to get new customers into your dealership, you’re in the right place. 95% of your advertising on social media is broken. It’s serving the same people with the same type of ad that every dealership in your market is running.
In today’s conversation, we’re going to explore a unique way to leverage social and vehicle recalls to get new customers into your dealership. This is a largely untapped market. Let’s get started.
I’m Andrew Street. Welcome to Word on the Street, where we help dealers grow sales, service, and trades. First thing I want to do is introduce my guest.
I’m joined by the marketing-obsessed dealer veteran that has a lot of experience on both sides of the desk. You’re best known for helping dealers really grow their profitability. Can you give us a little background?
[Sheila Pogue]
Absolutely. Thank you for that introduction. My name is Sheila.
I am Dealer OMG’s senior dealer consultant. I’ve been here for about two years, but before that, I spent over a decade at the dealership. I have been in every role, from director of operations over sales.
I have been fixed-ops manager, parts manager, foreman, warranty, reception, parts counter, anything that you can think of. It’s been a great experience. Because I have that background, I can speak really fluently to our clients, and I understand the grind at the dealership level.
This has been a big push for fixed-ops, which is neglected on social media, and I’m really excited to talk about this new campaign with you today and some of the other things that we offer at Dealer OMG.
[Andrew Street]
Cool. I just realized I never said your name in that whole introduction. Yes.
Sheila Pogue. I also maybe didn’t mention that. Sheila works with me.
We both work on the same team with Dealer OMG. What do you think right now? We’re talking about vehicle recalls and social, which is hardly ever done.
Outside of that, what do you think some of the key challenges that dealerships are facing right now about recalls, and what are some of the strategies you think that they can start to employ to get more customers into the service department?
[Sheila Pogue]
That’s a many-faceted question. When I have been broaching these conversations with some of our dealers recently, some things that have come up are that the recall is usually not a marketing pitch. Obviously, something’s wrong with the unit, you need to get it repaired, there’s a legal obligation and a compliance that usually comes from the OEM, they do mailers directly from the OEM.
There’s other ways of reaching these people to notify them that they have this recall. One of the things, this is Dave Lemon’s idea actually, that we are kind of playing with a little bit is the emotional impact of worrying about your vehicle. People care about their vehicle, this is an important asset in their home, and if there’s something that needs to be fixed that would be covered financially by the OEM, they need to know about it.
They’re engaged almost immediately if that’s something that they want to get taken care of. From what I know, this might be the first time this has ever been used on social media. Most of the feedback I’m getting back from dealers is that they have done other types of mailing campaigns around this to simulate service, they’ve done SEO optimizations and some other digital aspects, and like I said, mailers directly from the dealership to kind of get feet in the door.
But this has been really exciting to see the feedback that we’re getting on social. One of the challenges is, what are you looking to do? Some of the feedback I’ve gotten from pain points is, if we’re doing a recall campaign and we’re just looking to fill up the service drive, can the service drive sustain that?
Can you sustain having these appointments booked for people coming in, really concerned about their unit, wanting you to run their VIN, and then can you get a 65-point inspection schedule so you can find something wrong? Can you tee up an opportunity for your sales staff to possibly get them to trade in that vehicle? What are your goals and what is your capacity on the service drive?
One of the other concerns that I hadn’t thought about until I talked about this with the dealer was your flag rating. If you do actually get a recall, one that is needed, is it lucrative for your service department to perform the act? Do you get a high enough flag rate?
Do you get a parts markup for the internal part that you’re replacing from OEM? Is this something that is even worth your time? Do your service writers, are they trained and do they understand how they can use this as a sales opportunity to get more work?
Do you have the ability to train them if they’re not ready to handle these leads? These are all considerations that are coming up very, very rapidly for these conversations because it’s working. The leads are coming in.
[Andrew Street]
It sounds like the challenge that dealers are having is leveraging that outreach for their benefit outside of the OEM programs that they’re required to do to let people know that there’s a recall. Then any direct mail that they’ve traditionally done, it costs $1.40, somewhere in there to reach somebody and mail them letting them know about a recall. Where we’re finding that you can do it for two pennies to get through somebody’s news feed with a recall, calling them out for what vehicle they’re driving.
I want to talk a little bit about like how Vinamp has really helped, like our marketing platform that is ingesting data. It’s a really robust audience builder that kind of empowers all the advertising that we’re doing. What are you doing in there for your dealers that’s helping to make sure that we’re getting this message in front of the right people?
[Sheila Pogue]
Our data platform is probably the most critical component of this, being able to execute this type of campaign. To be honest, once I get the feedback from the dealer about what their needs are, I can then go and custom build their audience and target that way. An example would be this dealer I told you that has specific recalls that they highlighted as very lucrative for them.
