Episode 6 – Joe Brown, Chief Marketing Officer at Frank Leta Automotive Group

🎙️ Episode 6 – Joe Brown, Chief Marketing Officer at Frank Leta Automotive Group

Podcast: The 100 Marketers Project

Hosts: Andrew Street (DealerOMG), Matthew Davis (TradePending)

In this episode of the 100 Marketers Project, Andrew and Matt sit down with Joe Brown, CMO at Frank Leta Automotive Group. Joe shares his journey in automotive marketing, how his team tests new strategies, and why balancing data with gut instincts has driven real success. From evolving websites to experimenting with ad platforms, Joe walks through what’s worked, what hasn’t, and where dealerships should focus next.

If you’re a dealership leader or marketer looking to sharpen your edge in automotive advertising, you’ll love Joe’s candid insights and proven strategies.

Timestamps:

• 00:02:00 – Joe’s start in automotive marketing and early lessons learned
• 00:08:30 – The role of testing in scaling dealership growth
• 00:16:45 – Data vs. instinct: knowing when to pivot
• 00:25:10 – Biggest challenges dealerships face in today’s market
• 00:32:00 – Joe’s advice to the next generation of automotive marketers

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Transcript

We are on a mission to talk to the 100 leading marketing minds in the automotive space. I'm Andrew Street, owner of Dealer OMG. Matthew Davis here, chief marketing officer at Trade Pending. Why are we doing this? Well, we like automotive.

We like marketers, and we like retail automotive marketers. Our goal here is to give you the insights into what these leading marketers are thinking, planning, and doing.

Did you know that Gen Z is twice as likely to never click an ad than the generation before them? Millennials, I think. I just learned that. Well, this guy that I'm talking with right now is leading the charge on driving organic traffic for his dealership group. He's also experimenting with some really interesting stuff for trade-ins, for customer lifecycle marketing, and for voice. automation through ai to have those those real conversations with customers through ai he's kind of um got a good penchant for rolling up his sleeves next to his vendors and pushing their product to stuff that actually makes an impact for his five stores I'm Andrew Street. I help dealers grow sales, service, and trades through social media advertising. I'm joined with Matthew Davis from Trade Pending. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Joe Brown from the Frank Lito Auto Group. Frank Leta Auto Group.

