#244 - Marketing To Your Current Database w Andrew Street

Hey, Jeff, just before we start, we got something exciting to talk about.

It's your birthday.

It is my birthday.

Thank you, Jeff.

I'm 70 years old today. Been in the car business for 100 years.

You get a discounted IHOP now. I'm really excited for it. But also you get a discount on the Tiada Safeguards Rule. Luke, it's important for you. As you age and you start to forget things that you often do. Education renewals like what Tiada is providing to all dealers at a very reasonable price.

I tell you, we've got this huge deadline coming up, up of December 9th. It's the new GLBA. I think that's what it's called. Graham Leach Bailey act, where safeguards rule is changing and you've got to take a test. Jeff. I'm taking the test. And even with my forgetful brain, I was able to pass it. It implements on December 9th. Everybody, you gotta do this. You gotta get your. Your staff's gotta do this. Head to dealer education dot com. It's something Tiada did. I tell you what, it's cheap. It's. I shouldn't say it's cheap. It's affordable and it's really, really good information that will help you be in compliant with the new GLBA Act. And so head to dealer education portal.com and get certified.

You are listening to the Independent Dealer Podcast with hosts Luke Godwin and Jeff Watson. Hello and welcome to Independent Dealer Podcast brought to you by Buckeye Dealership Consulting. Today, Luke, we have a familiar face, Mr. Andrew street with OMG dealer. OMG.

Correct, Jeff.

What does that stand for? Dealer.

Oh my God.

Oh my God. Perfect.

It used to be Dealer Online Marketing Group.

Oh, okay, okay. I think it's better the other way around. Oh my goodness.

Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. Well, now we.

Now it's easy. It's great when we talk to dealers like, hey, we got OMG on the phone. Guys, come over here. We're going to talk about our strategy that we're doing this month.

Online marketing group. That makes so much more sense because that's what we're going to talk about.

Hey, and Jeff, you. You said we have a familiar face, but if people have been watching this for a while or been listening to it, last time we couldn't even see Andrew's face because he was a prisoner of war somewhere. But he was released and back. Now we can see his beautiful face, right?

Yes. Yeah. So episode 177 is what Luke is talking about. So if you're on the YouTubes and you've watched the show go back to episode 177. You also get some context for this conversation and you'll get a listen to some of Andrew's prophetic statements about Facebook Marketplace croaking, which if you're listening to this right Now, October of 2022, you know that Facebook Marketplace has essentially croaked. There's no more listings. We can't put our stuff on there. If you try to post as an individual, it gets flagged. So it's Facebook Marketplace as far as cars go is just kind of a big dumpster fire at this point.

I'll tell you that thing. So I use it to try to help buy cars, Jeff. And it is such a piece of junk that I'm glad it's croak this. It's horrible. Everybody on there trying to sell is.

A.

It'S a salesperson working for a dealership and every one of them's like, this is a great car, but it's got a salvage title or it's anyway.

Like put that in the listing and put your dealer number in the listing like you're supposed to. Andrew, what else, what else did you predict that you see is happening with us as far as dealers and our marketing strategies? I mean if Facebook's gone like then what where do we go?

Dude, Facebook Marketplace came out hot and heavy and fast and the playing field became not level quickly where there's a handful of feed providers essentially and we, we were one of them. There was maybe 12 or 20, I don't even remember. But we could grab dealers inventory and automatically publish it into Marketplace. We could sort of game the system to get larger distribution outside of just our city for especially people who had like high end vehicles. But then it came crashing down quickly with just like a fast notification that from Facebook that hey, you guys are no longer a partner. Nobody's going to be a partner. We're no longer going to allow feeds to pump that inventory in. We don't know what the future looks like, but you're not part of it. Nobody's going to be part of it. The good news right now is it's a level playing field and there's always a way for dealers to take advantage of you know, a platform like Facebook Marketplace still and, and yeah, without competitors there, now that the competitors aren't there, it's a good opportunity for us manually posting. Pain in the ass. It can work, especially if you've got somebody who knows how to game the thing and go into the you know, your cities buy, sell trade groups still getting flagged. Like, Facebook's cracking down on it. Facebook cracked down on us because we were trying to work with. We have a lot of buy here, pay here dealers that were on Facebook Marketplace, where I'd be arguing with the Marketplace team that we have a large subset of our dealers who we don't want to advertise our Kelley Blue Book valuation. And on that graph, you remember that? Yeah. Where it shows the value of our vehicle, what it should be worth, what it is on the low end. I'm like, that's not the value proposition for these customers. These Val. These customers just need to be able to qualify, have a low down payment, reasonable monthly payment.

