Yago Paramo

Automotive Entrepreneur

BZ Results Websites – remember them?

image1 (5)Remember those BZ Results websites (they were acquired by ADP in 2006)? If you don’t I’ll tell you: Those looked good. Mainly flash based, they appealed to the most dangerous word in the automotive industry: “I like that” (rather than “the data shows we should use this one instead”). Those guys made money.

They are long gone but flash survived all the way to just until about now.

By now some people in the car business have stopped reading this and have moved on to the next piece of technology data that they will consume on the Internet and that will guide future marketing decisions without any depth of understanding on the subject. You see the problem is not that flash was bad but that it took the total death of a system for people to stop “liking it”. There was little understanding on what did or didn’t do.

Today despite lots of industry leaders talking about real actionable items (which believe me, is a better deal than when anyone could say anything and there was no fact checking), dealers remain stuck on their technology choices because they either “like it” or they don’t.

For example today dealers continue not to use video for marketing purposes; every time we bring up the video conversation on a meeting we quickly downgrade from “doing something” to everyone’s opinion on how they need to be done–from subject to duration to format–but little actionable decisions.

Most of the time dealers hate “stitched videos”. I do too. But if that is all I have now, that is my start. Ot is the beginning of the conversation. That could be my baseline to have a file that I can learn to share, build social ads with it, and a system to start experimenting with “real” formats. Just start something.

If you want to know a little bit more about types of videos (for BDC quotes, walks rounds, format, duration, etc) you can simply look at what Elise Kephart or Andrew Myers do, whether you “like” them or now, its a start. They share so much on social media that you don’t even have to like them (although they are both very likable), just check what they do.

Videos are merging with content as a relevant piece of your website’s SEO (text + video). Videos are an absolute must for social media advertising. I’m sorry to tell you that this is not covered by the $300/month automated social media campaigns that came out of a cereal box. My friend Gary May knows about social media advertising, he can guide you (he is worth a lot more than $300 and he knows it).

Flash’s world is not the only one changing. This video craze that you think may take all your energy to understand is not the only thing changing, check out Google’s Youtube world changing; social media is overtaking video:

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/07/09/technology/facebook-video-stars.html

Btw since we are talking about video; check out one of our latest websites with a full on video player (works on mobile too):www.larsondodge.com You have to give a man the chance to show you his best work. Just in case, the video was purchased from the OEM gallery.

Video is not just merging into social media like a wildfire but those two are also merging with mobile faster than we can talk about it: it has already happened.

Any video + content + social must absolutely have a mobile interest at its core and this is very funny because again this life example the dying flash is giving us comes into play again. For every 10 meetings I have, 9 we talk about the weekly banners with the same OEM offer we all have, and 1 we talk about a mobile strategy. As a matter of fact we could not bring mobile into the conversation and dealers will shake my hand and let me go home as if our meeting had been a success.

Remember:

Flash = dead.

Video + content + social + mobile = alive.

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