By Mark Tewart
There is a revelation that is shocking and quite frankly very scary. A dangerous and potential fatal mistake is being made everyday in businesses. The mistake is the confusion between strategy and tactics. Strategy is your overall goal for your business and your overall marketing philosophy to achieve those goals. Tactics are executable actions you take to achieve those options. The good news is that once you have clarity about your strategy and then apply emotional direct response marketing methods you can create a continual stream of customers to your business. The scary part is that it is as easy and as flipping on a light switch but yet very few people know and understand the simple secrets to make this happen.
Your business is comprised of two businesses, the people business and the marketing business. You can be great with your people skills and handling of customers, but if you don’t have the customers to be great with, it won’t matter. Lead Generation = Dollar Creation. You live and die by the success or failure of your marketing efforts to create new customers and retain existing ones as well.
There are 3 simple things you can do immediately to make a dramatic impact on your customer flow and sales – Market, Message and Media
#1 – The first step is to define who your market is. If you were asked who your average customer is, do you really know? Do you know where they live, what they do for a living and what their hopes, dreams and fears are? Have you begun to break down every element of what makes up your best potential market of customers? Many dealerships open the doors every day and spend tons of money to drive customers through the door without every giving extensive thought to who their market really is. Successful businesses don’t try to business with everybody. If you believe your market is everyone, you are wasting tons of money. You must match your message to your market. When you more accurately define your message while also narrowing your market and niche, the more success you have. You also greatly increase your return on investment.
#2 – The second step is to define an effective message. Remember that you are not in the car business. You are in the emotions business. Your customers don’t buy cars. What they are doing is seeking to emotionally solve their perceived problems. If you believe you are in the car business, you have just grouped yourself into a fishbowl with every car dealership and every salesperson in the world. You can immediately differentiate yourself by creating an SDP (Specific Defining Proposition) built upon emotional pull.
In other words, what does your business do better, more of or more unique than any other business in the world? Begin to tell your story. Facts tell-Stories Sell. You may not have spent enough time figuring out what your story is that positions and sells you. If you don’t believe you or your business is not better or unique, I would argue that you are wrong and to do more work on figuring it out. If after careful consideration you still don’t believe you are better or unique in any way, the good news is that it probably doesn’t even matter. Since most people or businesses never tell their story, you will automatically differentiate yourself and stand out if you do. There are three legs that must be established to create a winning marketing approach to your business – Message, Market and Media. You have now created the second of three legs that builds your business – the message.
Make sure that all of your marketing messages contain the following: An emotional story, a specific and incredible offer, a strong sense of urgency with a specific call to action, multiple ways to respond and if possible a specific deadline that creates a real or perceived fear of loss for a lack of action by that date.
#3 – The third leg of your marketing is media. Be forewarned, advertising agencies are usually nothing more than commissioned based media sales agents. The focus of the majority of advertising agents is place the largest amount of money possible in media. This is a recipe for waste and lackluster results. Although there are technically no bad media selections, you must define which media is best for your market and message. If you can’t dominate a media can you dominate the way you use the media – Infomercial vs. regular TV.
A huge mistake would be to believe that the media itself is what gets you the results. A good example of this is a dealership that chooses a particular media such as radio or TV as their favorite and then places tons of ads that are strictly brand based messages. For dealerships, branding should always be of secondary importance to the actual direct response offer. The best way for a dealership to build a brand is to sell a bunch of vehicles. Unless you are Budweiser, Coca Cola or some other huge brand with tons of money, spending money on brand based advertising is like flushing money down the drain. You are in the business of creating customers and profit, not in the ego inflation business.
When you get very clear about your strategy and tactics and use emotional direct response marketing to achieve your goals, you will have flipped on the switch to a continual flow of customers and sales
About the Author...
Mark is a well known keynote speaker and author with regularly featured articles in Automotive Dealer Magazine, Automotive Training Monthly Magazine and was a contributing author to a book to be released in 1998 titled GenderSell. Mark has been featured in several ASTN programs such as Start Smart: The Beginners Guide To Selling Automobile, Perspective and Incredible Customer Service.
Mark Tewart, President
Tewart Enterprises Inc.
1999 Kirby Rd. #100
Lebanon, OH. 45036
mtewart@tewart.com
www.tewart.com
888 2TEWART / 513 932-9526
FAX 513 934-4588
How to Flood Your Dealership with Customers