The auto industry is buzzing since yesterday when GM announced that CEO Ed Whitacre would be stepping down effective September 1, 2010.  A few weeks ago resident blogger, Bob Harwood posted a story on GM purchasing Americredit and the effects that could have.

What are your thoughts on this?

UPDATE: GM filed their IPO paperwork, as expected, on August 18th. Definitely keeping the industry on their toes…

Today we continue to highlight our account executives here at Carloan.com and we kick off week two with Mike Gray, our account executive who has been with the company, in various roles, since 2004.

Mike, who was raised in California and Tennessee, moved to Virginia in 1990 and has been here since. Mike has brought many successes to Carloan.com with the help of the other Special Finance Lead Consultants and we hope that you enjoy getting to know him.

What is your role at IFMG?
Regional Account Executive.

What does your role entail?
I am tasked with developing new business and consulting with existing customers to make them successful and help them “SELL MORE CARS”.

What do you enjoy most about your role?
Everyday is new and different and my challenges change daily. I believe I get the most enjoyment from helping a struggling dealer become successful with our program.

Are you currently working on a new project and if so what is it?
My current project is probably the same as the other account executives…finding banks that are buying deep and sharing those banks with our dealers. We interact with many dealers on a daily basis and it is my project to share success stories with other dealers. This project has not changed and it never will.

What do you do for fun?
Hanging out with my kids, fishing, golfing and playing music.

What is something that no one would ever know about you?
The past is in the past…..I try to get all I can get out of today.

Mike currently lives in Richmond with his wife of 12 years, daughter, son, 20 fish, and a dog. His children’s hobbies are his own and he enjoys ice hockey, football, gymnastics, I-Carly, and video games.

If you’ve ever called our office, you’ve heard the distinctive voice say “Your goal is our mission…SELL MORE CARS!™”. That statement has never been more accurate, and we have spent countless hours looking at our products and services to figure out how we can do an even better job of fulfilling that mission for car dealers.

Recently, our marketing folks had a “eureka” moment. Why rack our brains trying to create the next silver bullet? We already have a suite of products that pretty much runs the gamut to help the Second Chance department be successful, so let’s just find a way to make them all work well together. The result is our new SELL MORE CARS!® System.

I’ve never used this space to sell products, and I’m not going to start now. But I do encourage you to take a look at what our marketing folks came up with. The new system really creates an easy flow through the process for both the consumer and the finance manager. Under this new program we:

• Do the online marketing to capture the auto finance applications
• Validate those auto finance leads to make sure that they are real people who actually want to buy a car
• Engage those car buyers and allow them to set their own appointment to come see our local dealer
• Train the dealership staff in best practices for getting appointments in the door
• Provide a free ILM to manage the traffic
• Buy the deal

I’ve looked at it from every angle, and I’m not sure what else we can do to make things easier. I’ve told many dealers over the years that there is no silver bullet and that success in Special Finance takes hard work.

I still believe that, but this might be as close to that silver bullet as you’re gonna get.

Today we begin a series introducing our Carloan.com Account Executives here at Interactive Financial Marketing Group.  We like to refer to them as our “Special Finance Lead Consultants”.  The Team is responsible for helping dealers Sell More Cars!™ by leveraging their 85+ years of experience in auto retail, finance, and operations.  Join us weekly as we introduce a new Team member with you. We believe this Team is wonderful and we hope you enjoy getting to know more about them.

We kick off this spotlight series with Mark Fernandez.  Mark is a native of New York who has been in Richmond since 2003.  Before coming to IFMG Mark had worked for the New York Stock Exchange for 8 years.

How long have you been with Carloan.com?
I was with IFMG for four years before opening my own business.  I’ve been back now for 2 months.

What is your role?
I am an Account Executive/Manager for fifteen states.  I serve Nevada, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Louisiana, Alabama, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island, and Hawaii.

What does your role entail?
I solicit new business in markets that can produce leads for car dealerships. I train those dealerships how to work our process and I manage business by forming long term relationships with my clients.  I’m invested in their success every step of the way.

What do you enjoy most about your role?
The sale and the partnerships I create; seeing my customers have success.

Are you currently working on a new project and if so what is it?
I am giving my house a siding makeover.

What do you do for fun?
I enjoy playing basketball,watching movies and recording music. In addition to recording music I am also a collector. Another hobby of mine, and my family, is traveling. We have been all over in the past ten years.

What is something that no one would ever know about you?
That I was born in Jamaica.

Mark resides in Richmond with his wife of 10 years and their 6 children. In addition to Carloan.com employment Mark owns a record store called 106 & Mark (also called ‘The Throwback King‘) in the area.

Contacting Mark Fernandez:
804-521-8579 (Direct)
804-521-8600 (Fax)
mark@carloan.com

We’re proud of the relationships with our dealers.  We have many who have worked with us for years and it’s been great to watch their business grow.  This post kicks off a new series about our Featured Carloan.com Dealers; dealers who are using auto finance leads successfully to SELL MORE CARS!®

The first time out, we’d like to introduce you to our dealer partner Joe DiBiasio and his two stores in Massachusetts, AutoDrive1.  In the three years that have passed since Joe started working with us, he has built his business around using Carloan.com leads and our internet lead management (ILM) system, DOLLAR.  And no wonder – they’ve been closing 15% of the auto finance leads they’ve received from us and have seen an ROI of nearly 20:1.

