Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you have probably heard about artificial intelligence (AI) platforms such as ChatGPT, Bing Chat, Google’s Gemini and more.  These platforms have been taking the world by storm (or at least the hype has). You think of a task you want done, and AI could probably help. Shoot, there are even AI platforms now that do consulting for lawyers after a lawyer got caught using ChatGPT to write a legal brief.  Gone are the days of humans thinking for themselves.  Or is it? Getting Over (Creative) Writer’s Block Have you ever been stuck on writing a pa ..read more

Last year, I decided that it was time to start looking for a replacement for my 2009 Honda Pilot. (I tend to hold onto vehicles for a long time, as more people are doing lately.) With this decision, I now had to decide what I wanted in my next vehicle. So, naturally, I turned to the internet to begin my search. I fit in with the majority of car buyers who use the internet to find their next vehicle. Think With Google says 92% of car buyers research vehicles online before they buy. And while your dealership may not care if you show up for searches like “2023 honda pilot vs 2023 subaru ascent ..read more

Any agency will tell you that search engine optimization (SEO) is important for your website. (We spend plenty of time on it here at 9 Clouds.)  Tackling the task of optimizing SEO for your automotive dealership is a large feat. We know that time is money, but prioritizing your effort to the most important SEO tasks can be overwhelming. Where do you even start? Think of all your SEO tasks like a traditional holiday meal.  Backlinking is the side dish to the main course of your whole SEO menu. And dealerships owning more than one store have the advantage: they can backlink their own w ..read more

You want your business to be visible and accessible for potential customers — whether you’re a small, mom-and-pop shop or a large automotive dealer with multiple brands and rooftops.  As a business owner or manager, engaging customers online and spreading the word about how great the business and its products are is a top priority. People need to know where your store is, how they can contact you, and what other customers have said in reviews.   In our experience, there’s one (free) tool that is often under-utilized for automotive dealers and other businesses: Google Business Pr ..read more

Car dealerships face unique challenges when it comes to creating and managing effective ads for each individual vehicle in the dealership’s inventory feed.  When it comes to shopping for vehicles, people just want to see the inventory. In fact, inventory-based ads regularly receive more than twice as many clicks as ads featuring non-inventory content.  At 9 Clouds, we offer a solution that can streamline this process and make advertising more efficient: using your car dealership’s inventory feed to drive your advertising strategy.  Here’s how you can use your inventory feed to p ..read more

At the end of the day, we know the main goal of a car dealership is to sell cars.  But since the car-buying process is more than just the purchase, your marketing efforts need to be able to measure those other, more important conversions — such as visits to your site and test-drive form submissions.  Beyond VDP Views: Switching to Event-Based Goals in GA4 That’s where event-based goals in Google Analytics (now known as GA4) can come in and help provide great insight for your dealership! In GA4, all conversions are counted as events, and you are in charge of creating events for differ ..read more

Stuck on what kind of emails to send to your auto clients, or what to say in those emails?  We’ve been working with automotive dealerships for years and have a few suggestions you can use directly or just use as a starting point. (Plus, access our free download below for even more!) Our Top 3 Email Templates Here are our top three favorite email ideas and an example of how each of those would look. Of course, you’ll want to customize the text for your specific audience, but use these templates as jumping-off points. 1. The New Lead Email When contacting a new lead, your sales team might r ..read more

Nineteen years before Al Gore allegedly created the internet, Ray Tomlinson sent the world’s first email message (to himself) in 1971. Email predates Windows, Apple and the entire web itself. Today, marketing emails are an essential tool for any industry’s marketing strategy. After more than five decades of having the technology, the world sends billions of emails every day. Although this might seem like a firehose of communication, it’s still easy for businesses to stand out and provide value in the inbox. Here in the age of social media, email is the most private and personable medium for de ..read more

Okay, so you have an email message you want to send out or contacts in a CRM (customer relationship management) ready to be approached with your services. That’s great!  But did you know there are certain practices to follow to keep your emails from getting marked as “spam”? Taking advantage of access to someone’s email inbox can only work if you actually make it to their inbox.  And showing up in the inbox is just the first step. You also want to make the best use of your time and money by keeping unsubscribes on your emails low.  Emails marked as spam or with high unsubscribe ..read more

More than 30% of the world’s population is on Facebook and Instagram. (That’s more than two and a half billion people.)  Users also spend an average of 11.7 hours per month alone on Instagram. Multiply that by 12, and you roughly get a yearly amount of 140.5 hours. To put that into perspective, the yearly time users spend on Instagram is equivalent to watching the first Avatar movie 52 times in one year. I like James Cameron, but there is no way I am watching that movie once a week for a whole year!   This is an opportunity business owners shouldn’t ignore. Facebook and Instagra ..read more