Those are the ones that are bread and butter for them. They want to kind of focus on those. I can use our platform to only target owners of that specific make and model in the year that was affected by the recall.
We can go as tight or as large of a radius as we want to spread that message. But because we’re pre-qualifying that audience so specifically, it is the best bang for your buck on digital advertising. As you said, pennies on the dollar to get in front of those people because we’re telling them exactly where to show this.
Other options that we have available to us, the aggregation of this data, we can target specific owners of brands and make it more of a vague conversation. If you’ve got really talented service writers that can flip them in and get them scheduled, we’re running one right now that’s just the brand of the vehicle. And it’s like, hey, does your brand of this vehicle have a recall?
Because it doesn’t have a specific model called out and because we’re blanketing owners of that third-party data, it has been a really powerful and compelling message. Because they’re like, I have a Ford, I have a Nissan or what have you that really grabs their attention and stops their thumb while they’re scrolling through their feed. And they’re like, it’s very easy to hit that call to action and kind of schedule that appointment from there or get you the lead or whatever we have your ad optimized for.
[Andrew Street]
Totally. And it’s like when opposed to like comparing it to direct mail, like it’s the same type of database where you can find each person based on their insurance records or their DMV registrations, the vehicle that they’re driving to make sure that you’re not wasting ads or mailers on other people. But then from paid social specifically, we can track people through to starting to fill out the RO scheduler and then bail or get all the way through and have their RO scheduled or fill out a lead form.
And so I think that’s like the nuanced part of making sure that the dealer has the right operational set up to be able to facilitate leads. Because if they’re not set up, we got to go a different route, pushing people into scheduling that service versus just dropping leads in the hands of the service department. OK, so we’ve been running these for a while with some stores, testing them out.
We’re growing our offering for doing vehicle recalls through paid social. What’s the experience been like so far?
[Sheila Pogue]
I’m thrilled about them, to be perfectly honest. I said my background was in big stocks predominantly. And as a service manager, I was tasked with doing a lot of my own organic growth, having to reach out.
I literally was hooking it, putting business cards in units on lots, trying and trying to drum up business for my service drive. The ability to hand that off seamlessly to an agency and have them have this compelling ad that is just generating phone calls, generating leads, trying to get foot traffic in your door, however possible, is something that I never saw available to me in the years that I was in that seat. It was always mailers and hot dog cookouts and figure it out, buddy kind of thing.
And I think that’s the most exciting piece is that this is really working. We have seen a lot of other attempts. There’s some other agencies that are only in the big stock space that kind of focus on discounts or like coupon carousel type of things.
And those work. Those are fine. Like you’re representing your big stock department.
But the immediate response I’ve seen from these ads, I have not seen anything like that to stimulate direct conversations with service customers. I think it’s really exciting. That’s yeah.
[Andrew Street]
Okay, let’s definitely do it then. What else are we doing? What else is working well right now for your customers?
Looking at the service department, getting some unique concepts outside of just running inventory and price and carousel ads. What are some other fun things that are happening in your world?
[Sheila Pogue]
Touching on on our platform again, one of the biggest growth opportunities and kind of untapped markets and social that I’ve seen is Spanish speakers. I have been really hammering on this. I have access to heat maps where we can kind of see breakdowns of populations near your dealership and see if this would be an effective campaign for you.
And because this is a little extra step to pre qualify that audience, no one else is doing it. No one is serving these people these ads. And we see a really high conversion rate with with these Spanish speaking audiences.
These are people on Facebook that not only are they bilingual, but they have their browser set to Spanish. That is the language they prefer to be spoken to in. And like I said, the conversion rate is really high for these types of ads because they want to work with someone that’s speaking to them in a way that they feel comfortable.
Usually compelling if you’ve got a population in your DMA that that kind of corresponds with, it’s definitely something exploring and I’ve seen some really good results from that.
[Andrew Street]
Are you filtering, too? So it’s going to you’re flipping it into everybody using the platforms in Spanish ad copy creatives in Spanish. Then are you adding like a layer of people driving specific vehicles?
[Sheila Pogue]
We can do third party targeting with that as well. Brand owners, we’ve done a lot of. Subprime and like finance targeting along with the Spanish to make sure that it’s in such a Spanish language, so credit challenged social security or like paper constraints, things like that has been really good.
Trade messaging is any way that we can pre qualify those audiences and make it a smaller pool of people that we’re talking to always makes for a better ad. It stretches your dollar further on social media and people are more receptive because we hit the nail on the head with the demographic. I am the one that you’re trying to talk to and you reached me and I do need your product and I am going to submit a lead.
It works really well.
[Andrew Street]
And with like, OK, so with recall specifically. Going after everybody driving those models or even just the brand driving the make, are there like specific KPIs that you and your dealers are wanting to look at when running these campaigns?
