July Newsletter – You Are Not Your Customer

This goes along with when you used to hear someone make the comment, “Why do we buy the Channel 2, 10 pm news? I don’t watch Channel 2.” To which my response has always been to a dealer or general manager, “You ARE NOT your customer.” Although these types of comments are far less frequent than they were ten years ago, they still have a tendency to come out.

So it was no surprise while sitting in a meeting with someone last month who told me they weren’t interested in spending any of their paid search budget on Bing because they never use it to do their searches. I had to revert back to this famous line, “YOU ARE NOT YOUR CUSTOMER.”

Then the facts came out:

1. Bing skews older in demographics and higher in income than Google.
2. Shoppers on Bing have more page views per session and time on site than Google visits.
3. Bing still comes preloaded on Microsoft products.
4. According to comScore, Bing has 31% of online search share and has gained on Google.

After I went through the facts, I made the analogy that all people search differently. There is no one way that is the definition of how Americans use search engines to shop, other than they use them in far greater numbers than anything else in the history of the world.

Google is still the 800-pound gorilla — the Digital Giant. But to put all your digital marketing eggs in one basket is something that needs to be evaluated. If dealers are constantly looking for better-qualified and better-credit customers, then you owe it to yourself to look at a source that —even though much smaller than Google — can deliver that customer. You owe it to yourself to experiment and run a series of campaigns on Bing to measure your own results and web analytics compared to that from Google.

The bottom line is: Do not think you have all the answers on a subject that is changing literally every second.

Strong Automotive has been Bing accredited for several years now and continues to see mind-blowing statistics from the use of Bing along with Google as part of our dealer’s digital marketing strategies. For more information, contact John Paul Strong at jpstrong@strongautomotive.com.