Marketing Exec Says Dealers are Missing a Golden Opportunity

David Boice, CEO of marketing firm Team Velocity, says dealers are failing to tap a potentially rich source of business — and it’s right at their fingertips.

“A dealership is sitting on a gold mine of data,” Boice says. Speaking last month at a Shift conference in Las Vegas, he said customers already in the database don’t want to be treated like new leads when they visit dealerships’ websites. Instead, he says, they should be able to log in, just as they do on Amazon.

In an interview with reporter Sarah Kominek, Boice said dealerships’ returning customers should have online experiences that are relevant to their personal details and the cars they’re driving. Here are edited excerpts.

 

Q: Why do you think dealerships should use customers’ data to serve them online?

A: There are probably at least 50 very relevant pieces of data on you and your car that the dealership you do business with already knows. Every other company you do business with, you have a relationship with them online. They all know a massive amount about you because you are already their customer. Therefore, they treat you differently and personally online.

 

Q: What data do most dealerships have that they aren’t using?

A: These are very common data points that every franchised dealership has securely stored in their accounting systems: The customer’s name, address, phone number and email. Their vehicle’s year, make, model, trim, VIN and estimated mileage. Its service history, any recalls, services due, last service and recommended services. The customer’s sales info — the payment type, down payment, term, payoff, trade value, equity, likely upgrade options, next service visit, preferences and their shopping history. These data points are easily accessible to create a personal online experience for their customers.

 

Q: How should dealerships use this data when a customer goes to the website?

A: People want personalized service coupons that need to be specific to the car they’re driving. People really like to know their service history: Does the dealership have all the services that have been performed on record and are they accurate? People also expect you to give them a warning if their vehicle just went under recall. Without filling out any forms, they want to be able to schedule service and incorporate the coupons they’re entitled to. You know my name, you know my car and its VIN. I’m not going to fill out a form with the 14 pieces of information you normally ask me for, because I’ve signed in and I expect you to make scheduling a service appointment easy.

 

Q: What would the experience be like for a returning customer looking to purchase or lease another vehicle?

A: Now the customer has pretty high expectations because they have an expiration date. They’re going to ask, What upgrade options do I have? What would my payment be? What are the rebates and incentives that are currently available on the vehicle models I’m interested in buying? When you give a customer a personalized experience, people are naturally more comfortable because the service makes it easier for them to do what they need to do. What is best for the dealer’s customer is also best for the dealership. You have a five times’ greater chance of them completing the task if you treat customers with some relevancy, in a private and secure way.

 

 

 

Original Source: Automotive News https://www.autonews.com/shift/marketing-exec-says-dealers-are-missing-golden-opportunity

Team Velocity® Welcomed as Newest Certified Provider in BMW Dealer Program

BMW has announced Team Velocity as the newest program-certified provider for website integration, digital advertising, and retention strategies.

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Team Velocity Announces New Partnership with Audi North America

Team Velocity’s extensive suite of premium digital advertising services are now co-op eligible through the Audi Partner Program.

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Team Velocity Named on Inc. 5000’s Prestigious 2019 Fastest-Growing Companies List

Team Velocity makes its 6th consecutive debut for its record-high revenue and employee growth from 2015 to 2019

WASHINGTON, DC – August 22nd, 2019 – Team Velocity, known for its ground-breaking technology platform, Apollo®, was recognized for the 6th consecutive year as one of Inc. 5000’s fastest-growing private companies in America. The Inc. 5000 list honors the most successful and inspiring independent and midsized businesses across the nation based on revenue growth from 2015 to 2018. This prestigious list includes well-known companies such as Microsoft, LinkedIn, Facebook, Timberland, Oracle, and more.

 

 

Team Velocity was co-founded by David Boice and Budd Blackburn in 2005. Since then, Team Velocity has taken the automotive industry by storm with its revolutionary omni-channel automated marketing technology, products backed by artificial intelligence, and aptitude for innovation and success. Team Velocity has reached its all-time record high – more than 54 percent – in revenue and growth.

Recognition on the Inc. 5000 list has become the hallmark of entrepreneurial success for privately-held companies in the United States for the last 38 years. To qualify, companies must generate at least $100,000 in revenue by 2015 and $2 million in revenue by 2018. This year, Inc. 5000’s honorees aggregated a total revenue of $237.7 billion― surpassing last year’s record high of $206 billion. All together these companies amassed more than 1,216,308 jobs in a three-year time span, increasing the three-year growth rate to approximately 454 percent.

This year’s Inc. 5000 Conference and Gala will be held October 10 -through October 12 in Scottsdale, Arizona. The event brings together all honorees and alumni to recognize their achievements, entrepreneurial success, and contributions to the economy.

