MM Podcast Episode 009: Newspaper, Radio, and Television Ads for Car Dealers With Terry Lancaster (transcript)
This is a transcript of MM Podcast Episode 009: Newspaper, Radio, and Television Ads for Car Dealers With Terry Lancaster.
Ashley: Welcome to episode 9 of the Motorcar Marketing podcast. In this episode’s main segment I’m going to be interviewing Terry Lancaster. Terry has years of experience in automotive marketing especially in traditional media like television and radio. His company Instant Events, produces radio and television spots for car dealers and he dropped some great tips for dealers who are thinking about doing this type of advertising. So stay tuned for that.
If you find this episode valuable, please help us out by giving us a review in iTunes or leaving a comment on YouTube or re-tweeting the podcast on Twitter or liking it on Facebook. These social media shares really do help spread the word about the podcast so is very much appreciated. If you have any questions or comments about anything, feel free to send us an email at info@motorcarmarketing.com . I want to improve this podcast so some honest constructive feedback is very much appreciated.
A couple of quick notes, any website or links that I mentioned in the podcast can be found on the website in the show notes. I also publish a transcript with every episode incase you’d rather read the show or look at something later on. You can find all the podcast show notes at www.motorcarmarketing.com/podcasts. If you’d like to get our free video selling more cars on Craigslist, just go to www.motorcarmarketing.com and put in your name and email address into the form in the side bar.
The guide goes to all the recent Craigslist changes and shows you some actual statistics from dealerships who post heavily on Craigslist, both now and last year before the big changes were rolled out. If you’re wondering if you should still be posting your cars on Craigslist or wondering how to get more value out of Craigslist Ads, definitely check this free video.
So now let’s get into the main segment, today I’m talking with automotive marketing expert Terry Lancaster, here is the interview.
Welcome Terry to the Motorcar Marketing podcast, I really appreciate you coming on the show.
Terry: Ashley thanks for having me buddy, I’m thrilled to be here.
Ashley: To start out, I wonder if you can give us a quick overview of your career and how you got into automotive advertising.
Terry: Well I was working in college, I worked my way through college the last couple of years as a disk jockey, and I figured out pretty earlier that the disk jockeys were not the driving force in the radio business and in order to make any money I had to sell advertising. When I got out of school I went into advertising sales and I graduated from University in Tennessee and got another job with a company out in Nashville that owned radio stations all over the South and they moved me to Tupelo, Mississippi.
I’m just a big city boy from Nashville, Tennessee. They dropped me off in Tupelo, Mississippi and I’m like the guy with two heads. One of my first days in business I walk into the local food store. I walk in, and I start trying to sell the guy some advertising and he tells me I’m not interested. I keep talking, I’ve learned all the “Yes-but” strategies, I know how to keep selling I know persistence.
I keep talking and finally, he said, “Son I had told you I’m not buying the advertising and you need to get the blank out of my store!” Now I don’t think he was actually going to pull the gun but I was afraid he might. I got out of the store and I immediately went across the street to the other dealer and started talking to him. I turned that dealer [00:03:22] dealer into my biggest customer.
Before he later ended up going out of business the … and the factory took it over. When the factory took it over, then the new managers then I went back and talked to the managers of the old stores, this was in Tupelo, Mississippi when Ford took it over they became Metro Ford. Metro Ford became my number one customer and I became kind of the automotive specialist. I got a job from there in Memphis Tennessee at the most radio station in the nation, FM 100 and I became their automotive specialist and a couple of years go by, and I’m working for a lot of dealers and I start doing advertising strictly for them.
I started to … we had it radio and TV and newspaper and I started working with dealers all over the country and that was in 1995. Instant Events has been doing nothing but automotive advertising for the last 20 years.
Ashley: Now was there a reason when you’re working for a radio station, is there a reason why you specifically went on after the automotive segment?
Terry: Well they … at the time and even the day, if you turn on any radio station in the country, every other spot is going to be a car spot.
Ashley: That’s right.
Terry: I decided very early on to hold, to follow the money. That’s where the money was so I started concentrating on the car business. Actually I was … at the time I concentrated on two huge things. I called it cars and bars. I had car dealers and night clubs that’s … I was working for car pool station and cars and bars. That’s where the money was so I started learning those businesses and I just dropped the bars and went strictly into cars.
Ashley: Yeah, okay, let’s talk a minute now on the impact that the internet has had on the newspaper business. Maybe you can talk to that a little bit.
