Putting it all together…
Brad Cannon | 03/10/2020
I’m writing this article having just finished up with our Marketing Boot Camp/User Summit here in Peachtree City, Georgia. Preparing for them is always a big lift. We work really hard to provide maximum ‘bang for the buck,’ trying to cram as much good information into as little time as we have together with dealers. When it’s all said and done, it never fails, at least one dealer (usually a couple) will say they want to come back because it’s like sipping from a fire hydrant. I love that. It means we’ve provided VALUE. And it’s not just lip service because we always have several repeat attenders at every single boot camp.
This one was a little different though. We bolted on a user summit to the last part of our time together, and honestly, it was amazing.
You see, for over a decade, we’ve been working hard to produce top quality marketing results for our clients, and it became pretty clear that in order to deliver on that, we were going to have to build a lot of infrastructure ourselves. The right tools weren’t out there yet, but we had a vision to make it happen.
This article will probably come off as a bit of a sales pitch, and that’s okay by me because I believe wholeheartedly in what we do. PLEASE stick with me to the end though, because I’d like for you to see the big picture that was very clear to everyone that attended boot camp this past week.
We began with our Sharp Shooter event marketing campaigns which drive a ton of traffic to dealerships and create leads for several weeks worth of follow-up and sales. It’s an amazing product that works as well today as it ever has. Totally kills it.
Then we bolted on AdWords (Google Ads now) to our mix. We became the first company in our industry to become Google certified Partners, and our relationship with them has only grown over the years. They’ve paid for us to go out to Mountain View for a visit, and we manage millions of dollars in ad spend for our clients per year. We’ve been involved with AdWords for so long, you’d be VERY hard pressed to find anyone who can outperform us in this industry. I’ve never seen it happen.
We bolted on reputation management complete with review acquisition before anyone else in powersports. Nobody was even talking about it yet, but we had a way to systematically generate reviews for our dealers automatically. Holeshot on dealers competitors.
Next was a game changer – the Firestorm email platform. We built an email platform from the ground up, by powersports enthusiasts and dealers, FOR powersports dealers. Not just some plain vanilla email sending program, a feature rich platform that contains just about an feature you could want, from totally amazing graphic elements that are powersports specific, to tracking and analysis tools, custom email sequences, and even heat mapping to see where exactly recipients are clicking in your emails. It’s awesome, and we continue to improve on it almost daily. A good example is the extremely complex data hygiene process we’ve implemented to insure the highest levels of deliverability for our clients. The email landscape has changed dramatically over the past year, and we’ve worked very hard to make it easy for our clients to adhere to best practices.
After all this, it became clear in our leadership meetings that we needed one last piece to close the loop in our marketing circle. Websites. Enter the Firestorm website platform, and you guessed it. It’s our baby from the ground up. Arguably one of the coolest, most feature rich website platforms available. Designed with the ultimate goal of any website – to generate leads. Which our sites do better than the competition. We have the before and after data to prove it. And don’t even get me started on website tracking, the most amazing way to see WHO was on your site and WHAT they’re interested in. Yeah, it does that.
With the addition of sites, came the associated app that allows you to walk through the dealership taking pictures of units and IMMEDIATELY make them appear on your site from your phone. Flawlessly.
Most recently, we’ve added Customer Connections, which provides the ability to enable texting on your website. It also allows you to generate reviews for your dealership by taking pictures with purchases and automatically post them to Facebook for customers to tag themselves. Before and after pictures can be added to show off upgrades or awesome repairs too. Struggling to get approvals for service work, or contact to get customers to pick units up? Customer Connections handles that too.
If you’ve stuck with me – good. I haven’t even scratched the surface of what our products can do for a dealership. But here’s the thing, we’ve created a SUITE of products that work amazingly well as stand alones – but when bolted together are a juggernaut for your dealership. They communicate with each other, share a common data silo of information, and integrate with your DMS for a seamless transfer of data to fuel each component for maximum ROI.
It was really cool to see all the pieces fall into place for our clients at the boot camp, as well as folks who hadn’t worked with us before. If you weren’t at this boot camp, don’t worry, we’re doing it again in the fall. If you’re interested in finding out more about the suite of products we have available, reach out. We’re happy to show you how we can generate leads for your dealership. If nothing else, you should be thinking about doing Sharp Shooters every month to supercharge sales this spring and summer. You won’t be sorry.
