If you are like many dealers nowadays, your auto marketing strategy is on life support, one breath faraway from the grave. You as the owner or manager are possibly terrified, wondering "What can I do to resurrect my selling efforts?!" "What’s changed?" And most importantly-"Where have all the business, ups and traffic gone?"

Well those are nice queries that I’ll cover now as part of the mandatory marketing CPR techniques you would like to bring health, life and vitality back to your auto business.

The "traditional model" of car dealer marketing is broken and no longer yields the results it once did. Call it the economy, call it the age of the web…call it whatever you want…however just understand times have changed.

The second drawback is that automotive marketing incest is rampant. Instead of testing the effectiveness of different marketing strategies for themselves, dealers simply copy what everyone else is doing… and that they too get stuck in this dead, outdated model as a result.

Therefore how are you going to reverse the code blue and turn things around this year? Think about the subsequent:

1. Concentrate on the WHY, not the WHERE of Advertising

Most dealers obsessively wonder, "Where should I place my ad?" or "What’s the most popular media right now?" And after they assume they’ve found it, they recklessly spend cash without knowing HOW or WHY that medium should work in the primary place. Till of course they don’t see the results they wanted and declare triumphantly, "______ does not work." Fill in the blank with whatever media you've got tried and were disappointed with. Then that media gets crossed off the list of potential choices and you're one step nearer to finding the magic media. Or so you think.

Well I’m here to tell you it’s not the media that’s the matter--- it’s the broken, ancient model of car dealership marketing.

You have got to prevent thinking about where to position your ads and instead concentrate on WHY you’re shopping for them in the first place. The sooner you progress beyond the WHERE and into the WHY, the quicker you’ll pump out better and cheaper campaigns than the magic media you’ve tried in the past.

2. Move Beyond Make, Model and Price

If you can't assume of something else to put in your ads other than make, model and price you're in SERIOUS want of intervention and very close to flat lining in business.

Why? Because everyone sells vehicles and features. If you give clients no other reason for selecting you outside of make, model and price, you will finish up right in the middle of the commodity market where logic dictates the sale and you’re left short changed at the end of the day.

So if you want to remove yourself from the commodities market and differentiate yourself from the competition, you’ll want to….

3. Begin Selling Outcomes

Instead of harping on the options of your products and services, focus on the precise reasons a prospect should select you over everybody else and what they have to achieve by doing business with your store. Declare to the world, "I am the obvious choice! Doing business with anyone else would be foolish."

After all this strategy is much more effective once you concentrate on and build your marketing around something the customer wants. Therefore how do you are doing that?

Ask yourself the following queries, "What are the big obstacles your customers face right now? How can you fix them? What do folks have to realize by operating with you? What do they lose by going with the guy down the street? What are your competitors missing? What do you do probably better than anyone else?" Package that up, tie it to a strong offer and you’re one step nearer to resurrecting your car business from the dead.

Another "lifesaving" distinction I’d like to make as you perform emergency CPR on your dealership this year is that marketing under the new model doesn’t require shopping for ad space merely to "get your name out there" or "build brand." That is ancient and tends to be a waste of money for smaller businesses.