“Words can’t describe how honored we are to make the Inc. 5000 list for the sixth consecutive year. We only hope to continue to strive and grow for not only our employees but our clients.” – David Boice, Owner and Co-Founder of Team Velocity

“It all boils down to the people. Without the continuous support of our employees and phenomenal clients, this success would not be achievable. We are forever thankful.” – Budd Blackburn, Owner, and Co-Founder

 

To learn more about Inc. 5000, its review process and the complete list of recipients’, visit: https://www.inc.com/inc5000/index.html.

Team Velocity Awarded AWA Awards at NADA; Releases ApolloGo Mobile App

Team Velocity’s sophisticated technology platform, Apollo®, and ApolloGo mobile app take the industry by storm at NADA.

WASHINGTON, February 4th, 2019 – The 10th Annual AWA Awards presented by PCG Companies awarded Team Velocity with the Digital Marketing Innovation Leader and Rising Star Awards at NADA 2019. These awards recognize companies for their marketing technology that help dealers effectively buy, sell and service more cars. Team Velocity was recognized as an Innovation Leader for its marketing automation platform, Apollo, and its new digital retailing product, Transact.

“Our team is extremely honored to receive not only one, but two awards this year at NADA. We look forward to continuing to build technology that helps position our dealers in the market,” says Joe High, Senior Vice President at Team Velocity.

Team Velocity Awarded AWA Awards at NADA

Team Velocity was recognized for their revolutionary technology platform, Apollo. Apollo aids both dealerships and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) with technology that combines artificial intelligence (AI) and marketing automation to deliver hyper-personalized campaigns across a number of marketing channels. Apollo has been proven to increase results by as much as 250%.

While Apollo is comprised of many features and capabilities that enhance dealers’ profits and visibility, it’s Apollo’s comprehensive digital marketing product suite that took home the Innovation Leader award this year at NADA.

Apollo’s intelligent digital advertising platform is 100% automated to create, deploy and update data-rich ads across every digital medium, including Paid Search, Remarketing, Display Advertising, Social Media and Video Pre-Roll. This exclusive technology provides dealers with unlimited VIN-based ads for both new and pre-owned inventory and ensures consistent messaging and creative across all digital touchpoints.

“It is impossible to run successful digital marketing without artificial intelligence,” says Brian Pasch, CEO of PCG Companies and the AWA Awards.

Of Team Velocity’s recent digital product releases, one product in particular stands out amongst the rest: Advid™. Within a matter of minutes, Advid builds dynamic, payment-based video ads for every make and model the dealership sells, and automatically delivers these videos to YouTube. Every video is automatically updated nightly as inventory, incentives and pricing change.

Amongst Team Velocity’s newest achievements, is the public release of the ApolloGo Mobile App. The transformed Apollo desktop platform allows dealers to work leads on the go, from anywhere, at any time, all from the palm of their hands.

ApolloGo contains all the notable features included in Apollo but enables users to track all opportunities, communicate with customers directly via text and receive Hot Opportunity Alerts straight to their phone.

To learn more about ApolloGo or download the app, visit: https://teamvelocitymarketing.com/apollo/

About Team Velocity:

Team Velocity™ is revolutionizing the automotive industry with cutting-edge technology and artificial intelligence (AI) to help dealers sell and service more cars. Made by dealers, for dealers, Team Velocity’s proprietary technology platform Apollo® analyzes years of sales and service data to predict who will buy, what they will buy, and when they are ready to service. Apollo’s sophisticated AI automates the entire communication and marketing process by delivering hyper-personalized campaigns across every touchpoint, maximizing ROI and lifetime revenue.

For more information, visit www.teamvelocitymarketing.com.

More about the AWA Awards:

Since 2008, AWA has become a benchmark in the automotive industry for outlining and reviewing technology that enables dealerships and OEMs to aid their revenue with cutting-edge technology in digital marketing, design, management tools and social media. The qualified experts at PCG conduct thorough reviews and research the best products for car dealers to optimize their investment and deliver the best customer experience.

For more information about PCG and the AWA Award, visit: http://awa.autos/

Team Velocity Now Participating in the General Motors Dealer Digital Solution Digital Advertising Program

Team Velocity is now participating in Enhanced Digital Advertising and In-Market Retail.

We are proud to announce that Team Velocity has completed all requirements to participate in the Digital Advertising Program under the GM Dealer Digital Solution.

This allows Dealers the opportunity to leverage in-Market Retail (iMR) funds to reimburse themselves for the cost of their Digital Advertising services.  Please refer to the iMR Dealer Program guidelines located at www.gmlam.com for further information.

