WEBVTT
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Welcome to season two of The Virtual CMO podcast.
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I'm your host, Eric Dickmann, founder of The Five Echelon Group.
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Our goal is to share strategies, tools, and tactics with fellow marketing professionals that you can use to impact the trajectory of your company's marketing programs.
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We have candid conversations about what works, and what doesn't, with marketing tactics, customer experience, design and automation tools.
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Our goal is to provide value each week with a roster of thoughtful and informative guests engaged in a lively conversation.
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So with that, let's introduce this week's guest and dive into another conversation with The Virtual CMO.
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Today, I'm excited to welcome a Jeff Revilla to the show.
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Jeff is an award-winning digital marketer with over 20 years of experience.
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He got his start in e-commerce, but found a home in automotive.
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For the last 10 years he has been the digital marketing director for a large automotive group in Western Pennsylvania.
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Three times he has been recognized by reputation.com as a top 100 dealer.
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In his spare time.
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You may catch him throwing discs at a local disc golf course or hosting his own trivia game show, now in its fourth season, one of three different podcasts he hosts.
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I think you're going to enjoy this conversation with Jeff and to learn how digital marketing has completely changed the automotive world.
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Jeff welcome to the virtual CMO podcast.
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I'm so glad you could join us today.
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Great.
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I thank you so much for having me.
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I'm looking forward to this conversation.
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I've been looking forward to it for about.
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we booked this maybe a month ago.
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So I've been thinking about it probably every other day.
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what are we going to talk about?
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What's the agenda.
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Hey, that's awesome.
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I'm so glad that you're here.
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You know, just before we started the show today, we were talking a little bit about COVID and the craziness that's going on with the pandemic.
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And I know that one of the sports that you're into is you love disc golf.
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Can you play that?
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Has that been something that you can do?
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the pandemic is going on.
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Yeah, it's actually the perfect pandemic sport.
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The play, the worst case scenario, you might be around one or two people from your house, maybe a friend or two, you don't play in large groups, rarely more than four people at a time.
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And it's over acres of woods where they've cut out different paths.
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And you're really essentially throwing Frisbees through the woods.
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It's like hiking with target practice and you know, your distance from other people, four or 500 feet from the next group.
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And you just go through 18 holes, like regular ball golf, but you're throwing disks or Frisbees.
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What some people would recognize it as in the woods, they're actually weighted Frisbee.
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So they, you can throw them three, 400 feet.
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That's a, you get out some aggression, some stress, chucking a piece of plastic through the woods.
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You hear the sound of the, you know, hitting trees.
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You're smashing chains.
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Cause we don't have a whole.
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Like in ball golf, there's a chains, almost like a chandelier.
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If you think of it where the disc would hit the chandelier and drop into a basket.
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So almost like a casino reward, like you hit it.
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Slot machine, like teaching string.
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there's this there's the sound element to it.
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It's peaceful.
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But then you're making noise at the same time.
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So you get both the best of both worlds
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A while back, I thought it was going to be really hip, with the youngsters and I, got my Sony PlayStation, with the move.
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Remember those with the lighted glow tips and whatever, and one of the games.
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Yeah, exactly.
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And one of the games that they had on there was Frisbee golf and it actually worked really well.
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with the move.
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And so I am familiar with the sport, but virtually not having played it in real life, but having played it on the PlayStation.
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if you ever do it, if you get into it, you end up carrying a backpack.
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It's about 20 pounds.
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You're going to hike two to three miles and I'm nor much more North than you in Pennsylvania.
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We have the mountains.
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So you have elevation changes.
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you're going to, you're going to put in the two, three, four miles carrying that bag.
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It's a good workout.
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Plus all that stretching and throwing and, the tension of, you know, ripping that disc through 300 feet.
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There's a lot of flexing and I forgot is that isometric.
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I think that's the type of exercise that is, but it's a great workout.
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So what's in this backpack, just the different Frisbees.
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Yeah, different.
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Frisbee's not great for an audio podcast, but I'll show you one on screen here.
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they're weighted and they're tailored to fly different ways.
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Just like in ball golf, you have putters and drivers and, wedges.
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you have similar types of things.
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You have a driver disc, a putter disc, and they're just cut different ways to cut through the air differently.
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Whereas a driver's very tapered.
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With a real short, sharp edge.
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So that can go the distance, whereas a putter as more of a bull nose.
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And it's not designed to travel far.
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but it's designed for a little more accuracy and the, for shorter distances.
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if it's anything like real golf, I would definitely need one that floats.
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They do make those as well.
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I would need that.
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Jeff, I'd be curious to know.
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So obviously The Virtual CMO, we're a marketing podcast.
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Talk to me a little bit about your journey and how you ended up in the professional marketing.
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It was a long journey.
