Marketing

  • Email Marketing: Five requirements for CAN SPAM compliance

    Tuesday, February 14, 2017 | Dave Kopf

    NO ONE LIKES to see a tsunami of spam messages in their inboxes. Back in 2003, spam got to be such a problem that the federal government passed the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN SPAM) Act. CAN SPAM, as a result, is set of laws that govern how businesses send their marketing emails.

    Businesses large and small must comply with CAN SPAM – including your dealership. That said, you shouldn’t think of CAN SPAM as some kind of hassle or unnecessary set of capricious laws invented to bog down your business. If anything, they outline a set of solid business practices that will help you reinforce your dealership’s reputation for good service and for being a reliable, responsible member of the local community, as opposed to a shady operation. Bottom line? You want your email marketing efforts to conform to CAN SPAM.

    If the positive aspects of CAN SPAM aren’t clear enough, know that there are fines attached to CAN SPAM violations. The Federal Trade Commission, which administers CAN SPAM, can fine each separate email that violates the law up to $16,000 — and that can add up very quickly.

     

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  • Online Marketing: Fundamentals, expectations, and using the tools

    Thursday, February 9, 2017 | Mary Green

    IF YOU’RE running a powersports retail business, you’re a success-oriented individual. You might have started in the business because you love to ride or wrench, but at the end of the day, you want to see your business grow and flourish.

    Online marketing, properly executed, is a powerful weapon you can use to make that happen. But if you’re not careful, you can fall into any number of traps – over-aggressive expectations, failure to understand your customer base and prospect markets, and focusing on delivery instead of creating a valuable marketing message (hint: content is king) are just three of them. These traps cost you time and money.

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  • Online Marketing: The Metrics Lexicon

    Thursday, February 9, 2017 | Dave Kopf

    “WHAT GETS MEASURED, GETS MANAGED.” That timeless business axiom might have some solid mileage on it, but it couldn’t be more applicable to today’s online marketing environment.

    Marketing online provides powersports Dealers with a powerful environment for tracking the performance of their marketing and advertising efforts . Where you might guess at how well a print ad in a local paper performs, with online advertising you can get solid numbers. With that information, you can start identifying what marketing efforts work; which ones don’t; what campaigns, messages and techniques can be improved; and what ideas need to get binned.

    The level of control Dealers have over their online marketing efforts is pretty revolutionary. In fact, the metrics for measuring online marketing performance have become so nuanced, that it’s not surprising for any local business owner to feel awash in a sea of numbers. You can measure social media performance, email performance and search engine metrics, and that’s just the beginning.

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  • Online Marketing: The importance of a good impression

    Thursday, February 9, 2017 | Dave Kopf

    WE ALL LEARN about the importance of a first impression, but in marketing it’s all about making the most impressions. If you understand this truism, you will constantly work to generate as many impressions as you can for your branding and marketing messages.

    So, what is an impression? Before we answer that, let’s first check our assumptions about advertising. Often, many businesses expect a direct correlation between advertising and sales, but the process is not that simple. If we had to define advertising with one word, that word would be awareness. Advertising is a form of marketing communications designed to build brand or product awareness. Consider advertising a broad net, rather than a rod and reel.

    Working under that definition, we can start to talk about impressions, why they are important, and how the social media marketing age is responding to it.

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  • Online Marketing: Segmentation (and why you put customers into groups)

    Thursday, February 9, 2017 | Dave Kopf

    CUSTOMERS AREN’T UNIFORM. The people coming to your dealership for rides, parts, accessories, gear and service represent a diverse group of people who possess a wide variety of ages, incomes, interests, preferences and needs.

    Does your marketing reflect that?

    For generations, businesses advertised in a scatter-shot fashion, running advertising across a variety of broad-reach media such as print, radio and television, and using advertising appeals and messaging that were equally broad. Expensive direct mail efforts were about as targeted as marketing could get.

    Enter online marketing. Regardless of the online venue — advertising, social media, email — you can precisely pinpoint customers and give them the most relevant marketing messages. This lets you distribute emails with subject lines and pre-headers that appeal to specific customer groups. This lets you target your online advertising to specific groups. This helps you create promotions and campaigns to are highly specific to niches within your customers base.

    Hold on.

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  • Online Marketing: Content is king. Here’s how to get started

    Thursday, February 9, 2017 | Dave Kopf

    IN TODAY’S ONLINE MARKETING environment, if you’re not providing content, you’re failing to reach your audience in a way that will resonate with them and affirm your relationship with those customers. And if you have close competition that wields social media in savvy fashion, you’re likely to be slipping behind those competitions — and the gap is widening. It’s time to close that gap and slip past to take the lead.

    Content marketing is not a new concept. In fact, it predates social media and even online marketing. In basic terms, content marketing means providing your target market with marketing communications messages that provide them with value. If you’ve sent out an informational flyer that did more than just “sell” to your market, you’re a content marketer.

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  • Online Marketing: Manage your expectations, and improve performance

    Thursday, February 9, 2017 | Dave Kopf

    ENTREPRENEURS, especially powersports Dealers, are success-oriented individuals. You might have started a powersports business because you love to ride or wrench, but at the end of the day, you want to see your business grow and flourish.

    Online marketing can look like “the secret weapon” that will make that happen. But if you’re not careful, you can fall into a trap, and that trap is called Over-Aggressive Expectations.

    We all read the success stories about small business professionals who create online businesses that grow faster than kudzu, thanks to brilliant online marketing. But it’s important to remember that for everything that goes viral, there are far more efforts that grow to fruition over time. As the saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and that’s particularly true for online marketing. Chances are, as a Dealer, you will constantly work to build your email marketing lists and your social media followings, and you will be working regularly to identify new online advertising venues.

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  • NFL training camp boosts visibility for local Kawasaki dealer

    Thursday, August 14, 2014 | Beth Dolgner

    CORTLAND, N.Y. – This town in central New York received a big boost in summer tourism in 2009, when the New York Jets moved their training camp here. Since then, the NFL team has been utilizing UTVs from CNY Power Sports during their pre-season prep.

    For 2014, Jets management and grounds staff rented 38 Kawasaki Mules to get them around their temporary home on the State University of New York (SUNY) Cortland campus.

     

    For CNY Power Sports, the marketing opportunity is as important as the revenue.

     

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  • 5 Questions: Jim Rasmus and Jennifer Robison

    Thursday, July 1, 2010 | admin

    Ed note: The following is the full transcript from the 5 Questions story in the July 2010 issue of Dealernews.

    If you’ve ever looked for some merchandising or display help, you’ve most likely stumbled upon the names of retail gurus Jim Rasmus and Jennifer Robison. Below, Rasmus, of Retail Design Associates and Robison, Tucker Rocky’s national retail specialist, wax poetic on fixtures, challenges and going green.

     

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