Providers who are participating in the Digital Advertising Program provide advertising solutions that include:

  • Improved efficiency, coordinated spend and strategy across all tiers of advertising
  • Participation commitment for:
    • Streamlined packages each offering full service solutions for sales and fixed ops
    • A single, managed monthly fee with cap
    • Performance accountability
    • Day 1 Go-to-Market readiness
    • Strategic and tactical advertising coordination with brands and LMAs
  • Dashboard for visibility into performance

If you have any questions about the benefits of Digital Advertising Program, please do not hesitate to reach out to our Support Team at 703-783-9759 or via email at https://teamvelocitymarketing.com/gm for further details.

Team Velocity named a finalist by Google for Video Advertising Innovation Award

Team Velocity named a finalist by Google for Video Advertising Innovation Award



Team Velocity, a marketing technology company based outside of Washington, D.C., has been named a Video Innovation finalist in this year’s Premier Partner Awards, presented by Google Partners.

Google’s Premier Partner Awards honor innovation in digital marketing across Search, Mobile, Video, Display, Shopping, and Growing Businesses Online. Team Velocity was named a finalist in Video Innovation for its latest product, Advid™, an automated video advertising solution that creates automotive model-specific, payment-based videos that are updated on YouTube nightly.

Team Velocity offers a comprehensive digital marketing solution backed by its technology platform, Apollo®. Designed to support the automotive retail industry, Apollo creates and delivers dynamic, automated, omni-channel marketing campaigns to in-market audiences based on behavior prediction analytics. Working hand-in-hand with Apollo’s intelligent offer management system, Advid creates hundreds of dynamic, high-quality video pre-roll ads in minutes and uploads those ads to YouTube automatically every night.

Team Velocity’s award submission included a case study on its long-term client Paragon Honda, describing the impactful results Advid delivered for the dealership. “Marketing today is all about relevance to the customer and attributing advertising spend to revenue. Video is the fastest-growing consumer medium, but traditional television advertising costs a fortune, offers little targeting and zero attribution. Google explained how video advertising on YouTube can better target in-market audiences and be attributed to store visits. We knew we wanted to shift some of our marketing budget away from traditional advertising efforts and into YouTube’s TruView platform. We put Team Velocity up to the challenge knowing the power of their technology. The results were incredible,” says Brian Benstock, Paragon’s Vice President and General Manager.

With Apollo, Team Velocity had the ability to target in-market audiences with relevant ads and provide attribution reporting on search and display, but video offered a unique set of challenges. For video ads to be relevant to the customer’s shopping history, advertisers would need a video for every model, which would be costly and time consuming to produce. The ads would also need to include the actual payments to provide the customer what they really want to know. However, offers and payments change frequently and need to meet state and original equipment manufacturer (OEM) compliance regulations. On top of all of this, YouTube lacks an API, meaning every video would need to be manually uploaded, creating the biggest challenge of all.

Costs aside, it was clear that attempting this process manually would be impossible to scale. Team Velocity would need technology to automate the process. Thus, Advid was born.

“With Advid, we have created a scalable video advertising solution. For every model of every brand, Advid creates a unique video and uploads those videos to YouTube every night despite the lack of an API. The ads include vehicle payments, factor in OEM and dealer incentives, meet compliance requirements and have the same message and offer seen on search, display, mail and email campaigns, which Apollo creates for every vehicle,” says David Boice, Co-Founder and CEO of Team Velocity.

Paragon Honda was the first dealership to pilot Advid. With just 20 percent of its budget allocated to video advertising, Paragon saw 47 percent of its store visits attributed to video.

“Our creative and development teams created something truly innovative. The automation of creating thousands of video ads on a nightly basis that include the dynamic details a consumer actually cares about is amazing. Our teams’ recognition is well deserved.” explains Joe High, Senior Vice President of Team Velocity.

Team Velocity is part of a select group of digital specialists that Google celebrates as Premier Partners. To qualify as a Premier Partner, digital marketing agencies and professionals must pass a series of exams, and prove their expertise in using and applying Google’s advertising products.

Premier Partner Awards 2018 winners are scheduled to be announced in October at g.co/PartnerPartnerAwards.



About Team Velocity


Team Velocity™ is revolutionizing the automotive industry with cutting-edge technology and artificial intelligence (AI) to help dealers sell and service more cars. Made by dealers, for dealers, Team Velocity’s proprietary technology platform Apollo® analyzes years of sales and service data to predict who will buy, what they will buy, and when they are ready to service. Apollo’s sophisticated AI automates the entire communication and marketing process by delivering hyper-personalized campaigns across every touchpoint, maximizing ROI and lifetime revenue.

For more information, visit www.teamvelocitymarketing.com.