Visualize this scene and see if it’s familiar. You’re at your desk, determined but worn… Determined to grow your store but worn out from drowning in a deafening sea of what has become white noise. Your inbox is filled with reports; some say everything is great! Others say the sky is falling… The news is saying tariffs could price consumers out of the market and stocks are in trouble. You change the channel, and the next station says consumer confidence is at an all-time high. TV off… You get texted an article — AI is replacing search marketing and website traffic, and it’s coming for everyone’s job next… Now what?!
The swell of conflicting information has you wishing we could go back ten or twenty years in the car business. Things were simpler — and they can be again. I’m here to show you just how much of this white noise paralysis is a mind-over-matter issue and what you can do to cut through the noise to identify what’s driving sales and profitability and what’s not.
False Alarms?
Whether it’s the news, vendors, LinkedIn or your 20 group, countless echo chambers suggest the next crisis is around the corner. Some say it’s already here, and we’ve been hearing this pretty much nonstop since COVID. Has it been true? Sure, there has been very real volatility over the last five years, but what are things actually like right now?
According to the most recent J.D. Power report as of this writing, year over year retail sales volume is up 15%. PVR is up 19% in the same window of time. That means there are more cars being sold, and dealers are making more money on average — almost 22% more money than the same time last year. The data proves that these are not the scary days everyone seems to be saying they are, yet I’m seeing decision paralysis — or rash decision-making — at COVID-era levels.
One dealer group on the West Coast turned down new-car allocation amidst the spike in tariff fears. They didn’t want to get saddled with inventory during what they assumed would be a major downturn in consumer purchasing. Fast forward five minutes and tariff impacts were blunted ahead of a record month in the industry. The result? Their reaction to all the noise cost them dearly in market share in a way that will have implications for years to come, as many of those consumers who bought elsewhere will not return to this group’s customer base.
Another dealer group in the Midwest told me they’re cutting budgets and holding off on making new marketing commitments. I asked why and was told things are tight these days. I looked at their CRM data to see how bad things were and I found their volumes and profit were steady. Their trepidation was 100% a manifestation of the bad news white noise with no basis in reality.
These patterns repeat again and again, and the opportunity cost is huge. In my August 2024 AutoSuccess feature, I highlighted Federal Reserve data that supported a forecast of at least a 10% YoY market increase. I predicted that the aggressive 20% of dealers would reap 80% of those returns. The market forecast proved accurate, and my prediction is playing out right now, with the successful minority tuning out the white noise to avoid decision paralysis.
Stunned by Noise
The problem is that all this doom and gloom… All these buzzwords and new concepts… All the noise and mental gymnastics are getting in the way of clear and audible signals we can understand. This leads to inaction, not driven by cowardice but simply because you don’t have enough clear information to make an informed decision. The problem is that not deciding is still a decision, and it can be a costly one when the market is strong — contrary to what the fearmongers would tell you — and there’s money to be made.
If we go back ten years, things were simple. There was TV, radio, print, SEO, paid search, third parties and basically one social media platform with Facebook. These drove traffic to your showroom or your website, which had forms, a phone number, and maybe chat. If you wanted to know what was working, you could measure the handful of sources in analytics or see clear information in your CRM. Deciding what was working and what was not wasn’t a perfect science, but it also wasn’t rocket science.
Fast-forward to today, and there’s AI search, AI chat, digital retailing tools, CDPs, identity resolution tech, PMAX, a half dozen social ad platforms and much more information sharing — good and especially bad — and all of this is being seasoned in a healthy coating of AI FOMO and uncertainty as a new age kicks off and changes everything faster than ever.
You don’t need a new model that adopts every new idea that floats past your desk or your screen… You just need a quieter room. How did you pick a direction when times were simpler? You evaluated the information available to you and threw out what wasn’t useful while focusing on what was. How about we just do that again?