So tell us about, real quick, who you are, what you do, and kind of like the responsibilities that fall under that umbrella. Yeah. I'm Joe Brown. I work for Frank Lita Automotive Group. It's a family business. My grandfather's Frank Lita. I've been working for the group essentially my whole life. Started as a kid in the commercials. Me and my brothers would be the board of directors. So we... Grandpa would talk about how if his license plate isn't on your car, chances are you overpaid. Just ask my board of directors. Right, gang? Cuts to all of us around a boardroom table and we're like, right, grandpa. And we did that for years. I remember doing that as a kid. um and then as i grew up i started working in the dealership started washing cars worked in the service drive worked in the finance department pretty much every department within the dealership and ultimately landed in marketing once that you know i was kind of around for the birth of websites so once websites became a thing social media uh i kind of took over those responsibilities within my group and since then it's just grown from there i started with Two stores, we had Acura Honda, and now we're up to five rooftops all around Missouri. How old is too old to be sitting around that board of directors table as a kid? I think that's the most pressing question I have right now. I think once you start growing that awkward mustache in your teens, you're not as cute anymore. That's the time to get some new kids. Yeah. When the cuteness wears off. Exactly. Yeah. But those commercials still live on our YouTube channel. I posted some to our TikTok and they get a lot of a lot of love. It's good stuff. Are there people that remember them? People still remember. I mean, back when those commercials were airing, we only had like five channels. It was just the terrestrial TV over the air. You didn't have satellite, and now you've got everything on demand and YouTube. Yeah, so I think everybody saw those commercials, and they still remember them. It's kind of part of their childhood. There's a big nostalgia factor to it. Did any, were you ever recognized as a child star or even today to people say like, I, how do I know you? Not today, but I think kids in my class would see my commercial. So they thought that was pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. And they get to go home and be like that guy, that boy's in my class. Yeah. Yeah. I've had to start wearing sunglasses and hats to school. So people ask me, bother me, but it's part of the gig, right? And I like to think that little network that you're tapping into at the elementary school is a good network of home buyer or of car buyers with their families and network. Still friends with a lot of them on Facebook. They know I'm in the business. Yeah. Well, you're expecting a new child soon. Congratulations on that. Do you plan to bring your roster of children in as child actors as well for the boardroom? Yeah, we've talked about it a lot, bringing back those commercials. I haven't done it yet, but something that we'd like to do. Yeah. have the next generation, because now all of us that were the board of directors, most of them are actually working in the dealership now as owners of the business. And then their kids are now the cute, adorable board of directors. I like it. And this is like coming from an era of like advertising had actual creative behind it. It wasn't, you know, inventory and tricking systems and, you know, black hat SEO or what, you know, it's like, this is what, what is the message we're trying to get in front of people? We've got five channels. They're going to, a lot of people are going to see this commercial. What do we want them to think? Like we're family. Here's what we have. And then you could have like that, you know, that nineteen eighties commercial blended into the modern one and show you immediately sprout up and skip the voice cracking stages where you're now the marketing director. Right. Director of marketing. Yeah. What is your title? Chief marketing officer. Yeah. Yeah. So with the lead of brand, you guys have built this name up over generations now, how do you think about balancing still investing and building that brand name versus we just need some leads right now to sell some cars, acquire cars and get service in the door? How do you weigh those? How do you balance them? Yeah, I think it's important to have both. Obviously you wanna be at all parts of the funnel of the purchase, wherever the customer is. So, People who are not necessarily in market to buy today, you want to plant that seed so they know they'll need a name. I mean, grandpa did a great job way back when putting his adorable grandkids in the commercials that cut through the clutter because none of the other dealers were doing that. Even before the grandkids, he had his own children in the commercials. My mother, she's a wonderful singer. And actually, I think they had a band as grandpa had three kids and they were all kind of musically inclined and they had a band growing up. So he ended up using them in his commercials. My mom would sing on the lot, walking by a bunch of accords and she'd make a song about it. come up with the songs and have her sing it and it was yeah he's always been really creative in that aspect so we've got a good uh good reputation because we've been in business for so long people still remember the old commercials uh and it's just kind of evolved over the years we used can't beat alita which has a nice ring to it he came up with that way back when think he would say you can't beat a franklita deal and then in the nineties the ad agency we were with shortened it to just can't beat alita and that was a pretty pretty strong hook for a long time we haven't been using it much but people still remember it so yeah we kind of stopped using it a decade or so ago but people still remember can't beat alita so we we still maintain that here and there um So I think you have to have both branding and, of course, the low funnel tactics. The challenge is everybody focuses on low funnel, so it's a very crowded space. So I think the differentiator is when you have that additional brand message that will make people remember you. One of the things that we do that I haven't seen too many dealers do is we have a charitable foundation, the Franklin to Charitable Foundation, whose mission is to provide quality transportation to those in need. So we've partnered with a bunch of local charities within our community and we help underprivileged youth afford a vehicle, we'll match a down payment up to a certain amount. We've also completely donated vehicles, different charities that need transportation. We've