Powersports Marketing Boot Camp and User Summit Recap
Rod Stuckey | 02/17/2020
We just completed our Marketing Boot Camp and User Summit here in Peachtree City, GA and as always it was great to meet new faces and reconnect with our longtime clients and friends. It’s amazing just how fast the lay of the land continues to change in the world of marketing, specifically with Powersports Dealerships. As technology and innovation continue to evolve, we’re beginning to see a trend of dealers making less careless spray-and-pray decisions and instead opting for a more targeted and quantifiable approach. This has been a longtime coming and it’s exciting to see.
Our format for this event was different than previous years, but very well received. Here is what longtime dealer Curtis Sloan of Sloan’s Motorcycles had to say via an online review:
I wanted to say thank you for 2 days well-spent learning a higher level of marketing know-how than any OE dealer meeting seminar, 20-group, or media consulting firm that we've been exposed to in recent years! The venue, food, and time-away-from-the-store were excellent as well. It was especially worthwhile not only meeting the PSM team members that we interact with by phone and email, but the interaction with other dealers was priceless. At Sloan's, one of the pillars of our success is relationship-building with customers and co-workers, and PSM consistently demonstrates that same core value. I look forward to the next Boot Camp so we can send other members of our management team! -curtis sloan-
Regardless of whether you’re a current client, previous client, or not a client at all our goal was to build a live event that was relevant, beneficial, and interactive for all. We’re very different than the other website, technology, and marketing companies in this industry and wanted to showcase that during this boot camp.
First of all, we’re still a privately held owner operated entrepreneurial company. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, we’re the only website provider in the industry that hasn’t been rolled up under the umbrella of one of the 800-pound mega companies who love their lengthy contracts, legalese, and on-retainer team of attorneys. While some may see it as a disadvantage to compete with the giants, I see it as the complete opposite. That’s why we don’t require contracts and do our best to have real people answer the phone every time you call. If you give us a try and it doesn’t work out, we don’t get mad, we don’t send ugly letters, we just ask for your candid feedback to learn from so we can get better and hopefully win back your business in the future.
We’re also different because in my former life I was a dealer. And everything we do is seen through the lens of the dealer and the dealer’s customers; first and foremost. It’s just how I’m hardwired, and if I wouldn’t spend my money on it, we won’t sell it. Next, before we ever built our first product over 15 years ago, we totally immersed ourselves into the research and study of all things advertising and marketing. We’re not only marketing purist, but we’re also practitioners. Every single thing we sell to our clients, we also do ourselves, just like this direct mail piece we’ve been mailing for the last 120 plus month’s give or take. We use our Firestorm Email software weekly, our own Firestorm Website daily, and are very pleased that our reputation management system has assisted us in earning over 500 reviews on www.psmmarketingreviews.com and over 177 on Google.
This boot camp was designed to teach timeless marketing fundamentals and principles, and then understand how to apply those principles with real world tools and technology applications.
We kicked the sessions off with a “Purpose of Your Marketing” presentation on branding, image, and TOMA (top of mind awareness) type of marketing as opposed to Direct Response, Lead Generation, Nurture and Relationship style marketing that is quantifiable. There is a BIG difference, and what most dealers have been taught is all wrong.
From there we moved into what we call the four-legged stool. Right message, right market, right media, right timing. You can get 3 out of 4 of these fundamentals correct and still waste every single dollar spent and watch the stool collapse. The sad thing about this is that the person responsible for neglecting one of the fundamental components is the same person who is quick to blame the media when it was set up to fail from the start. From there we covered Social Media best practices, Reputation Management, Google Ads, Email and Email Deliverability, Google My Business, Website best practices and more.
It was a LOT of content, and quite a bit of it was new based on recent algorithm changes, like the importance of email list hygiene and how that impacts deliverability, and how the new Google Map 3 Pack is a search engine results game changer.
The last big point as to why we are different is because everything we build, test, and ultimately sell is designed with the aforementioned marketing purist fundamentals in mind, which most tech companies simply don’t understand.
We’re looking to have another Boot Camp this fall, so stay tuned. Today is the first day Tia is out for maternity leave and the only way we can pull it off is if she makes it back soon! Thanks for reading and as always give us a call at 877-242-4472 to learn more.