Terry: The impact of the internet on the newspaper business is the internet has basically put the newspaper business out of business. In 1995 when we started Instant Events, car dealers spent on average 60-70% every dollar they spent on advertising, they spent in on the newspaper.
When I was selling radio, I was always fighting over scraps and I learned pretty quickly that if I wanted to be in the automotive business, I had to be in the newspaper of the business. We only got into business because we figured out a way to do newspaper ads for dealers all over the country quickly and easily, that was in 1995.
The internet came along, few years later and gradually it started eating away at that, and today newspaper business car dealers spend about 15% of their advertising budget on the newspaper. In the newspaper the type that I used to work … I worked at the Nashville Tennessean for a couple of summers in college. They had hundreds and hundreds employees in the giant building downtown. That building is practically empty today because the newspaper business it just dried up.
There’s one specifically important thing that the car dealers need to recognize. Newspaper was extremely valuable four years ago because this was the … it was in the battle for the low-hanging fruit.
When people wanted to buy a car, they got up Saturday morning, they went picked up the Saturday paper. Every dealer in town had an ad in the paper and they looked through there like it was the series and robot Christmas catalog for car buyers. They went through it, they picked out the shiniest cars and they went around from dealer to dealer until they got the car they wanted.
Well the low-hanging fruit these days is on the internet. When people decide they want to buy a car, they go look on the internet. That’s where the research is done, that’s where car buyers go shopping. If you’re trying to reach them in what they call the ‘jilo’ moment, the moment of truth when they’re actually trying to make the decision, the internet is the place to be and that is … it’s decimated the newspaper industry. It’s not just in car business, it’s in the job business, it’s in the home business, it’s in real estate. The newspaper classified business is basically gone.
Ashley: Yeah.
Terry: It’s not even a fraction of what you see. It’s probably down 90% I would say.
Ashley: Let’s talk a minute about the … now that we’re talking about internet, let’s talk a minute about sort of the strengths of the internet as far marketing cars versus traditional media. When should a dealer use traditional media? When should they use the internet? What are the strengths of each different type of advertising?
Terry: Well one thing I say is you’ve got to use every tool in the shed to the job done. Back in the good old days you’re good. You’re good just advertising on the newspaper and you could spend the vast majority of your money there, and you’d be done. You’d have most of your bases covered maybe spend a little money on radio, maybe spend a little money on TV, but that was all they had.
You have one newspaper, you had three TV stations, you had five radio stations in every market and you had several billboards. Those were the advertising option and that’s how you reached people. Today you can’t decide … you can’t pick and choose well I’m going to use digital media, I’m going to use traditional media, I’m going to use this or that ; You literally have to use everything. There is so many options that you can’t pick one and hit everyone. The strength in digital media is the … there’s the 1% of buyers who are in the market to buy a car right now.
That’s when you’re using pay-per-click, when you’re using Craigslist, when you’re using search marketing, search engine optimization, that’s’ all to get people who are buying cars right now.
The problem with concentrating on that … and you have to do that and that’s where you should spend probably most of your money. Right now dealers spend about a third of every dollar that they spend, goes into digital media one form or another. That’s to reach right-now-buyers.
Ashley: Now, but what you’re saying is you should do … most dealers are spending a third of their money but in your estimation you think they should be spending like two thirds of their money.
Terry: Well every situation is different actually I wouldn’t begin to know what the right number is for anyone. It’s a third right now and it’s growing and I foresee it to grow for the considerable future. Every situation is different depending on what your budget is, what your market is. But your first dollar should probably go into digital advertising. Your first dollar is set out but to reach those buyers who are in the market to buy it right now.
But if you’re only reaching right-now-buyers, if you’re only concentrating on using TrueCar for instance. If you get one of the services that sell your leads and you’re just standing there and a ton of dealerships spending a ton of money in Auto Trader and TrueCar and they’ll leave their remark and that’s great and then they close that and they tend to be checked out [inaudible 00:10:04] with commissions on that every month.
The problem is, you’re only promoting TrueCar and Auto Trader and you’re only reaching those buyers , you’re not doing anything to build with business for the future. You’re not doing anything to build your brand so the people think of you as the place to go buy a car. They look at Auto Trader as the place to go buy a car and the next week Auto Trader might be pushing somebody else’s business and all of a sudden you’re just a delivery service hoping somebody will make a deal.
Ashley: Let’s turn to some traditional media and talk about the strengths of that, I think you’re kind of eluding to that. About more a longer term approach but what are some of the strengths of television and radio ads?
