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Well it’s official, we’re now in the website business. It’s something our clients have been asking us to do for many years, but wasn’t previously a fit into our business model. But, recently the stars aligned and it just became a no brainer. 

Let me share the back story. My background is originally as a dealer. My family owned a four-store operation in Atlanta, Georgia. Those stores weren’t really for sale, but we were made an offer too good to refuse. My dad was a retired pilot and Lt. Colonel and my mom was a school teacher. They invested their life savings in the business, and this was a great opportunity for them to cash out and begin enjoying the fruits of their labor. So, we sold the stores, and bound by a non-compete I wasn’t able to open a dealership in the Atlanta market. Because the Powersports Industry is my passion I decided to take our dealership operations manuals, enhance and modify them into a robust database of best practices, and then create online training courses for Dealer Principals and their staff.  We called it dealershipuniversity.com and launched at the Indy Trade Show in 2004. We’ve had over 15,000 users go through our online courses and, at some point, worked with nearly every OEM.

But in 2008, the lay of the land was changing drastically, and dealers were going out of business left and right. In addition to the recession the internet was changing everything to do with advertising and marketing.  So, we did what we always do around here and put our heads down and began researching, studying, and testing everything we could get our hands on that had to do with marketing best practices. That’s when I discovered something very interesting about advertising. There seemed to be two camps out there. The first and most commonly heard of camp was the “branding” people who say that the purpose of your advertising is to build your brand and get your name out there. This group of folks is backed by the big money world of ad agencies who are mostly hired by the mega sized Fortune 500 and other really large companies (like the OEM’s). The ad agency world is usually compensated by a percentage of ad spend, meaning the more a business spends, the more they make.  Quantification of this type of advertising is next to impossible and its success or failure is usually based on the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of the executive board room. 

The second camp was a harder group to find, but they were sharp, passionate, and much better suited for the small to medium sized business. This group was the direct response marketers and they were marketing purists. They have a much different religion than the ad agency folks, and believe that the purpose of your advertising is to generate leads and everything you do could (and should) be measured. They believed that marketing should be 1-to-1 (meaning from a real person to a real person) and it should create affinity and build relationships. They believe the purpose of your advertising is to generate a positive ROI, not to build your brand or create top of mind awareness.  They are never paid as a % of ad spend, as they view this as a conflict of interest. This group of folks believed that when you do direct response marketing properly (right message, right market, right media, right time), you get branding and create top of mind awareness as a happy byproduct. Really it’s the best of both worlds. 

As we began sharing this knowledge at our live marketing boot camps, many dealers asked if we could just do direct response marketing for them. So, we did. And, it worked. And it worked a helluva lot better than spending a fortune on billboards, radio, and TV (see Exhibit A). Since then we’ve added lots of new features to our Sharp Shooter and Local Web Dominator products and executed thousands of campaigns for dealers (big and small) in every corner of the country, always guiding our decisions with the principles of direct response marketing. Will this generate quantifiable leads? Will this build affinity with customers? Will this provide a positive ROI? If I was the dealer myself, and this was my money would I spend it on this?

Fast forward to the present. We didn’t want to enter into the web site market if our product didn’t align with our longstanding beliefs on marketing best practices and we also didn’t want to enter with a product if we couldn’t answer the question of why choose us over the other options.  I’m proud to say that our new Firestorm websites accomplish both. For a personalized demo to see how we can partner with your dealership to generate more leads and earn a better return on investment for your dollars spent, contact us today at 877.242.4472.