Yeah. And it didn't. It didn't account for a condition. It didn't. I mean, it didn't account for anything. It could have a dead cat and missing the rear seats, and it would still book. Amazing.

Well, but you. But I'm so. I argue that. I'm gonna argue Facebook's side here. Okay.

Good luck.

Buy your pay. Your source shouldn't be advertising their inventory at all. It's. It's a. It's a. It doesn't make sense, is my opinion. And so to dump your inventory into this is just useless. It clogs up the actual individuals who want to sell their car because some new car store gave them a junk offer on it. So buy your pay here stores, even subprime retail stores, don't need to be putting their cars on this platform. They need to be advertising and branding themselves on Facebook. Is there an argument made there?

Dude, I would give you a gold star if I had a gold star and we were in the same room together.

Nice.

Yeah, that's it.

Luke will take any kind of present today. It's his birthday.

It is my birthday.

He hit the big. The big five one, I think.

Five, two, six, two.

He's on the senior menu now, so. But. But to your point, Luke, that's exactly what you argued in episode 177 last time with Andrew is you said, I don't use Facebook to market my cars. That's silly. I've got one car. Why would I put that car out there on Facebook and deal with it when I can use that money in ad spend and awareness to market my brand? You said you sell on experience, so, yeah, you want to get your brand out there and your experience, which is not marketplace necessarily. It's just. It's Facebook ads. So you're running ad campaigns both in the feed, Instagram And Marketplace ad inserts, right? Sponsored ads.

Dude, you guys are so far ahead of so many downstream dealers as far as capabilities within Facebook.

But yes, you're not doing it right.

I just, I just, I mean, nobody's doing it perfectly.

I hope, I hope I'm doing it right.

I'm gonna let you know, everybody's getting really close though. And I know so many dealers who have really capable people on their side of the desk with digital and understanding and analytics and lead distribution and qualifying leads. And it's become, it's come so far so fast. Website providers, the dms, the integrations with the dms, the FTC safeguard. Like people are figuring this stuff out on, on both the vendor and the dealership side and going to like a lot of these conferences. Like we just did Digital Dealer last. Last week we were in Vegas, we went there and did a workshop and a lot of people from the dealership side came up and they want to look, they want to show us their ads manager and their analytics and start digging into the audiences and the frequency and the optimization and all this super nerdy digital marketing stuff that never existed. That didn't exist anywhere in auto 10 years ago. We're now, you know, it was trying, you know, at first when we, when I left Facebook started working with dealers is trying to draw parallels between display and Facebook advertising to like billboards, where you're going really fast past it and you want to be able to make an impact on that person and have a very clear call to action. Where now it's like dealers are, a lot of them are pretty equipped. But we talked about the play in Marketplace right now that is working. And here's, here's what's working from, you know, merchandising your inventory on Marketplace, which again, buy here, pay here. I don't think that's necessarily, necessarily our big play, but maybe a small percentage getting the inventory and making it look just like a Marketplace listing, like an organic listing and then placing that into Facebook Marketplace.

So that's, that's. So is that our, Is that our Facebook Pages catalog? Is, is that the same thing or is that different? Like, yeah, I mean, it's the same catalog, right?

With inventory, you have a catal, a catalog on your page that has your inventory. It's the same feed that's going to fuel the, the ads that are going to be placed into Marketplace, but it's not going to be the same. It's not going to draw traffic back to our, our cat, Our inventory catalog on our page. Yeah, but it could draw traffic to our vehicle detail pages or to our credit application. But what I'm seeing that's working well is, like, if we have especially, like a good chat provider to have messenger ads triggered right there and start the conversation with our customers, can your chat provider be Facebook?

Because that's what we're using on our website. Does that make sense or. Or no, Andrew.

