RV Dealership Marketing Synergy

Maximize Your RV Dealership Marketing

There is so much complexity and ongoing change in digital marketing (relationships, capabilities, functionality, etc.) that understanding how this impacts your business is not a simple thing. The goal here is to present you with some useful information as well as a model to understand, and then advance, your marketing efforts for ultimate success (leads and sales).

Tremendous business advantages are obtained by dealerships who approach their overall marketing efforts in an integrated and holistic fashion. This applies to all aspects of marketing from vendors, applications and tools to methods and people. The obvious reasons for this rest in the efficiencies and benefits of synergistic labor, systems, engagement, information accessibility, lead generation, communication, data flow, etc.

Although this all may sound very theoretical and abstract it actually has practical implications for your dealership. Real-world examples include efficiencies with the integration of your DMS or inventory (data sitting on an island?) as well as your paid marketing campaigns (being expensive and returning little to no conversion?).

Three Marketing Domains

For the purposes of this article, we’ll examine the three marketing domains (owned, paid, and earned) and how optimizing the relationship between the three will maximize RV dealership leads and sales. We’ll review these three domains and then explain why the synergy is so critical for RV dealerships. Finally, we’ll cover what you can do to ensure you are moving in the right direction.

As mentioned above, when these three domains do not work well together then your entire marketing efforts will be hindered. This harmony extends beyond coordinating people, services, technologies, budget, campaigns, projects, etc.

Owned, Paid & Earned

Some have referred to the owned, paid, and earned domains as three legs on a stool. They work together as a critical part of the whole and all contribute to successful digital marketing.

The owned domain is comprised of any digital property that you can control and is unique to your brand. The foremost examples of owned media property are your website(s), blog site, youtube videos, and social channel content. Channels like social media and blogs are extensions of your website and brand as a whole. Developing content on your owned media advances your overall digital presence.

The paid domain is often a quasi guaranteed method to ensure presence. This is done through third-parties for such things as sponsorships or advertising. Paying to promote content increases exposure and can increase engagement. It can be leveraged to elevate the presence and impact your owned property or content. Paid media can be a great way to promote content in order to create earned media (see below), as well as direct traffic to owned media properties.

Depending upon the objective, paid promotion on social media sites like Facebook, Youtube, and Pinterest can be used to help boost your content or items for sale. Another way to gain more exposure for your content is to pay influencers for promotion. Their audience reach can help escalate your content or brand. Yet another approach is using retargeting/remarketing, Pay Per Click (PPC) and display ads. These can be a highly effective and more direct way to engage with those searching specifically for your offering(s), pointing them to your owned properties thus helping to increase traffic and/or conversions.

The third leg is the earned domain which concentrates on promotion. You can think of owned media as the destination and earned media as the vehicle that helps people get there. Earned media is essentially online word of mouth, usually seen in the form of ‘viral’ tendencies, mentions, shares, reposts, reviews, recommendations, or content picked up by 3rd party sites. Earned media is most effective in the form of highly developed organic rankings on search engines. combined with content development and distribution. For obvious reasons, the earned domain is seen by all as the more credible online content source.

Top search rankings and high-quality content are typically the biggest factors in building a strong earned domain. Rankings on the first page of the search engines place your owned media sites and content links in a position to receive higher engagement and shares, which is why a good SEO strategy is crucial. When it comes to brand content, interesting and informative content can come in all shapes and sizes. Whether it be a blog, infographic, video, press release, webinar or e-book the bottom line is that content has to be worthwhile in order to receive the value of earned media; which is why a great content strategy is also important. Keep this in mind because many fail to understand the key role that content plays in advancing their overall marketing strategy.

The Synergy of Unifying Owned, Paid, & Earned Dealership Marketing

In the RV vertical it is well established to utilize the RV marketplace RVUSA.com for marketing purposes. RVUSA drives a lot of web search traffic and your site can leverage that traffic by acquiring space for your company and inventory (paid). What’s makes RVUSA unique is that it is owned by NetSource Media (NSM), a full marketing agency services. By utilizing an RV Marketplace and a full-service marketing agency you obtain a completely integrated offering that focuses upon the synergy of your owned, paid and earned domains.

The integrated approach utilized by NetSource Media and RVUSA allows you to own a presence on a very well-trafficked website (over ~750k visitors a month) and connect your website seamlessly to your inventory and all other systems. Due to a highly developed, customized, and optimized inventory management system, your inventory is always visible in real-time to visitors of either RVUSA or your website. This is a very powerful capability that is not widely available in other industries on the Internet.

One thing to constantly keep in mind:  Are those you entrust your marketing efforts to helping you grow your business by leveraging these three domains.

RVUSA and NSM provide offerings to fully engage owned, paid and earned domains. No matter who your agency is, they should be providing the means for the three domains to work seamlessly. Yet, this is rarely the case as RV dealerships segregate their website from their directory marketplace from their inventory.  This disintegrated approach is in stark contrast to the benefits of our approach.

Here are a few examples of how WE do things:

• Well constructed PPC (paid) campaigns drive traffic to optimized landing pages (owned) that are designed to maximize form submissions.
• Use of RV Marketplace (owned) listings are tightly integrated with your other owned assets, such as your website.
• Persistent remarketing campaigns (paid) through Facebook or Google drive traffic back to your website (owned) but more importantly result in leads and sales.
• Blog content (owned) is widely distributed on social (owned) media to impact digital marketing presence in the form of website SEO, mindshare, and earned media.
• Development of high valued original content (owned) is used in various ways, such as through advertising (paid) and popup forms on your website (owned) to generate lead and build a marketing and sales pipeline.
• List building and marketing automation, in the form of email lead nurture and drip marketing campaigns (owned), is highly integrated into your content development (earned) strategy.

Executive Summary

By categorizing digital marketing into owned, paid, and earned media we can quickly understand and track the components. Having these three domains operate in unison can pay dividends, generating more leads and sales for your dealership. Achieving this goal requires a savvy marketing team, working on your behalf, focused on domain synergy. It is worth talking to us because NetSource Media is unique in providing proactive, integrated, full-featured marketing agency services under the same roof as a leading RV marketplace.