Terry: The strength of radio and television is exactly that digital media is reactive. People go to digital media once they’ve already made a decision something else drove them there. Maybe they’ve decided to buy a car, maybe they heard that. A lot of online activity is driven by offline advertising. Offline advertising can interrupt and intrude, that’s its strength. It’s completely intrusive, it interrupts people’s conversations, it jumps into their life whereas digital advertising sits back and waits for something to happen. It waits for something to come look.
Someone’s coming to look for a car they go to Craigslist, come on someone’s searching for Nashville Ford dealers they go to Google and look that. But they’re already looking for something when they found you in the end. But if you wait to advertise when someone’s already looking, when they’re making a shopping list you’re probably not going to be on the list.
The number of dealers that people visit has dropped from 6 or 7 dealers when they bought a car in the 90’s to one point some of our dealers right now. People will visit one dealer or two. If you’re waiting to get on their shopping list, so they make the shopping list, you’re not going to be on their list.
Use radio and TV, you can interrupt and intrude, you can build your brand. You can insert yourself into their lives before they know they’re looking for a car and when they get ready to look for a car, then you’re already on the list.
Ashley: Let’s dive into some of these specific things like we talked about newspapers. You said there are dealers who are still spending about 15% on newspapers. What are some tips you can give us for creating great newspaper ads?
Terry: Well the newspaper is still valid in a lot of small markets … extensionally in smaller markets. The newspaper is the only way that’s local. There’s not any local TV station, radio station just playing music. There’s not a good viable resource for local music therefore the newspaper.
The newspaper reach a lot of people, it also reach older people that’s radio and TV and through they reach an entirely different market and I get something about the newspaper, let me just say this- traditional media reaches an older demographic than new media, digital media and I think the statistic that I’ve heard is 2 out of every 3 new cars, is sold to someone over the age of 50,and those are the people who are using radio, TV and specifically newspaper.
But newspaper back in the day you wanted to be … you wanted to have a classified ad and you wanted to have every car in your dealership listed with every option and with every conceivable option because that’s what people were looking for. But today, that’s on craigslist and that’s on Google so the way the newspaper is used has changed then we need to change the way that we’re using the newspaper. Instead of listing every car with every option, we dial back on the number of cars that you put in the ad, and we just … we try to make … we try to use the newspaper now more like we use radio and TV which is to create and invent.
It’s to create an idea that something big is happening so specific idea or more specific ideas are … you still want to use the big colorful ad because you’ve got to get attention. You don’t have to run full-page ad, we’ve always run page dealers and we still do to this day.
A full-page ad, a page dealer uses like three quarters of an ad wide and three quarters of a page tall. It’ll only cost about half as much and it will completely dominate the page in exactly the same way.
You take a page, ad will cost half the price of a full page and you want full color in. You put a great big headline in there that says “Great event sale in Monday.” You’ve got to put a deadline in there to create a sense of urgency and the whole concept of … is to make it look like something big is going on. They’re going to miss out if they’re not down there buying a car now. For the call of action, put a deadline and create a sense of urgency.
Ashley: Okay good tips for sure. Let’s talk about radio and what kind of tips you might have in terms of creating great radio ads.
Terry: Well the same thing, the whole point is to make it look like something big is going on and the key thing about radio and any other advertising is different gets noticed. You go … you turn on the radio and like I said before and every other ad is going to be a car ad.
Car dealers are the number one … one of the number one categories on every radio station in the country. There are a ton of car ads, but most of those car ads are just done by the local disk jockey. You get every other spot of car ad, every other spot is being done by the same disk jockeys who do every other ad. The same disk jockeys who read the weather, so they all sound the same. If you want to get noticed, you have to be different.
The first way to be different is to use a different voice and either you hire someone like my company to create the different voice, or as clear as possible, every … most radio stations now are part of a group. Get your local radio say, “Hey I don’t want this produced by the local disk jockey, have you got another disk jockey two towns over or at some other station in your group that can produce the spots of … my spot is different than every other spot on the radio.
Use a different voice and then go back to the same ideas use … create sense of urgency, put a deadline in it and put a call to action. Whether it’s call, click or come on down. Call us in our phone number, click us on website or come on down and see it, you’ve got to put a call to action to create the sense of urgency and then make something happen. The voice is the big thing that people notice but one thing that hardly anyone ever thinks when they’re making the radio spot is the actual production and music that goes behind it.