Yeah. Yeah. If you set up those rules to have kind of like. Did you set up the conversation.

We have? Partially. It seems to work sometimes. It's odd. You know, sometimes maybe Facebook just has a glitch or something. It works sometimes it doesn't work all the time. And so sometimes we. We find ourselves picking it up.

Yeah, that's great. I mean, if you had the bandwidth and you have somebody in house that can jump on pretty regularly and just look at the conversations coming through to help direct it, because they go off the rails.

So you're. You're. Luke, you're saying on your website, your website chat is hosted by Facebook Messenger?

Yes.

Is that still smart in a day and age where, like, nobody's on Facebook anymore?

That's. That's quite odd. Well, you don't have to back up. You don't have to have a Facebook account to use it. Oh. So what happens is if. If you don't have a Facebook account, it will. It comes through it like Facebook user or something like that. But if you are signed into your account, you get the names and everything.

But you have to respond to these people through Facebook Messenger. So you salespeople all have to be logged in and they have to have a Facebook in order to see these coming into your Facebook page as a website chat.

Yeah.

Okay. Yeah, I understand that. I have a lot of salesmen that do not have Facebook pages, so. Well, I think it is struggling.

I think, Andrew, you might. You might know better now, but I think it comes through as the God like a Gobble Motors chat. Not a particular person. So. Yeah, as long as they're signed. As long as they're signed in as a user of Galva Motors, it works that way.

But they have to have a Facebook page for you to make them. To give them access to the Godwin Motors.

Yeah, I mean, right? I mean, you can create one.

Speaking of, Luke, you do not have any active Facebook ads running, so just FYI on that one.

I do. So. I do. Jeff.

I don't see it here. You guys know Buckeye Dealership Consulting is a great sponsor of the podcast. A great way to get your reinsurance company Going, we're looking at fourth quarter. We're right in the middle of it. Now is the time to make sure you're funding your reinsurance company. If you're listening to us, you definitely have a reinsurance company. I don't think there's anyone listening unless you're only selling 5 to 10amonth and maybe it's not financially advantageous for you yet. You definitely have a company, right, Luke? So now's the time to start making sure you're funding that thing as healthy as you can.

You know, just entering the fourth, third, fourth quarter here, we can get everything set up and off and rolling. So if you don't have it, get it done because the tax man is calling. And I saw they released some new IRS tax brackets this morning, and boys and girls, it doesn't look fun. So, yeah, let's get set up.

And one thing that stroke struck me as I did a review this week with my reinsurance company is it's almost like a forced savings account as well, because I'm putting that money aside and as I've earned out those premiums, my. My guy was like, hey, you know, you need to start talking about what you're going to do with this money. And I'm like, well, honestly, I kind of want to just forget that it's there, you know, just for years in a little money market account and build up. Because if, if, you know, poop hits the fan, soon I want to be able to tap into that reinsurance company and use it as kind of a rainy day fund. So anyways, get your reinsurance company set up. Talk to Buckeye back to the episode, because you might be boosting maybe.

No, no, I don't do any boosting. We have a company that. Oh, a media company that, that runs.

Our ads to using somebody else so it's not under yours. They set up like a faux look of you and they run the ads. So, Andrew, talk about that. So I want to know if I hire a marketing company and I've spoken with one recently, they basically, I don't know, it's not called like mimicking or spoofing, but they basically own your ad library inside of their ads manager. They're not. You're not. They're not logged into your ads manager creating ads and running campaigns and building these assets for you. They're doing it inside of theirs, but then just driving the traffic to you. So at the end, if you ever split ways with these people, they own all the audiences, they have all the data, they have all the historical information, is that. Is that just the way it works? It kind of rubs me the wrong way. And I was like, I don't know, man. I'd rather pay someone to get into my ads manager and run it so that if we do part ways, I still have all my historical data inside of my ads manager.

