I have to hand it to the street fighting tactics of Yamaha ATV dealers. These guys have shown true grit in the age of the Internet. A lot of people don't know this but ATV and motorsports are actually very aggressive markets. There are a lot of competitors out there who are trying to get to the top of the search engine heap. The competition is so fierce in fact that in a typical market there can be as much as 15,000,000 competitive pages all vying for the top spots. This means that a lot of Yamaha ATV parts dealers are doing everything possible to get to the top positions. Sometimes they pay for it. Sometimes they create viral web videos and sometimes they do a lot of praying.
But the point of this popularity game is that the ATV market is really setting a great example. A lot of auto dealerships could really benefit from this type of aggressive online marketing. The main reason why the auto dealers should take on this type of marketing is because it is so successful. When you think about terms of bandwidth, web space, server space, viral capacity and holding a captive audience the choice is obvious. Newspapers cannot offer this type of flexibility and either can printed coupons that you get in your mailbox. The web is a free floating life raft for many companies and in a lot of cases it is saving them.
The challenge happened 18 months ago when newspapers started to fall apart. Running full page ads no longer became an option for many dealerships. Many auto dealerships do not have a real option to run advertisements in the paper because of budgets. So they will rely on doing radio and television spots to get attention. This becomes a difficult situation when you start running out of media venues - namely newspapers. Metro Detroit has lost several newspapers including the Ann Arbor News and the Eccentric. There are also mergers that have been happening all across the country in the last two years.
One thing that the ATV web sites have done correctly is optimize their web sites fully and create smart pay per click campaigns. Some of the more creative ATV dealers have figured out a way to scrap the PPC model entirely and deal strictly with organic tactics. This enables web sites to stay on the top of the search engines without added expense. If the auto dealers are going to partake in this type of promotion now is the time. There has been a lot of apprehension in recent months. But actually the online environment has never been better. Many auto dealerships could learn a lot from the progress that ATV dealers have made.