Cleaning Up The Signal
Think of all the nothing-burgers in the last ten years that felt like Apocalypse Now in the moment and then turned out to be another Tuesday once in the rearview mirror. During COVID, everyone said online purchasing was the future, and Digital Retailing solutions became mainstream. Much of the industry thought it was adopt or die, but now these tools are part of the day-to-day, and it’s debated if they’re even useful now that the online deal craze has passed.
Remember when GA4 (Google Analytics 4/G4) was rolling out? Most people have fully forgotten how panicked they were about this at the time. Everyone in the industry who attends a 20 group or knows anything about their marketing was deeply concerned about how they would get this new kind of analytics set up as Google sunsetted the old Analytics. Today, it’s like it never happened, and we all got back to business as usual.
I realize it can be hard to know with certainty what’s a nothing-burger and what’s a game-changer. The point I’m making is that you don’t actually need to know the answer because nothing changes so quickly and radically that you’ll lose everything if you don’t make the perfect decision now. You’re not better off standing still and waiting for clarity, versus picking a known direction and adjusting as you go. So, how do we identify a known direction? The same way we used to…
Leads – Which sources are driving more leads for the money? Which sources are up or down over time? What changed? You know how to see this in your CRM, and it hasn’t changed.
Traffic – Which traffic sources are driving more traffic? Which are driving less? Which are converting? Assuming you or your trusted agency did, in fact, adapt to GA4, this is not hard to measure.
Close Rate – Which lead sources are closing well and which are busy work? Has your close rate changed with no change in lead sources? Then you have a process problem. Has your close rate changed, but you can isolate a lead source change that’s causing it? Then you have a problem with that lead source.
Attribution is rarely single-source, but it’s also not as complicated as it’s made out to be. There are great ways to do multi-touch attribution modeling, but at a certain point, this, too, becomes noise. Tune it out. Get back to basics and look at the more concrete measures that have been mainstays for years. They will get you 80% of the way to sound decisions, and that’s a hell of a lot better than the 10% you’re feeling right now with all the white noise paralysis.
Borrow Some Headphones
Many successful owners and GMs are great leaders, managers or fundamental car guys and just aren’t comfortable measuring even the “basics” above. That’s perfectly fine, and plenty who used to know the basics have let that skill diminish in today’s noisy reality. It’s okay to ask for help, and I’m here to offer some. Not as a service, but for free and in a way you can potentially duplicate yourself.
Wikimotive is a boutique marketing agency. We do actual marketing services for our dealer partners — white glove organic search, paid search, social ads, etc. — and we’re not actually a consulting firm, as many people assume from my articles. What I offer dealers is a marketing deep dive on as much or as little as they’d like, and we offer it for free. It starts with an SEO analysis. With analytics access, we can add SEM analysis. With CRM data, we can add third-party ROI analysis. With some marketing cost information, we can turn it into a complete report on what’s working and what’s not and recommend the next steps.
For most dealers, I find more than one obvious problem that’s sapping away marketing budget. For some, the recommendation is simply to cut the fat and carry on. For others, I find their budget is causing missed opportunities and recommend lateral shifts or even additional budgets in specific areas that are working. No such thing as a free lunch, you say? Helping people find their way breeds goodwill, and what goes around comes around! Simple as that. Just go to our website and request a consultation, or reach out on LinkedIn.
Turn Down The Volume and Focus
The most successful dealers aren’t reacting to news or making decisions based on fear of missing out. They’re sticking to the basics and keeping a watchful eye on which trends turn out to be a flash in the pan and which are turning into a stable direction. When in doubt, the “Yes, and” approach is your friend, but only after you pick a clear direction. Make a decision based on fundamentals and the available information, and then you can pick a shiny new thing to try. There’s nothing wrong with being an early adopter, but there’s a lot wrong with getting paralyzed by noise and failing to pick a direction.
The truth is that over the years, there has always been noise. There’s always a hot new topic on everyone’s mind, and more often than not, it’s gone or normalized within a year or two. In the information age, and as we enter the AI age, the volume is only going up, and the distractions are only becoming more numerous. Tune out the noise and get back to basics — by yourself or with a trusted partner.