I mean, it's simpler, it's more simple to have somebody just create their own page or like companies like, I don't want to name names, but that are driving dealers to think that the vehicle detail page is everything from digital marketing and they run it under some guise of a different company. With your dealership's inventory drawing traffic to vehicle detail pages, it's all just kind of tricking the reporting and kind of the dealer to where all the growth, all the people who like it, who follow it, who connect it, whose friends already purchased there, who like the page, all that's irrelevant. So, like, you're not going to grow a network of followers and fans and things from having somebody else run ads under their page. And just like you were talking about, there's no takeaways for your dealership if you were to part ways. All the retargeting growth and the pixel growth of people who've come by and looked at your credit application and left it, that's all in the hands of the marketing company now.

Right.

Opposed to you as the dealership, where you've got somebody under the hood working with your store's presence, with your store's Instagram account, with your store's Facebook page, your store's website and Google listing. Yeah, I mean, if you have somebody else running ads from their platform, it's just, you know, a simple question of why, why don't.

Yeah, that's just. Well, the way that they explained it was that's the way they do it because of ad buy or what? And then there's the whole level of transparency and what they bill you for compared to the report they showed you and I don't know, whatever. But tell me this. So if we transition from Facebook over to the Google, which is a little more. What's the word? Like, is that kind of the relevant? I mean, that's kind of been like the constant through the ages. Right. Like, I build up my Google Ads, I've got it built into my analytics of my website now. I'm building out things and ad campaigns and stuff like that. Is. Is. Does Google Ads run the same way?

Yes, in a. In a. Yeah, in a different sense. Google's gotten so much bigger than it was where it was paid search, where we want to compete with other dealers who are catering to our type of audience. So if somebody's looking for, you know, low credit lending vehicles, my city, things like that, where we want to pay Google to rank highly. And then so it set it up where, you know, there's basically an all of digital advertising. I like to think there's customers searching for our dealership or there's going to be customers that discover us. And so when they're searching for us, they're going into Google Maps, they're going into Apple Maps, they're going into Google Search, maybe going into YouTube. And that's where we want to try to, based on what they're searching, have us pop up quickly. So that's the search side. On the discovery side, that's where somebody is looking at their phone or at their computer or tablet, not trying to find us, but because of who we think they are and where they are in their buying cycle or their credit score or their household income. They're, they just moved, they just had a baby. Okay, let's start to cater to that person and have our ads go through their news feeds and on their websites that they visit. So that's the display side page. But, but with Google, you know, they've gotten so much further and expanded. Gmail, YouTube, Google search. So a lot of those other platforms that are underneath Google's umbrella, you know, you can start to be able to collect more info or more data on what buyers are shopping for without them having to show intent by searching. Does that make sense? Right, because on YouTube you're okay, this customer is looking at getting a vehicle loan on YouTube and they also Google searched that before and they've got emails coming in from a few different dealerships about these types of vehicles. So Google's starting to get more and more of a so let discovery understanding.

I don't want to miss what you just said. So let's just say Luke Godwin is deciding to start the buy in process. And so the first thing I do is I check my credit, realize my credit's less than, less than Prime. And so I go, okay, Google, how do I get a car loan if I have less than perfect credit? Let's just say that's the search and all these things come up and I click on a couple of them. So you're telling me the next morning or 15 minutes later I'm going to get a Google spam email advertising somebody?

Not a spam email, but yes, there's there's ads at the top of Gmail typically, especially on desktop, you'll see more ads that are pretty under, like they're, they're not super apparent at the top of your Gmail. But then also that you know that same platform of Google or it's Alphabet that has the Google Display network which is all the ads that pop up on ESPN and a bunch of different websites and it has YouTube so it has the preferred, you know, the, the listings on the front and it has the bumper ads that are the five second videos, you know the, the videos at the beginning of each.

Yeah.

Video that people are going to watch. So yeah, Google's collecting that and able to start providing you with more relevant ads right now. And who knows about the Pixel? And if that's going to do whatever people say, it's going to do more relevant ads to you just based on who you are opposed to what you're searching for.

So I, I don't use, I use a paid Gmail account. That's our email, it's server set up. So I guess I don't see, I don't, I don't know what a normal Gmail account looks like. So maybe that's the reason I didn't, didn't realize that was going on. Just thought about that.

Yeah, that's upper middle class problems right there.