It is a kind of a trade secret so you’re giving some of the secrets off. Most of the local radio spots, they give the disk jockey the radio copy, he goes there and he reads it, he reaches over he grabs a teenage the album out of the shelf, CA he puts the Kenny G CD in, he plays that song, he drops 30 seconds of instrumental music behind what he just read and he’s done. It’s called rip and read they’re in and out. The [inaudible 00:17:16] line they want to get in and out as quick as possible because for them producing the spot is just a hustle. The price they’ve got to pay so they could be on the radio four hours or they have no interest in it, they want to get it done as fast as possible.
But what we like to do and any professional producer is going to do this, they’ll take the spot, they’ll read it and they’ll cut it in slices and indict it and any spot I produced never has more than four or five seconds of continuous music in the background. That’s because different gets notice even subliminally.
Your mind notices when something change so the music in the background behind the voice is changing every 4 or 5 seconds, you’ve got 4 or 5 seconds of music. You’ve got a pause where it’s just the guy talking then you got sound effects and there’s constant action and something change is going on.
That gets the mind working; over 60 seconds commercial that’ll be 10 chances for you to grab their attention, because every time something changes, your mind goes, “Hey, what’s different now?” You want that music and the sound effects and the blank spaces and the pauses. You want it all to keep changing and kind of keep everybody on their toes to keep guessing what’s coming next.
That way they’re paying attention to what you say, and they get to the end of the spot and they hear your call to action. The other most important … another tip here I read a book a long time ago probably 20 years ago right when we were starting out, there was car dealer who had gone in the advertising business and his big suggestion was that never, ever, ever let anybody know you’re doing a car spot until 5-10 seconds into the spot.
I’ve determined over the years that that’s just crazy. You have to let them know … and maybe 20 years it was good but [inaudible 00:19:06] there was only 5 stations and people didn’t … weren’t quite as overloaded as everything is now. You have to let people know from the get-go. Within the first 3 seconds that this is a car ad because you want the people who are interested in cars, the 1% of people who are in the market right now to buy a car, you want them to catch the spot.
You want to say, “This is the car ad, hey we got great deals on great cars at Bob’s Car Light.” You want to say that upfront and early otherwise they’re just going to tune it out. I used to kind of play a little … run a little experiment when I was in the car business that I would … I’d be in the car with 4 or 5 people, the music would be playing and the disk jockey would start talking and he’d go into what we call the stock sale which is the … all the commercials that they play in a row, like 4 or 5 commercials in arrow.
I would let everybody in the car continue on with the conversation and we just let the commercials run through and at the end of the stock that’s when they go back to music, I asked the people in the car with me, “Hey what commercial’s just played?” Without a doubt no-one heard all 4 or 5 commercials, radio is intrusive but it’s in the background and it kind of jumps out.
People hear what they want to hear so the guy who was looking for a car, he heard the spot from a car dealer, if there was a person who was looking for a home, well, they heard the spot from the bank about low mortgage rates. If there was one guy who was hungry, he heard the spot from the subway about the 5 dollar food longue. People hear what they’re looking for so you have to be pretty clear right up front. “This is a car commercial, we’ve got great deals on great cars but you’d better hurry because when they’re gone, they’re gone.”
Ashley: Good tip. That’s great. Let’s talk … maybe you can give us some similar tips for television ads.
Terry: Well TV the big thing about TV one thing I noticed … the great thing about TV is that it combines everything. There’s visual advertising, there’s audio advertising and so many and not necessarily car dealers, but a lot of spots that you see, they don’t take advantage of that. They treat TV like a pretty picture, whereas a lot of times when people are watching TV they’re going to the kitchen to fix a sandwich when the commercials come on. Or they’re going to the bathroom or something … so we want our commercials to be just as loud as a radio spot.
We want to use every tool, we want to use the audio channel and we want to use the video channel so though the … if they’re not even seeing the commercial, they know that it’s for [Bob Got A lot] and if they get it tuned down, but they’ve got it on their DVR and their fast forwarding troupe, I want the graphics to show them, well this is for [Bob Got A lot] and [Bob Got A lot’s] having a great candy van and I’d better get down there before Saturday and you can pick all that up if you fast forward this spot at 2 times on your DVR and just all the graphics are going to be right there. Make sure everything just plain and simple.
The … one of the biggest problems dealers use when advertising is they can … and this comes down to their agency or their local TV station trying to teach them something but they won’t … they end up wanting their TV spot to look like a shabby spot. There’s basically two sides to television advertising. In the advertising really there’s image advertising, brand awareness advertising which is what the factories do. They spend billions and billions of billions of dollars on TV spots with pictures of beautiful cars driving down the mountain roads and down the beaches with beautiful women in them, their hair flowing back or they’re drinking champagne and they want to create an image.
