As business owners, marketing geniuses and salespeople, we all want to tell you about ourselves.  We want you to visit our website, read our blog, “friend” us on facebook and follow our Twitter feeds on your iPhone.  I think we all know that the marketing game has changed and social networking tools are here to stay.  Many of our dealers now have facebook pages and twitter accounts that we maintain for them as part of our “Attract” strategy and they can be very effective for connecting your store to a new audience.  But how to you get people to follow you or be your facebook “friend” or even know about your last blog post if you don’t tell them about it? 

There is a solution staring you in the face.  It’s been there all along and it’s plain, old, low tech, email.

We knew our traffic grew and grew every month, after all it’s part of our job to help dealer’s increase their overall traffic (not to mention we have the monthly bandwidth invoices to prove it) but a careful analysis of our overall traffic revealed that our customer get A LOT of traffic. It turns out that our customers, combined, are seeing more than 2,000,000 Page Views and over 300,000 Unique Visitors every month.

Strong Sales and Operations Leader takes the Reins at MyRVAdvantage.

Louisville, October 6th 2009: MyRVAdvantage announced today that Tom Mattes has been promoted to Vice President of Sales. “Tom has been a leading force within the MyRVAdvantage team; effectively working with dealers to develop our new performance based programs and solutions while ensuring that the company delivered on sales promises, met deadlines and generated results for our customers” said Paul O’Daniel, President of MyRVAdvantage “We’re excited to see Tom take over the entire Sales and Account Management Operations and expect even bigger things in the future”

Virtual Business Development Delivers Up To 20% Closing Ratio on Pre-qualified Leads.

Louisville, September 30, 2009: MyRVAdvantage announced today that is has refocused its business as a turnkey virtual Business Development Center for dealers delivering pre-qualified leads on a pay-for-performance basis. “We began implementing a fundamental shift in our business model about a year ago,” said Steven Webster, VP of Product Development & Marketing for MyRVAdvantage. “Our Web and CRM solutions have always been among the best in the industry but in the past they could seem too complex and technical to our customers. We realized that at the end of the day dealers care about one thing – more sales. We know that ninety percent of real buyers visit the Web first so MyRVAdvantage became a dealer’s virtual Business Development Center. We create traffic and convert visitors into qualified leads, we attract new customers, engage and pre-qualify them and send dealers leads that are ready to buy today. Then we cultivate the rest so they’re ready to buy tomorrow. We simplified our approach and aligned ourselves with our customer’s goals - changing not only what we deliver, but how dealers pay for it.”

Before we can elaborate on this very important question, let's first define the word "prospect." A prospect is a suspect that has engaged with you in some way, whether it be an action taken on a web visit, a phone inquiry, etc. Your goal in this stage is to qualify this prospect to the point that you know the decision-maker and you have identified an interest level in your products and/or services. But it's more than that really.

A few years ago, many of our customers scoffed at those online RV wholesalers who sold “paper units” only on order, often shipping directly from the factory to the consumer at markups that made it very difficult to compete with on the open market.  Then, a couple of years ago, one of those dealers became the largest volume dealer for a major manufacturer.  Today with the continued tightening of floor plan financing, the evaporation of available used inventory and the public’s increasing comfort in ordering online – some of our customer are reconsidering the is this model or at least a hybrid version of it. Could this be the future of the RV dealership?

MyRVAdvantage will be attending the 2009 Recreation Vehicles Dealer’s Association International Convention in Las Vegas October 6th – 9th.  Stop by and see how MyRVAdvantage customers are selling more RVs by leveraging our performance based solutions everyday. 

A few of our dealers are just beginning to experiment with social media sites like facebook and twitter.  Since we launched our new website a few of them noticed our twitter feed that we display on the homepage of myrvadvantage.com.  Quite frankly we were surprised anyone noticed – but good catch!  This is a new module that allows you to connect your website to your twitter account and display the last few posts right on your homepage (or any other page on your site).

Everyone is doing it;  Celebrities, news anchors, athletes and teens.  And guess what – more and more of your customers are doing it too.  What are they doing?  Tweeting on Twitter of course!  Now you may have been living under a fifth wheel lately and you might not know what Twitter actually is, how it works and what it has to do (if anything) with selling units on your lot.  We’re here to help.  This is the first in a series of articles will explain what Twitter is, how it’s used and how some dealers are already using it to market their dealerships.  We’ll also include some real world examples along with some do’s and don’t to keep you on track.

The SEO (Search Engine Optimization) engine built into the MyRVAdvantage web platform is designed to deliver terrific search engine rankings right “out of the box”.  By using our “built in” SEO Engine we’ve seen our dealer’s rankings improve within weeks of switching platforms or targeting specific keywords, increasing relevant traffic and increasing the leads generated from their website. 

Well, we’ve been able to make this even better with our latest release of the Inventory Showroom module, ensuring that not only the dealer’s web pages and content get found and properly indexed on search engines, but their inventory does too.