So let me ask you just a couple of poignant questions, Andrew. Do you believe. So I self manage my own Google Ads platform, right. And it's probably a big rat's nest of different campaigns that I've kind of like cobbled together over the years. And how do you, is it something that has to be actively managed? Like when I talk to these companies, these marketing companies and I'm like, hey, what I really want as a dealer is I want someone to go in and just tweak it, just fine tune it. Just make sure I'm not buying stupid words that I shouldn't be paying for. Like should I be paying for my own name? Like why would I? If someone searches you ask these every time.

You ask that. Every time, Jeff.

I do, but like what's the consensus? Should I pay for that?

No, no, not at all.

Do I want to show up top in an ad search for my own name?

I can talk about this stuff. I'd like to be clear, like I'm very specific with our puzzle piece with Facebook and Instagram. Now we're doing Amazon Display Network. The jury's still out. Don't be, you know, completely enamored by the shiny Amazon Logo for advertising. But with, with paid search, with buying your name. My, my take is I see so many providers working with the same dealerships that I work with that are paying the lion's share of the budget and the lion's share of the traffic coming from our paid search efforts are just on our name. And then when you do a little bit more digging, nobody else is competing for our name. So they were looking for us to begin with. And instead of clicking the link below it and coming to our website, they click the link above it and we just paid them, paid a dollar for.

Them to click on our name instead of the one below. Which is what I do to my competitors every time I'm going to their website. I search it and I'm sure to click on the ad.

The sponsored one. Yes.

As many times.

Click it again.

I do that as well.

Yeah.

So maybe we should be buying our competitors names so that when someone searches one of our top competitors, we show up above them, you know?

Right. Yeah.

Oh, drivetown's been doing that for years in my market to, to me, I mean it's, it's ridiculous. You Google us, it'll be, you know, drive time. US Auto finance, you know, all these, US Auto sales, all these big corporate companies are doing it. So years ago I said, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna send assist and desist letter. A cease and desist letter apparently.

Cease and desist what competition? I want you to stop competing against me.

It didn't, it didn't, it didn't work. Okay. It didn't work, but bad for business.

If you compete against me. Please.

Yeah.

At some point it's, you should be flattered. Like you're on their radar. Yeah. You've gotten under their skin and to a degree. But like from what, what marketing firms, especially if they're doing it, can deliver to the dealer is an impressive report on traffic to the website and intent and soft conversions and hard conversions on the website. From that traffic from your name being bought because that person's going to come to your website, they're trying to come to your website now they come to your website, they're going to spend a lot of time, they're going to visit a lot of pages, they might even fill out the credit app because they were trying to come to the website. But then when you're reporting that from, from the agency or from the marketing platform or some in house marketing person, it looks really good. But that was going to be something that you didn't have to pay for. Because you earned that traffic because of the branding that you have because that customer had a friend with a good experience at your store. They shop with you in the past. Like that story doesn't get told. It just says good job paid search, good job ad agency. And they can take credit for not necessarily getting you a customer that you weren't about to be able to pull in anyways.

Do you know much, much about like the Google my business listings? Is that something we need to talk to dealers about? I know they switched it over from the app to the Google Maps. Now you have to access it through Maps, which makes no sense to me, but.

All right, everybody, one more break in, right? Jeff, we're going to talk about protecting your assets. And the best way to protect your assets, in my opinion, is to use Pastime gps. Been using them for years. We had somebody skip not long ago to Savannah, Jeff, and we didn't know it right, but we had hidden a wireless gps. So guess, guess what they're doing now.

Get in the car.

They're walking. That customer's walking because we had it protected, buddy.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It's super important and it does, it keeps driving home the fact that it's really, really simplified my underwriting or my delivery process when my guys, my salesman can put a wireless GPS in a car. Right now it's a Saturday afternoon, it's a Tuesday night. They have been trained on how to activate a wireless gps. What are the most accessible points to install that wireless gps? So it's really taken a huge headache off of my plate. When we used to have to hardwire a gps, it was just frustrating. So talk to the guys at Pastime if you use our, tell them that we sent you. You will get one free GPS when you order your first five. That's for new members. Order five, get one free pastime gps. Great. Guys, do I really need to be spending like Google Ad spend to, to boost me in the search or do I just need really, really good reviews? And if I have current and active and consistent Google reviews, will that boost me up in the Google algorithm just as much to be relevant on a search?

