Force Marketing‘s Vice President, Cody Tomczyk, joined Bridget Fitzpatrick on the CBT Stage at NADA 2020 in beautiful Las Vegas, where they discussed video marketing, choose the right vendor, and the importance of an omni-channel approach.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Bridget Fitzpatrick: Thank you so much for joining us, Cody.
Cody Tomczyk: Glad to be here.
Bridget Fitzpatrick: All right. There’s a lot of buzz going on in the booth right behind us. A lot of action at Force Marketing. How’s it going for you so far?
Cody Tomczyk: It’s been great. The traffic on the first day was outstanding. A lot of great conversations with dealers around, how do we move their business forward? Really collaborative and instead of us just saying, “Hey, here’s what we think you need.” It’s about hearing their needs and then identifying a solution that fits them. So it’s been great.
Bridget Fitzpatrick: Great. Now dealers are looking for vendors out here, obviously. What should dealers be looking for when it comes to their vendors out here?
Cody Tomczyk: Well, I think from a marketing perspective, you’ve got to align on your KPIs and for us, we want to be hired and fired based on your metrics. So rather than say, “Hey, here we are on a reporting call and here’s your click-through rate and here’s your bounce rate,” and all these things like that. Let’s talk about things that move your business forward. “How was your weekend? What are you feeling? What do you seeing? How’s showroom traffic?” Right?
Bridget Fitzpatrick: Yeah.
Cody Tomczyk: We want to be judged on whether or not you’re increasing new car market share, whether you’re picking up used car volume, whether you’re doing more customer pay RO’s. Those are the metrics that should matter and I think when dealers are out here talking to vendors specifically on the marketing side, I think they need to look past the click and look past those digital metrics and get into the business metrics that really ultimately matter when it comes to growing year over year.
Bridget Fitzpatrick: Absolutely. Now video is a hot topic right now. Can you talk to us a little bit about how you’re helping dealers with video?
Cody Tomczyk: Yeah. Video is super hot right now and we’ve built a product we call Drive. That’s a dynamic video product that takes inventory directly from the VDPs with actual images of the vehicles and connects them with an in-market consumer with a why by branding, value proposition type message. That, by the way is Evergreen. So they don’t have to change content every month. They don’t have to produce content. They don’t have to go through that painstaking process. They’re just always on and they’re always running and they’re connecting with customers where they are, which from our perspective, that’s things like Facebook, YouTube, connected TV, OTT, programmatic. It’s been great.
Bridget Fitzpatrick: Awesome. Now 2020, we’re still new into the year. So, what should dealers be focused on moving ahead in 2020?
Cody Tomczyk: Well, I think there’s a couple of things. I think first it’s about, who is the customer that you want to communicate with and then how and what do you want to communicate to them? And so, for a long time we’ve had this process in automotive marketing where, let’s find a bunch of people, let’s send them a message, right? But we’re not really talking to them about what matters to them. We’re not really introducing personalization. So any ways in your marketing that you can increase personalization, you’re going to be a winner. On the other side, once you identify that right audience, the next thing you want to do is make sure that you reach them in as many platforms or publishers that make sense. So one of the things we’re really excited about is if you think of like a legacy direct mail type campaign where a dealer would run a buyback campaign and send out 5,000 pieces and maybe they’ll send out some email.
Cody Tomczyk: But what we’re saying is if we really identify those right people, relative to whatever those goals or outcomes are that you have, well, the next thing we want to do is let’s go ahead and ramp them into dynamic video on Facebook. Let’s do it on YouTube. Let’s introduce some streaming audio, right? And let’s have this omni-channel, comprehensive approach that puts a consistent message in front of those people to get them to engage with our store. And again, doing so without just price. Doing so building value in the store and building value in the product.
Bridget Fitzpatrick: Absolutely great advice. Thank you so much. Cody Tomczyk with Force Marketing. Thank you Cody.
Cody Tomczyk: Thank you.