donated vans to those companies and they'll wrap it with, of course, their branding and then a little bit of our branding too. So people see those driving around town. So we just really trying to do the grassroots community involvement. I think that is the strongest thing marketing you can do. This is something I've been sort of dabbling with how to crack into. And a lot of dealers are just really not into it. And some are like, yes, if you can do it tastefully. is using the philanthropic amazing stuff that as a brand that we our dealerships are doing for the communities not only staffing so many people in the community but giving back in a meaningful way to a lot of folks in the community they don't want to put that in their advertising because obviously that's like just gloating sure have you found tasteful ways to inject at all outside of like wrapping vans i think when you have whatever uh charity that you're involved with post on their own channels and then you share that to yours it seems a lot less uh of a brag you know it's just congratulations so glad we could have helped you out on that enjoy your new vehicle kind of thing instead of us posting it on our social channels look how great we are we did this come see us we rock okay yeah i like that angle because i like the third party angle of giving that dealership credit for what they're doing without it being the dealership saying look what i just did and look how much i just done it but it's we matched all these funds yeah but like somebody like as an influencer with a quick hook at the beginning of an ad everything i think about is like social but it's just like if I was going to buy a vehicle right now, here's why I would pick frankly, you know, and then go into the philanthropic stuff. And it's just me saying that what, this is why I would pick this dealership because of what they've done. And it's a voiceover from somebody that's not, you or the general manager and letting people know like this is why you don't this is why you don't buy directly from the manufacturer this is why you don't buy directly from tesla this is why you go through you know what's the backbone of a lot of the community that you guys are surrounded by yeah and then people within those organizations talk and you know word of mouth that's since day one that's i think been the best form of advertising is word of mouth You've mentioned a top of funnel stuff, which is my, that's good language. Like what, where are you finding like a good resource to get top of funnel? Like what platforms are you working with? I mean, like we talked about with getting involved with different local organizations. And then also we've done some social awareness branding campaigns where it's not necessarily price and payment. It's more about what our dealership is doing for the community and And also focusing on the ownership experience, not just that one-time transaction, but right now our tagline is Lita for Life. So we offer a lifetime warranty, lifetime pickup and delivery, lifetime tech support. So trying to get that message out that we want to take care of you for the life of your ownership experience, not just that one time transaction. We want to sell you that car, but then also service that car and sell you the next car. One of our better branding spots focused on kind of generational sales because we had a situation where a mother is now buying, she bought a car from us and now it's, she's buying a car from us for her son. And I thought that was pretty powerful. So we ended up making a spot around that where, you know, you've got flashback to when they buy a car, ten years ago or twenty years ago and the kid's a baby. And now fast forward, the kid's buying their first car at like sixteen and the mom's there. So it's pretty cool. How do you think about your channel mix? So if you have your budget in your mind, like, yeah, we're going to devote X amount towards to social media, towards television, our radio, our print, our billboards in those equations at all. We, radio is actually a big part of our subprime business, which is a totally different animal from your traditional prime dealership business. We have some radio commercials that are very loud, cut through the noise, but it's effective. But I think it has to be for the right, like I said, for subprime, it works very well. I don't know if it would work as well for our Acura store, different audiences. Low down payment, low monthly payment. We can qualify you. Exactly. Guaranteed credit approval kind of thing. Play it on a lot of the terrestrial radio stations and it generates a lot of awareness, a lot of website traffic, phone calls. Yeah. And then, uh, Trying to figure out what really it kind of depends on the month. If a GM is feeling like they have the budget for some of the more top funnel tactics or if they want to reduce budget because they had a bad month and we have to cut some of our branding campaigns. Unfortunately, it's not entirely up to me, right? It's the whole group and each group kind of has different goals. Different opinions, you know, a lot of chefs in the kitchen sometimes. So it's a balancing act. Yeah, a lot of it's the twenty eighth of August. I'm not needing branding. We need we need to pull some last minute deals across the finish line. Yep. Yep. Um, and here's what I did. Like I used to, so my background was like, I worked at radio stations, billboard companies, then I worked at Facebook and then like, so it's all terrestrial old school marketing at the beginning. And I'll, I'll work with the, we work with a ton of stores where I have like a little lens in shoppers coming through their website and stuff. And sometimes like we're the number one source of traffic, which is my team's like, yay, we're the best. It's like, well, I don't know if we want to be like, I don't want to be the number one source of traffic coming from social. It's like there should be a large volume of organic stuff and going through the Google business profile. And then the stores that are like rocking with a lot of organic traffic, it's like, once you start digging down just one layer deeper, it's like, okay, cool. They're doing a lot of branding. They're doing a lot of sponsorships. They're doing a lot of radio. And you know, they've got this foundational old school stuff. That's driving that organic awareness for people to Google their name versus us reaching deeper and deeper into our pockets continually to just drive that initial traffic. Yep. Yep. I think that organic is what you want to invest in first and foremost, make sure that you're maximizing that. And then the paid tactics are icing on the cake paid. You can just turn on with a