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And one, I didn't even know I was on at the time, about 20 years ago, I started selling skateboards out of my parents' basement.
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We'd would have kids come into the house at all hours of the night, two, three, four in the morning.
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Sometimes they were out skateboarding late at night, and I'm sure my neighbors started to question what I was doing over there.
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And, one thing led to another, the business started to grow.
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And I was able to establish, I bought a building for$11,000.
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Wow.
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And this was in 2002 and I put in a skate park, a skate shop.
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And for about eight years I got into manufacturing, but I also started buying ad words like in 2002, 2000, I was even on overture.
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If anybody out there remembers the old ad network overture that Yahoo eventually bought.
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you know, buying keywords for a nickel, like it was the craziest thing.
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Looking back that
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Nicole
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I started, I had my own social network.
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I called it a lounge.
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I didn't know what it was, but I had a message board.
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I was making video content on YouTube and all these things started to add up.
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And when the business folded in Oh eight, people started asking me questions like, Hey, you know, what's this with the website?
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How do I get this to rank better?
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how do you do ad words?
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And I was like, this is all you do, click, you know, and it was done.
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It was like, Whoa, that was pretty good.
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And they would start recommending me.
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And all of a sudden I realized these last eight years, weren't just, running a business.
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I was building a skill that's valuable to people all over the place.
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So I started doing a lot of consulting and eventually I landed a job at a media company.
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And then where I've been for the last 10 years as the digital marketing director.
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I landed in automotive and I'm stuck.
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I'm hooked.
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I love the industry and it's a very complicated process, still on four wheels, like skateboards had four wheels, but now I'm selling, you know, helping the sell cars on four wheels.
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I stayed with the same category, at least with four wheels.
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but, the price point has gone up quite a bit.
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I definitely want to dive into the whole selling of automotive products because that's such a huge segment, but I'd love to talk a little bit more about this idea of buying keywords for a nickel to where we are today.
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So things have certainly changed, right?
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In terms of Google ad words, in terms of Facebook marketing, in terms of really where people are spending a lot of money online.
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Talk to me a little bit about what you've seen in terms of some of the changes with the digital marketing spend
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.Yeah.
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even funnier with OvaTure overtreat used to show you everybody's rank and everybody's bid.
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So if you were like it's 7 cents and you wanted to be number one, it was 9 cents.
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You like, okay.
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I just bid 10 cents.
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I'm number one.
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And in that competition where wasn't exists, didn't exist in 2003, 2003.
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People figured it out.
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And it has gone where, you know, the money has flown where the eyeballs are.
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People are searching on Google, they're on social media and those costs have skyrocketed.
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we're seeing a little bit of a turn downward turn with Facebook.
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We can get into it a little bit, but where the, where people went.
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Yeah.
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You know, the dollars float and as that competition increased, so did the costs and the cost.
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So you really had to look at when I had skateboards, I was only making maybe$10 a board.
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And when those costs got the 25 cents 50 cents a click, you know, that it takes you 10.
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These are, you have to also consider for skateboards.
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You have a lot of 12 year old, 13 year old, 14 year old boys searching, clicking search and clicking.
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So it took 20-30 clicks to get a sale.
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All of a sudden, now that you start to realize how much that AdWords starts to cut into your budget.
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It's that you have to, you can, it's not difficult.
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I don't think anything we really do is extremely difficult.
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You have to understand it.
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You have to have some science behind it.
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It's a little bit of science, a little bit of art, but you have to have structure and the discipline to really manage what you're doing.
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And that's where that didn't exist.
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When they're nickel, you didn't have to yeah.
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Enough to know too much.
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It was lucky.
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It was like fish in a barrel.
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the searches were there.
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The keywords were cheap.
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Now the searches are there, but the keywords aren't cheap.
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So you better know what you're doing on the backend.
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You better see how many clicks it takes to generate that sale.
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What's that sale on average generating for you on the backend.
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So the knowledge has gone up.
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I'm much more of a management experience, led business management to really understand the whole backend situation.
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I bet when you were using OvaTure, it was mostly a manual process.
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And today we're so fortunate to have so many different tools that can help us with this.
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I'm not only tools that are provided by the platforms themselves, third party tools in your business today, what tools do you find are especially helpful in doing your keyword research and actually placing the buys?
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So a lot of this, we do a lot of this in house, so I do use a lot of the Google keyword planner.
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I use a lot of SCM rush.
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I use tools like that.
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we've actually, especially with the pandemic we've reduced our ad spend significantly and we have, I'm fortunate to have a marketing department of nine people.
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I have content creators, videographers, and photographers, and we've gone all in.
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really over the last two years, and especially now with the pandemic, we've gone all in on generating our own interest.
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So making sure that we're, we have, two or three videos coming out a day.