Joe himself puts it best: “They really care about my business. And for the dealer that knows how to handle these leads, Carloan.com is the best to do business with. They truly turn leads into money – it’s the best form of advertising you could do in our business.”

Thanks Joe! And congratulations on your phenomenal success!

You can read more about it in our Carloan.com Client Success Story, available here.

If you’re reading this, you clearly have some interest in the car business, and spend some time online, so you have no doubt already stumbled over the news that GM has purchased AmeriCredit. Let’s go one step further and assume that since you’re reading a blog on Carloanco.com that you probably have at least a passing involvement in Special Finance, which probably has left you wondering if this acquisition is a good thing for sub-prime or not. Will GM turn AmeriCredit into the new GMAC, only servicing GM dealers and primarily looking for A paper, or will service the whole gamut, possibly spinning off a sub-prime division like the old Nuvell? My guess is neither of these will happen.

At this point I don’t know any more than you do, since this purchase was just announced today, but the landscape seems to lend itself to AmeriCredit sticking with what they’re good at, at least for a while. GM seems to have carved out a comfortable relationship with Ally Financial to service their prime and super prime paper, so why not bring on AmeriCredit with the intent of allowing them to continue to service the customers upon which they have built their business? I think that AmeriCredit (or whatever they end up being named) will continue to be a higher end sub-prime bank, giving a lot of dealers a way to go when a 560 walks into their showroom and wants to buy a new car.

My real question is will AmeriCredit continue to service non-GM dealers? My guess is that they won’t sign any new business from outside of the GM family, but if you’re already in and have a performing portfolio you’re probably OK. Things will no doubt be up in the air for a while, but AmeriCredit has been pretty successful lately with the dealers with whom they currently do business, so it seems like a no brainer to keep doing business with those folks long term. If you aren’t a GM dealer and want to keep AmeriCredit as a lender, it is probably worth taking a little time this week to see how your portfolio is performing, and to shoot them an extra deal or two that you might have put elsewhere.

Last time I was here, I wrote about the importance of putting a plan in place before you jump into social media marketing for your dealership. Now that you have that plan in place, let’s take a look at some ways you can supplement those activities with your dealership website.

A great place to begin is with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the primary underlying principle, keywords.

First off, what is SEO?

Any online marketing website worth its salt is going to start out by talking about SEO. These are the “rules” you can use to structure and tweak your dealership website in order to make it appear near the top of search results for any of the top search engines.

I say “rules” because to quote Captain Barbossa: “they’re really more guidelines than rules.”  They’re fluid, and you have to keep up with the changes — SEO is never really complete.

There are several websites out there that can help you with that, and my favorite is Hubspot. They make their money from helping people “Get Found” online using their software, but they are also a great resource for getting a general grasp on the concepts behind SEO and its parent concept, Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Full disclosure: we’re not clients. I just like their content because they know what they’re doing.

What’s great about these two acronyms – SEO and SEM -  is that they represent a way to get some free advertising  for your dealership if you’re willing to put in the time. Many dealers outsource this activity when they outsource their website development – which means it’s technically no longer “free” -  but this is an activity you can do in-house. It can be spectacularly time-consuming to do it correctly and stay on top of it, but it can be done.

If  you don’t have a website yet and you’re interested in building one, check out our sister companies at Dominion Dealer Solutions. They’ve got you covered, up to and including SEO.

So where do keywords come in?

Keywords are important because they are what make your website visible to the car buyers you’re trying to reach when they’re using search engines on the web.

Take for example our auto finance lead generation site, Carloan.com. Because of the way the site was built and the density of the auto-finance-related keywords on it, a Google search for “car loan” in most parts of the country will bring it up first in the organic search results. This is great because consumers are more likely to trust the organic search results than the paid placements that line the top and the right side of the results page.

Again, it can take a lot of work to get the mix just right on your own, but it can be done.

How do I find the keywords for my site?

Depending on what your strategy is (again, see my previous post), you’ll identify keywords based on geography, your business focus, even your lot inventory to bring more people in to your website via a web search.

For example, if you’re the truck specialist in your area, focus on highlighting the makes and models that you know are popular on your lot. Emphasize your location to make sure that folks searching for “Ford F-150 in Alpharetta, GA” find your website first.

Another way to tackle it is to check out your local competitors’ websites to see how they’re featuring their inventory. If you’ve got someone who’s coming in ahead of you in search results for your area, definitely check them out.

All web browsers have a “View Source” capability where you can look under the hood and see what keywords they’re using. Copying and pasting theirs won’t get you to the top of the results, but you can at least see what’s working for them.

You can also create a Google account and use their Webmaster Tools to find ways to tweak and update your site to be more competitive on the search results pages and drive more traffic to your store. Go to Hubspot and search for “keywords” for their tips on finding and using keywords.

Believe me, it’s worth checking out.

It’s not enough to just have a dealership site anymore, you have to put some thought into how it’s structured, what it focuses on and how it brings in web traffic that you can turn into lot traffic. Taking a good look at what keywords your site uses is a great place to start.