Yeah. Google's updated their algorithms on paid search and for their local business listings 10 times in the last year. So it's been changed so many times. So it's, you know, to think we're going to outsmart everybody. But it's always going to be relevant for us to have continual reviews, responding to those reviews, whether they're good or bad. And let Google know that you Have a light on that. You're keeping your page updated and you go through all the different sections of the listing to make sure that they're accurate. And that's where we're going to win the game with Google, in my opinion. If I was an independent dealer with one store, 10 stores, I would make sure that our goo, like our play with Google, is going to start with our business listings, making sure they're accurate and doing what we can from our end to help encourage happy customers to leaving reviews.

Yeah, I'll tell you the, the new, I guess VDP pages built into that to the Google. My business is pretty slick. If people hadn't. Hadn't done that, you should go check it out. I mean, it's, it's almost like you're on my website. I mean, you, I mean, essentially you are. It's. I really, I really like it.

I think it's.

I think it's pretty.

What's. Do you have an early take, Luke, on how, you know, customers are engaging with it? Any conversations start through it for you yet, or is it just kind of. It just looks good.

I think it looks good. And I'm not even sure. I'm not even sure customers are. People looking for cars. Understand it yet. I think would be my biggest take on it that you kind of have to look for it. Because, you know, if, as, as a consumer, if I Google Godwin Motors, I'm gonna go to the. And see it over here to the right. Right. And I'm gonna click the website. You have to scroll down just a hair and then you say, oh, well, okay, I can see. I can click the cars. And so I think. And I think it's below the, below the scroll or it's right at the scroll. And so I think we will see Google push that up if they really want us to be on their website of ours instead of our website. And I, I think that's what Google really wants people to do is be on, on their product, not on my product. If I had to. That's kind of my take.

Yeah, I think you're right. And I think, you know, the two of the behemoths with, with meta, with. With Facebook's platforms and with Google, there's plays happening right now for them to replace websites.

Yeah, for sure.

In general, not just for dealers, but to have a lot of the functionality work faster and better and conversations take place on their platforms versus on the World Wide Web.

Yeah.

And I think if we talk about, you know, you said something meta. I mean, if I think if we, if we look at Facebook's ultimate play since they changed their name is, is the Metaverse. And, and I would assume that if you're in their Metaverse, which, you know, Zuckerberg thinks everybody's going to be in their, their Metaverse at some point that you're going to have to have a storefront that they provide for you. Right. And so I mean, I kind of see, I kind of see where that, that's going to lead to. I don't think I'll ever get on the Metaverse. As, as Jeff said, I'm like 50 something today. But you know, our kids are going to be hanging out in the Metaverse. I mean, they kind of already do when they're playing, you know, Roblox or that other game, whatever it is, Minecraft or whatever it is, they're kind of already hanging out in this area. And, and I think, I think that's the ultimate play. Right?

No, Yes. I mean, maybe, but I, I, yes, there could be in, you know, a long way from now. I don't want to sink my teeth or have my dealers try to sink their teeth into VR or ar.

Yeah, I don't think, I don't think that that's what you should. Yeah.

And I just talked with like the head of auto at Facebook last week in Vegas. He's in Austin here with me, Adam.

But he's a genius.

Yeah. They're talking about, you know, understanding the Metaverse and the long term vision for Facebook because he works for Facebook. And then the rest of the whole conversation is about Facebook ads and targeting and measuring and standing out from your competitors, which has nothing to do with virtual reality or augmented reality. I've got big feelings about Metaverse and Facebook putting 15, 16 billion dollars dedicated this year into virtual reality versus putting a hundred million dollars towards serving small businesses with their ad platform that is by far the most cost effective ad platform in the planet still. Yeah, and yeah, I think it's a huge misstep and as a stockholder too, it's a big misstep when they have a tiny multiple on this huge company. It's, it's, it's, they're turning their attention away from us as the small businesses and as the dealers, as an independent dealer for us to kind of try to wrap our head around VR.