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We're doing long format videos, sometimes 26, 30 minutes.
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That's where we've put our focus on lately.
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With the, you know, back to the ad words in regards to that, we, some of that we do outsource still.
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So we have companies that are managing some of our behalf.
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Some of it is automatic.
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A lot of display is being generated with our inventory in real time.
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So we're able to rebel to really match the search interest with the physical products that we have in stock.
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So if somebody is looking for say a Honda civic, we have not only do we know what the inventory is, what the current offers are, but we have images to back that up.
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We have videos to back that up and we're tying all that in together, with, by outsourcing the ad words by now.
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Well, one topic that we haven't talked about much on this show yet.
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Is the whole idea of retargeting.
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Do you do a lot of retargeting ads?
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So if somebody is coming in and doing a search or comes and visits your website, that you can then retarget advertising specifically to them.
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Yeah.
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It's about 10% of ad words, budget, overall.
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So we are looking at, behaviors.
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I'm very interested in behaviors and I look at the way I structure my audiences are mostly URL based.
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So I'm looking forward at somebody, visit a URL.
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That said that had the word civic or Honda civic in it.
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And then I also, I'm putting all those people into a bucket.
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Get, I call it, I called my audiences buckets.
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I have that bucket.
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I have a Honda accord bucket, a passport bucket.
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And from there I'm looking for people who are not just on my site looking for it, but through dynamic audiences, I'm able to look for other people who I don't know about who are doing that same behavior.
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So I'm not only retargeting, but I'm also seeking constantly seeking other audiences.
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And with automotive, you're really only selling in a 10 to 20 mile radius of your dealership.
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It's most 80, 90% of your sales are so hyper-local.
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So I'm just looking for that tight niche, People who are searching for the vehicles that I have.
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And I'm matching those behaviors to the actual physical inventory I have in stock.
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One thing that I've noticed over the years with, automotive sales is that.
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People are doing more and more research online.
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You know, there are so many great tools, not only pricing tools and whatnot, tools that allow you to configure automobiles.
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If you're going to buy something new or find the right pre-owned vehicle that you're looking for.
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And so rather than there being a static, advertisement or listing for that particular automobile, We've gone to a point where there are 30 pictures of a vehicle and a virtual tour of the inside of the vehicle or the engine compartment or whatnot.
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Have you talked a little bit about video before, have you really video transforming the automotive industry in terms of what a consumer expects to be able to find online?
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Yeah.
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if you look at a YouTube channels for car dealers, people aren't, they're not going to YouTube to watch a car dealership, video people, they don't want to read a car dealers blog.
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They don't want to watch a car dealer video.
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what we've been able to do is by we've removed most sales elements from all of our videos.
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So we do branded series and we have 10 franchises.
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So what we do are series that one's called ride along.
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one is called first drive and it's kinda almost like you're watching like a motor trend show, but it's our sales person, in the series right along taking the customer through the back roads of the city.
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I'm from Greensburg, you know, up and down the Hills around the bends, accelerating breaks, showing you the lane keeping assist.
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And we're most people don't watch videos.
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Yeah.
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Of a car dealer online.
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We have almost 18 million.
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organic views of our videos are online.
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If you look, I sent some links to earlier, in the show notes, but people watch our videos from all over the country and they're telling us, you know, that was implemented, instrumental in their decision to buy a Honda or buy an Acura.
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But locally people are coming in and asking for the sales person who did that video, they want to talk to Justin.
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They want to talk to Steve.
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And they want to meet that person who they've.
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They spent 26 minutes in a car with, before they even came to the dealership, they spend all that time researching online.
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They've been to the manufacturer sites, they go to YouTube and then they find this local video, which also ranks really well, organically in the search engine.
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you know, you'll see our listings and then you'll see our video listings almost all the time.
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but the customers are having these experiences with the sales team before even meeting the sales team.
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And then they want to meet the sales team when they get there.
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So it's really, it's help streamline that.
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That's something that we've been doing for a few years.
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But with COVID and everything happening, it's sped that up where people were more interested in the content that we're creating.
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It's interesting that you say that because we're recording this episode in the middle of July in 2020, I think it was just the other day.
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I saw an ad.
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I believe it was for Lexus.
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Where they were doing a FaceTime video with the sales person who was driving the car and somebody was asking them questions as they were driving the car.
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So what it sounds like you're talking about is not necessarily a live kind of FaceTime video, but a prerecorded video with a sales person actually taking that car for a drive.
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But this was something that you implemented before the crisis hit and it's been hugely popular.
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No crisis or no crisis.
00:16:09.230 --> 00:16:09.590
Oh yeah.
00:16:10.100 --> 00:16:10.309
Yeah.
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We've had a videographer full time.