switch. Organic is the long game, but ultimately if, if done properly, that will make everything so much easier. You'll get more organic traffic. It's cheaper in the long run. You get the organic traffic to the website. And then your paid campaigns, you no longer have to convince customers to do business with you because they should already be aware of you. And it kind of shortens that amount of time. I think you're already building that trust with the organic so that the paid is more effective. So we're dipping our toes in here into attribution and multi-touch attribution, which is always just such a weird conversation to navigate your way around because some people are like attribution is dead and other people are like, well, you got to measure all eighty five points. How are you thinking about it? Yeah, I mean, you do it as best you can, but it's also kind of inherently a flawed metric. There is no perfect attribution, but I don't think that means you should just completely be blind to where leads are coming from. So you just kind of do the best you can with the information available. We tend to use our CRM as the primary source of proof and look at what you know where the leads are coming from within there look at the closing ratio it's it's more than just lead volume you want to look at the quality of the lead too so Andrew you were talking about some SEO but bringing a lot of traffic to the website is it quality traffic are these blog posts about remote start and my Honda Accord and it's people from all over the country that just go to that website or never gonna do business with you You know, so going beyond just the, the number for lead volume or traffic to the site, being able to really dig in to see what, what the customer did once they're on their website, what kind of quality traffic they're bringing. Yeah, I want to, so you're looking at all this data, you have all this data, and I want to kind of ask about the balancing act you have to play with the GMs there. Are you bringing data to those discussions when they say, hey, we want to do this? And you're like, actually, you should be thinking about this. I know that's a delicate situation to navigate. How do you do it? No, I think data is always helpful. It's agnostic. It doesn't have an opinion, it's facts. So when a GM might have, notoriously in my role, GMs will come back from a twenty group with a bunch of ideas that they want to just change everything that we're doing. And you kind of have to slow them down and explain why it might be working for that particular dealer, but it's not necessarily a silver bullet that's going to work for us and every dealer in the country. So one example would be SEO. There's a significant investment involved if you're going to do it right. And a lot of dealers don't see the value in it because they just see a monthly recurring cost and not necessarily in the CRM, SEO got you this many sales. So you have to show them that this is what we're investing. You look at the breakdown of traffic to the site. In our twenty group, we are not only The number one dealer in organic traffic by percentage of traffic to the site were more than double the average of that group. So we're really doing well in organic. And I like to point that out whenever a dealer is looking at the marketing expenses report and they see a pretty significant cost going to SEO. Well, here's actually what it's doing for us. We are generating a lot of traffic and SEO traffic. Organic traffic is going to be the highest quality traffic to your websites. And then backing it up with data, always helpful. I like to look at like kind of unique metrics with some dealers that aren't just like the marketing metrics and grosses and some stuff that's, you know, pretty apparent, but like, look at the. retention rate from sales to service, from sales to repeat sales and stuff like that, just to kind of get some baselines. There's going to be a long-term relationship. It's let's look at these metrics and see what we can do from our, from all of our desks to impact them. Have you, have you found things from your store, from your stores? That's like able to tap into loyalty a little bit better. Are there efforts that you guys are doing with your CRM? There are. Yeah, it's kind of a blind spot, surprisingly, in the industry. There's not a great loyalty solution. You know, you look at Starbucks, they do a great job with the gold stars and you got the app and it's kind of front and center. I haven't found anything quite like that for automotive. We've got a company right now that will track dollars spent, and then you have kind of a point balance that you can check, but it's not quite as frictionless as Starbucks makes it. Obviously, there's a significant investment in building an app, so nothing that we're going to be able to do on our own. But we utilize CDP. We're currently using Fullpath, and that sort of maintains that retention piece, talking to the customer throughout the entire ownership experience. So sell the car. That's not the end. Full Path is going to stay in constant contact with that customer for switching the messaging up from sales to service once they bought. And then after they've been servicing with us, once they are maybe you know, due for another vehicle, Fullpath is going to know that it's already going to automatically switch that communication to, hey, check out these great new lease specials. You could get into a new Acura for about the same monthly payment. So that lifecycle marketing I think is the best thing we have available right now. Right. It's like, we're not continually, like it's really easy as an industry for us to like continually reach outside of our ecosystem and pull and try and get new customers, new customers, who's new to town. Who do we know who just turned sixteen. But we have a huge database of people who know who we are. bought their car from us. Totally. Let's start there. It's not a gold mine, but a lot of dealers have that data. They just don't know what to do with that data. And without some sort of sophisticated tools, it's really hard to take full advantage of that. If you're just operating out of the CRM, there's only so many email blasts you can send out to unsold prospects each month, right? Yeah. What was that implementation process like with implementing the CDP from Fullpath? pretty painless. They have a pretty strong integration with a lot of different pieces of our technology. And if they don't have that integration, they're pretty willing to make new connections. I've actually requested a few and they've been implemented since we've been with them. So they've been a really good partner for us. Right now, we're obviously