It's so far away. I, I totally agree. And I think that as dealers though, I think there's a conversation to be had here. As dealers, sometimes we get wrapped up in those shiny things that, that we shouldn't be doing right. And it's just a distraction if we just hit the basics of fundamentals of advertising. And I think you talked about that before. Actually we got on the, on the call, man. We own a lot of data, right. You know.

Yeah.

How can we better use the data we have, dude.

And that's where you, you guys as dealers are sitting on a gold mined a gold mine of information that you can tap into and it is your data. And it's two things. It's simply the people that come by your website, you can collect those people into buckets. What do they do? Do they leave our credit app? Okay, let's aggressively go after everybody who's left our credit app and all of our lost unresponsive leads. Let's go after everybody who's, you know, everybody who's visited our website because it's typically not a huge audience and it's not expensive. But then the, the second part is going to be your database, all the unresponsive leads and especially all of our customers. So there you can use, you know, and if it's a thousand people, it's going to cost us $12 to reach those people on Facebook and Instagram. If it's a $12 cost per thousand. So this is $12. Okay, let's get them. 10 times there's 120 bucks towards our database saying thank you, saying please refer a friend. Here's our referral program. We hope you're happy. Potentially. Trade in, trade up. You know, if we have any service or parts opportunities to be able to tap into our database of just our customers and then especially the people who have abandoned our, who, who filled out our forms. Cold leads. We're sitting on a pile of cold leads that we're not doing anything with. You know, if we have 2,000 cold leads, you put a hundred bucks into that campaign, you're going to hit those people a lot of times. And what we're seeing is 5% of those 2,000 people start engaging with the ad, which is pretty normal. There's a hundred new sales opportunities that we just picked back up.

Andrew, is it, I mean it's the only way we. I know Facebook's changed some of that targeting by email addresses. Is it only an email campaign or is it a campaign we can use through Facebook?

Yeah, you can do it on Facebook. Instagram, right now they've restricted it with just Facebook's data where you can only do a 15 mile radius if you're a car dealer because it's credit Related. Everything's credit related. With dealerships they say so it's a 15 mile radius, but then that's where you as the dealer can start to. We have connectivity into the DMS and into third party data, our own third party data provider because we have a CDP like a customer data platform. But dealers can pull in their own data simply by exporting a spreadsheet from their CRM, importing it into Facebook and then now that's an audience of people that they can run an ad campaign to.

Okay, so trying to wrap my head around this, Andrew. You're talking about taking our data out of our systems, both our CRM and maybe our dms and putting them into a Google, putting them into an Excel spreadsheet and then uploading that into Google Ads as a custom audience. Right. And that's something we have to manually do every month, every quarter, update the audience manually. Right. There's not a lot of APIs that take my CRM data and instantly create a Facebook audience on the regular.

Yeah, I mean it's a customer data platform is what you would like. We go to dealer omg.com that's my only plug we've got. I mean we'll do that real time and it'll publish. It'll automatically create audiences real time based on who's coming to your website and who your past customers are. But you as a dealer, obviously you're not going to create a platform. You can still do it. It's going to be a little bit more manual, but you can export that list and just manually import it and then call it two, three months later. If, depending on how much business you're doing, import a new list and then update the list.

I've.

See, I've done that in the past. I've taken out like my, all my past customer data out of my DMS and said, okay, here's all my sold or paid offs or here's all my customer data ever in my entire history that I have in my current dms. I'm going to yank out the emails, dump them into a custom Facebook ads campaign and then try to run ads against them or do the lookalike audience and try to run ads against those people as well. I've kind of not been as consistent with updating that audience or even running things to that audience. I don't know why, but because you.

Have a dealership to run, a podcast to run, travel, increasing notoriety, you know.

You got, you got older, so it's hard to keep up on that kind of stuff. And here's the other problem I have is you talk about how we're sitting on these gold mines, but my gold mine just, I keep getting like claim jumped because like I'll have all my data in one CRM and then I switch CRMs and somehow I can't get that guy to bring all my data to my new CRM or I don't have like one central holding place to be like, okay, I've got 15 years worth of names, phone numbers, emails, all in a central location that I can continue. You know, I paid for all these leads, but it seems like I keep losing these buckets of leads every time I change CRMs or change DMSS or I have a server crash and then all of a sudden my Excel spreadsheet's gone. Is there a better way to be doing this as far as keeping track of those things?