Well car dealers are in the image business, they’re in the selling cars business and they’re … they need to use direct advertising which is, “Sham-wow, call before midnight, hurry in the day.” Car dealers advertising, they need to look more like a Shamwow commercial than a shabby commercial.
It’s great that they’re to create an image but the image is going to be secondary, what we’re trying to do is we try to have everything with a call to action and create right-now buyers and use the residual fact of consistency using a good voice, using the sign logo, using a direct … using a tag line consistently to build the long-term buyer instead of just spending hundreds of thousands dollars a year on creating commercials with puppy dogs and flowers and duffel deals. And …
Ashley: Is this …
Terry: Yeah go ahead.
Ashley: It’s the same thing now. These are sort of the second level details the main thing is the same thing you’ve been talking about. A call of the action and creating a sense of urgency by creating an event. Those are sort of the focus of all the advertising.
Terry: Oh absolutely every spot we do … every spot I do whether it’s radio, TV, newspaper or direct mail, the entire purpose is to make it look like something big is going on that they’re going to miss if they don’t buy it. Create sense of urgency, create a call of action, come on down, call, click I’m serious.
Ashley: Now this is something we talked about a little bit in the pre-interview should the owner of a car lot appear on the commercial and if so what are some tips and what are some things to kind of look out for if he wants to appear in his own commercials?
Terry: Well that’s … we have a lot of dealers who end up doing their own commercials. Dealers are very successful business people, and they’re very proud of what they do; a lot of businesses that allow the dealerships or family business and you get into their family for generations.
You have a lot of dealers who end up on TV and that’s great. Being your own brand is enormously powerful matter of fact there is nothing more powerful than being your own brand. The problem is if you’re trying to be your own brand and you don’t necessarily have the charisma to carry out that
You don’t necessarily have the vocal prowess to record the spot clearly. Most dealers they aren’t comfortable doing the hard sale, they’re not comfortable doing, “Hey we’re having a great giant cheap sale coming to you.” They want to talk about, “ Hey my family has done this business for two generations, hey we support the local little league,” and lots of things like that and they’re really as comfortable getting out front and doing the hard sales. They you do this create the call for action.
What I do a lot of times if I get a dealer … and dealers do end up doing their own spots more often than not because the local TV station or the local radio station, both; they convince them … they’d let them on the air because people will notice them and they’ll say, “Hey I saw you on TV the other day.”
Every time they … someone sees them on TV well they didn’t buy a car but they just sold you some more TV advertising. It’s great PR for the TV station every time the dealer gets recognized. What we try to do is if I’ve got a dealer who wants to do his own spot but doesn’t necessarily have the really jump-out or the vocal prowess to pull the whole thing, I would get him to say the tag line, “Nobody beats [Bob Got A lot], nobody!”
It doesn’t matter how much charisma you’ve got if you can say that for 5 seconds so we’ll get the dealers to create the tags at the end of the spot, to create their imaging and we’ll handle the big loud hard sale start with the big voice and the sound effects and the boom bang boom and we’ll do that for 25 seconds and the 5 seconds through the show – will be Bob saying, “Hey you all come on down to [Bob Got A lot].
The other problem is, and this happened here in Nashville funny story, we had a guy he owned three key stores in Nashville and he was all over the TV and he did have the … he had the personality, he had the charisma, he had the voice, he had a beautiful wife and kids and he had everything and he didn’t doing the ad.
He came on and he was … you couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing a spot with this guy on there and then he had this … he got into a little trouble with the law and that became the leading new story on the news for weeks on end. All the money that he … he had spent millions of dollars on the last couple of years building this brand with him in it and now that’s just spatter for the local news cast and it was in every newspaper … on every newspaper, on every news story.
The thing I’d like to tell you is that if you’re going to plaster your face all over the TV, if you’re plaster your face on every billboard in town, you’d better make sure your nose is clean if you’re sticking it out there because you’re going to become a target it’s like being a politician. They’re going to put a big target on your back so be careful.
Ashley: I’m just playing devil’s advocate here but there’s the old saying, ‘Any publicity is good publicity.’ Do you think even something negative like this could potentially help him sell more cars?
Terry: Well the problem with the deal is … and this guy he spent millions of dollars advertising, building the brand and as soon as he hit the airwaves with the negative publicity, every spot that he was on, yanked off. He’s not doing the spots anymore he ended up changing the name of the dealership strictly to disassociate himself from everything else even though I don’t think it helped him at all. It cost him millions in new advertising.