[Sheila Pogue]
Yeah, those are very for the recall campaign piece, it’s very specific to what the store is trying to do. So, for example, one of the first ones that we tried, we did third party data targeting for the brand and the leads were normally generating campaign that we were sending to their CRM. Well, I connected with the service manager as soon as the lead started flooding in and I found out that he doesn’t have a CRM.
So we ended up doing direct to email, made that change. And now he’s getting those and he’s going to be acting on the sales side. We would call this the BBC, but he’s going to be acting kind of round robin, handing those out to the service advisors as those leads come in, as the sales opportunity.
So he’s had a chance to tee up meetings with them, explain to them what to expect with these leads, what the ad looks like, how it’s working and how they’re supposed to manage it when they get that lead. Some people might want to push traffic to their service scheduler. That’s an opportunity, something that we can do and optimize that campaign for.
Some people that this would probably be more fitting about what I was telling you about where they have certain recalls that they actually want to perform a recall, not just get the sales opportunity or the 65 point inspection opportunity. They want to do the work. And that one is going to be a lower conversion where he wants service schedule appointments.
And then we can look back on the actual return on ad spend. How much was that work order? Did they come in?
Did they get the recall performed? You know, and then we’re going to kind of grow that and keep moving on from there. It’s really collaborative and it’s very, very strategic depending on the dealer’s needs, basically.
Yeah, we can do a sales one where it’s recalls and we’re specifically trying to stimulate the service drive. So sales guys get a chance to tee up a trade conversation with them. Like, hey, you worried about a recall?
Let me get you a new one. This one definitely doesn’t have it. You know, there’s a lot of opportunity here.
[Andrew Street]
I was just talking with a dealer recently that like every single person that leaves their service department has a little folded up note on their dashboard that says how much they would like to buy their vehicle and how much they’re willing to pay. Yeah, and it goes right around back into the sales department.
[Sheila Pogue]
Yeah, they probably see a little camera back there and fix up some swatches as people drive up for their oil change or whatever.
[Andrew Street]
Yeah, especially as like a lot of new car inventories come screaming back, kind of creative ways to stimulate traffic into the sales floor. And so many people are having issues with their service department being overwhelmed or not having enough text to operate everything. So it’s kind of balancing the push that we’re able to do from our end to stimulate sales and service.
So it seems like the formula is going after people based on just personalization of what they’re driving, exacerbating maybe a little bit of fear for a recall that’s outstanding. Because I looked this up right before I talked to you, but it was like in 2023, there was a thousand recalls for vehicles in the US and there’s more than 34 million vehicles had a recall last year. But millions of people, millions of vehicles, millions of vehicles have gone unrepaired.
And so that is just like the low hanging fruit for us to be able to find those people that didn’t repair it, who don’t even know about it potentially and get them into a store.
[Sheila Pogue]
To your point, recalls are widely known, everyone knows what they are, they know what they mean. It could be varying levels of severity, but again, this is one of the most expensive assets that most people own. You want to take care of it.
If there is any chance that something could be unsafe or anything like that, this definitely does kind of play on that emotionality of wanting to protect their asset. And we’ve seen some really compelling results from that.
[Andrew Street]
Yeah. And it goes back to just standing out when everybody else is running the same type of ad in your market, running ads to the same person. Let’s go after specific people based on what they’re driving with the message that stops their thumb from scrolling.
And it could be a dangerous recall. Now they’re going to start coming through more hoops than just coming and being maybe a vehicle detail page view, but actually coming through to scheduling an RO, getting into our service department, getting familiar with our store and starting a relationship with us.
[Sheila Pogue]
It’s a much lower barrier to entry than some of the other things you might, you might be pushing your fixed ops manager to consider a promotion or like a flat rate oil change per month where you’re going to take a hit, but you’re going to get that relationship with them. You might want to, you know, invest in your amenities for your lobby and free Wi-Fi and snacks and stuff like that. There are other ways to stimulate service, but this one is so inexpensive and seems to be really powerful and immediate.
[Andrew Street]
Okay. Sheila. Okay.
We’re going to grow this. We’re going to start adding a lot more stores doing recalls because it’s hot right now for us to be able to tap into a market where we’ve got ads that nobody else is running and the data to back it up for, you know, what recalls are out there as well as what vehicles people are driving. How can people get ahold of you?
[Sheila Pogue]
I am constantly connected to my phone. So you can email me at Sheila at dealerOMG.com or call and text my number. I think it’s probably on the website.
Anytime. Ask me questions. You don’t have to ask me for a demo.
This is not a pressured conversation. If you just have questions about social or digital marketing in general, that’s all I talk about all day. It’s my favorite thing.
So hit me up. Let me know if I can help.
[Andrew Street]
I love it. Sheila, let’s do this again. Thank you so much.