I like to think so. Okay, me too.

Yeah, Yeah, I like to think there.

Is a way and lean on the CRM or the DMS provider to have you keep that. And if you lose some of the data and it's too much of a headache to retrieve, you know, you can still start with what you have right now and continually grow it and make sure that it's in the CRM provider, the DMS providers obligation and it's to keep it safe and, and keep, keep, keep it growing and then where you can transfer it.

All right, Jeff, it's your time of the year, buddy.

Oh man, I love tax time, guys. And you guys know Tax Max. It's the best way to get your hands on the money before everyone else does. It is that time of year.

Yeah, you love the fourth quarter. I don't know how it works, but you've had success, success with it, right?

Yeah, yeah. We're going to have Bill on the podcast pretty soon to educate all dealers on how fourth quarter program works with them. But it is successful. We all know cash is tight now than it ever has been. A lot of people are looking for their tax returns. They need them now to get that relief and we need them now to be selling cars with larger down payments. So stay tuned to the podcast. We're going to be a lot more information on a great sponsor Tax Max and how you guys can take advantage of their program. And as we think through that I really, the finger comes back to me, right? I said to myself, hey, this isn't important enough for me to ea keep safe through somewhere, you know, duplicates, backup copies and or b be more persistent with my CRM or DRMS provider to make sure I get that data when I switch and I leave you, is that your data or my data? It's my data. Okay. I need that in an Excel spreadsheet before we finish our contract because I want to update it on my master list because I spent. I spend $10,000 a month on advertising. So if I've been with you for 24 months, you know, I don't do public math, but that's a lot of money that I'm just letting flush down the toilet by not being persistent to get those unsold and. And, you know, leads.

And if you're struggling with it, I imagine there's so many dealers that are listening right now that are struggling with the same thing.

I think. I think, Andrew, you. You kind of talked me into to giving you a ring off air because I would really. I tell you, I don't have a good plan for this. For this data I have. And I've got to figure out. I think that's our missing key to our. Jeff, we used to. We used to be in 20 group with this guy down in Augusta, and I won't name names on the air, but he spent no money advertising. And the guy sold 100 cars a month. And he had one person that. All they did was mine the data he had, and they were just cold calling and getting referrals and doing this, and the guy was selling 100 cars a month. I mean, we're all missing out by not using this data correctly, right?

Yeah. I mean, think. Think about how much work and how much marketing and how many different people internally at the dealership are involved in getting that one customer out the door with their new vehicle. And they know who your dealership is. And then now advertisers are super prone to kind of continually prospecting outside of there, getting new customers, new customers. But we have earned this customer who not only knows about us, but they've shopped with us, they bought from us before, and hopefully they had a great experience. But to be able to tap into this network of people who already know who we are, that's the gold mine. And it could be referrals and thank yous and trade and trade ups like we were talking about, but to just get back and yeah, as buyer pay.

Here, dealer, birds of a feather flock together. So, yeah, we have found. We found the gold vein in our mind. We just need to kind of get deeper into it, you know, and get those repeat referrals for sure. Andrew, Luke's gonna call you and get set up and have you work for him. Anyone else that's listening, how do they call you and get help of your services and or pick your brain?

You can just reach out to me. Andrewealer omg.com and if it's and, and.

You'Re going to be, you're going to be at something, some something that Niada is calling, I don't know what they're calling it this year, but you're going to be at something in the next week or two, right?

Yes. Okay, I just messaged our marketing department. We're going to be at Booth 160 at the BHPH thing, Super Forum in.

Austin, November 9th through the 11th.

This year.

You've got a couple of days, a couple of weeks to sign up and get down there to Austin. It's going to be a good time.

Yeah, I'll be at the booth. I just happen to live right down the street so it'll be perfect.

All right, buddy. I'm gonna be in your area this week watching some race cars go fast. So I, I can't wait.

I love it.

All right, Andrew, thanks for your time. All right, gentlemen, dealers helping dealers. Please leave us a review and subscribe the independent dealer podcast.