Ashley: Yeah, so okay in the … when we first started talking about doing this interview you said that there are the four words that will determine the success of every ad you run. I think that may be a good way to wrap things up. Can you speak to that?
Terry: The call of the action. Call …
Ashley: Okay.
Terry: The… come see us now, you’ve got to have a call to action in every ad and that’s what we’ve talking about the whole time. So four word …
Ashley: Yeah, yeah.
Terry: … yeah you come on down and see us but you’ve got to have a call to action in everything and that’s the whole … the whole focus of our company is instant events, we could have had … we could have called the company Lancaster Advertising, we could have called it Automotive Advertising, but we decided early to concentrate on events advertising with something going on now and a call to action to be involved in that again as something big is going on. Every ad is an event.
Ashley: Let’s go ahead and talk about your company Instant Events, can you kind of give us a two-minute elevator pitch on what you guys do.
Terry: My elevator’s pitch is anytime I meet someone I meet who’s never met me before, I … here’s my elevator pitch, “ My name is Terry Lancaster, I’m the vice president of making shit happen at Instant Events automotive advertising. We produce the biggest, loudest automotive advertising in the history of big, loud automotive advertising.” That’s … and we … that’s … and everyone notes immediately what I’m talking about when I do it they’ve seen those commercials. That the type of advertising that you think of I the big loud obnoxious car ads, that’s’ what we do because boring advertising gets ignored.
Ashley: Yeah.
Terry: Different gets noticed so we want to be the biggest, loudest ads on store. We have the biggest loudest radio spots, we have TV spots, there are big … I’ve had … one dealer described our spot as they make you drop your popcorn, They’re big, they’re loud, they’re shiny, they’re flashy and there’s lots of stuff going on and our newspaper ads or direct mail are almost the same way.
We try to be just … we don’t deal with any image advertising, we don’t have puppy dogs, we don’t use bad deals, I used to tell our dealers when we started that if we ever want an advertising award for any ad that we produce for your dealership we‘ll give you a choice you can either fire us or slap us because we’re not in the advertising awards business, we’re in the selling cars business.
I’m not interested in winning any awards, I’m not interested in impressing your friends down at the lottery club, I’m interested in selling cars and we do ads that are going to sell cars, we’re not trying to make you look … the new shabby, we’re not trying to make you popular, we’re trying to sell some more cars.
Ashley: Perfect, so what’s the best way for people to keep up with what you’re doing and potentially contact you?
Terry: Well, Instant Events is on the web, Instant-Events.com. It’s there we blog there regularly about the things that we talked about here, how to improve your advertising. We have new ideas that pop up every month, I do a blog post every month about automotive advertising ideas for car dealers; we’ve got a couple of big events that you can use in … for your June advertising and then we talk about how to improving your advertising that you’ve done. You can check us out there at Instant-Events.com and I’m all over the web and social media. Just Google Terry Lancaster I’m there or I’m on Facebook, I’m LinkedIn, I’m on Twitter at @Terrylancaster so I’m pretty easy to find.
I’m sitting here at phone all the day … all day long at 1-800-3523305. Call, click or come on down.
Ashley: Perfect, that pretty much covers all basis. Terry you’ve been very generous with your time, I really appreciate your coming on the show. This has been a lot of great information.
Terry: Ashley I’m proud to do it, anything I can do to help, you let me know this is great.
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We can have your new website up and running usually in less than 24 hours. Set up is free and easy, and there are no long-term contracts so you can cancel at any time. Again, check out Motorcar Sites.com to learn more.
Just a quick thought on today’s interview with Terry, I know a lot of the dealers that I work with are stuck in this rot where they basically just use cars.com, Auto Trader and Craigslist to advertise their inventory. If you’re willing to be aggressive on price, you can definitely sell a good number of cars through these channels. But I get these same dealerships asking me what else they can do, and I think Terry has given out some good information about how to go about doing so offline marketing.
If you can start to build a real brand name for your company, you can start to get away from this race to the bottom which means constantly cutting price and shrinking your margins. It’s not going to be cheap or easy but diversifying your marketing channels is probably the smartest thing you can do for your company. I know from my own experience in marketing various products over the years getting out there and trying new things is the best way you can find new channels for advertising your cars.
It doesn’t always work out, but even if the ROY isn’t always positive, this is how new ideas are born. That’s our show, I hope you get some value out of it and it can help you grow your business. Thanks for listening.