By Melanie Borden, VP of Marketing, Celebrity Motor Cars
Tom Maoli’s Celebrity Motor Cars is where I reside as the in-house VP of marketing and built and run our internal agency.
Celebrity Motor Cars is a luxury auto group in NJ/NY that consists of the following luxury brands: Lexus of Route 10, BMW of Springfield, Maserati of Morris County, Alfa Romeo of Morris County and Mercedes-Benz of Goldens Bridge. Since Tom has purchased the dealerships in 2011, we have won the following prestigious awards BMW Center of Excellence Award. Lexus is a 7x consecutive winner of Best in the East, as well as the defending champion of The Crown Jewel and the Circle of Excellence for two years running. Our Maserati and Alfa Romeo dealerships are both run completely by women leaders in sales, service, and finance. Maserati and Alfa Romeo of Morris County service have also tripled gross since becoming brand new points. Mercedes-Benz of Goldens Bridge continues to grow exponentially since our ownership took over in 2017 and won 2018 Mercedes-Benz Best of the Best – Golden Laurel.
As a newcomer to Celebrity Motor Cars and the automotive retail business in 2018, there were some major challenges that I faced coming into my new role after being a supplier/vendor in digital marketing for most of my career. I was creating a brand-new position which had never been established in the company. Our owner and COO understand the purchasing power of millennials and the universal digital shift that is happening in our industry, which is why in my department we have a significant focus on digital marketing and public relations.
Here is What I Have Found in My Journey So Far:
Your competition is doing it. The NJ/NY metro area is fiercely competitive. There are dealerships in and out of our PMA constantly conquesting our stores in every form of media, mainly in digital marketing (search, display, social, SEO, etc). In our meetings with the manufacturer, I see first-hand the numbers on the pump in – pump out report(s), who is pulling customers from our market and how we are doing as a store(s) in our market(s) with defending our market share. When I joined Celebrity the percentage of market share our competitors had was absolutely reflected online in the searches that I did for both paid and organic, as well as social media. Traditional media such as television and radio tell a similar story, if one of our competitors is heavy on a local radio station in our area, they are most likely showing up on the OEM report. We have had tremendous success recently in saturating our dealerships local presence and “holding” market share in our PMA, or primary market area.
You need to have marketing consistency across every channel. One of the biggest challenges dealers have today and have had for years, is lacking consistency across the board on all forms of marketing media and telling the public about any awards you received. It’s a very basic concept that we all still seem to miss in the daily grind.
As a dealership are you using the same message on all forms of media? This includes sales messaging, service messaging, awards, events, socially conscious awareness, etc. Are you tying it to social media (both paid and organic) and is it on your website? Are all of the socially conscious efforts your dealership is involved with, on your website and aligned with your social media – organic and paid? Having great partners at your local TV stations, radio stations, website vendors, and digital advertising companies all help this come together to achieve success.
HUGE offsite SEO benefits. One of the unknown facts of press releases are the SEO benefits you will reap from them. Not only can you target your audience, but you can get picked up by other huge publications, in or out of the automotive industry resulting in additional search results. We use PR Newswire for all our releases and any local newspapers that syndicate online. All the targeting strategies for your releases are an essential part of your social media and SEO efforts. Over time, the releases you publish will come up in the SERP and add a new flavor to your business’s online presence.
There is an old saying that I recently learned, “Advertising is what you pay for; publicity is what you pray for.” The takeaway is you have amazing local resources at your fingertips. Public relations in 2019 helps you today – across all marketing. Your OEM reporting is an incredible resource for you and is a guideline for your strategy – past, present, and future. Although from time to time I struggle with the benefit of tracking print and traditional media in 2019; newspapers, media companies are beneficial to you and will help you maximize your PR and online presence.
About the Author
Melanie Borden, a Fashion Institute of Technology graduate, has spent the majority of her 14+ year marketing career in the automotive tech industry. Melanie has worked in various atmospheres from social media startups to a public tech company in consulting, marketing, and business development roles. Presently, she is the VP of marketing for Tom Maoli’s Celebrity Motor Cars auto group where she develops and implements all facets of the marketing strategy and built the in-house advertising agency.