CRM DMS website. So now, you know, CRM, if you were just living out of your CRM, you could look up Mr. Jones. and you would see that maybe he bought a car two years ago, maybe he services with you or not, but that's about all you've got for Mr. Jones. Now with Full Path, we're able to see anytime he comes to the website, if he's actively looking for a vehicle, if he received an email, did he go to the website? What did he do once he was on the website? And then you've got all that information in your back pocket when you want to reach out to that customer. You're not going to explicitly say, hey, I saw you clicked on an email and looked at five different Acuras on our website. Let's check in. How's it going? I want to let you know that we've got these amazing new lease specials and you're a great candidate to upgrade your vehicle right now. So yeah, a lot of wonderful tools at our disposal today. I think it's cool. Like at some point let's all put in our two weeks notice and just focus on that loyalty piece and we'll start a company together. Like I really am fat. Like I'm so obsessed with it right now for some reason. Yeah. I love the idea of it. I don't know why company like CRM DMS companies don't have a better piece for that. I'm pushing for it within full path. They do have kind of a lifetime value for the customer. And I think that we're, they're going in the right direction. It's just not ready for a complete loyalty solution at this point. Here's what I'm doing and feel free to steal it, but I don't know if it's working. It's sort of working. Here's what I'm seeing. So like, as soon as somebody buys, we stop advertising on social to them and all it is is a thank you for buying from us. Welcome to the family. Follow our Instagram page, follow our social media pages. And that's the whole call to action is just to follow us or exclusive discount. You know, you can come up with some creative in there and then introduce the service department, the service manager, remind them about the service contracts that come with that vehicle. And then on the twenty third month, right before they get their new registration sticker, their first registration sticker after they buy their car, then we start talking about trade in key for key. So like from the social side, that's the tricks that we're using. And then I'm working with some stores that have like a full time vehicle appraiser on the service drive, giving everybody like what looks like a check right there on their dashboard for the value of their vehicle and then following up the next day with that person to make sure that they saw it. And it's like, OK, yeah, all these just like if there's one thing they know, it's that we want to buy their car. Andrew, I feel like you just teed me up perfectly to talk about Trade Pending's new product called Value Watch. Oh, yeah. You're the perfect person to talk to about this. That sends monthly texts and emails to people tracking their car's value over time. And sold customers are enrolled automatically the way to you before they start getting stuff. And then service customers are enrolled in. So every month they get the value of their car. If you've seen Carvana's value tracker, it's the same thing. And in Seam. Love it. Great product. Yeah. As soon as I saw Carvana's, I was wondering why we weren't doing that in automotive. So I'm glad to see that you guys are doing that. It's been a it's been a pretty big hit so far in terms of people like once the people that get it really get it. Fantastic. All right. Well, that's enough sales pitch for me. So we haven't yet approached any discussion around AI. And I feel like it's that time of the conversation where we ask, what the heck are you guys doing with AI? I think it's just a fad and it's going to go away. It's changed everything. Every vendor that we do business with has incorporated AI in some capacity, just enhancing their already strong products. And we use it internally too. Our analyzing data has gotten so much better because AI can do it in seconds versus hours or days of going over some of this data. talk about attribution, it's a lot easier to just dump a massive file into ChatGPT and have it analyze the data and tell us of any insights that it sees based on this data. Using it, multiple different facets within our store. Right now, the thing that we're really experimenting with is voice AI. It's made a lot of improvements over the years. I think it's just going to keep getting better and better and excited about that Are you live with Voice AI, like actually using it with customers? We are, yeah. It's been working pretty well. We've had some hiccups, but part of that is because the company that we use for our service scheduling tool, it was a new connection for the Voice AI company. They already have connections, integrations with a lot of other companies, but this particular one was a brand new connection, so... We get to be sort of a guinea pig. But the good news is they're working with us. They're offering it at no charge while they kind of work out the bugs. So they've been a really strong partner so far. That's cool. It sounds like you have a seat at the table with a handful of the vendors you're working with to help push product adoption. Yeah, it's who you know. Sometimes you sign up with a vendor and you get... like an intern almost, right? Somebody fresh out of college who's not, you get sold on the product based on the figurehead of the company. But when you sign up, you get handed off. And a lot of times you don't get what you were expecting. So I, you know, I'm fortunate enough to have been in the industry long enough. I know a lot of the tops of the companies. So if I don't get the answer I want from the low level intern, you have to go up the ladder. And next thing you know, you're getting your way. A lot of it's just who you know. Yeah. It's the benefits of being in automotive marketing since you were a toddler. And not only that, but on the board of directors. And I feel like I've gotten an email from Joe once before. I leverage my celebrity status appropriately. Yeah. So it sounds like voice AI is something that you're tinkering with right now. Yeah. Can you tell me, is it Mia that you're working with? It is Mia right now. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I'm pretty impressed with their product. That's the thing. Yeah. I've been eyeballing voice AI for, you know, a couple of years now. And it just seemed like there was it wasn't quite ready for primetime. There was a big delay between asking a question and getting a response. The voices seemed pretty robotic. But Mia, it was pretty quick to respond. And it sounds like they've got a bit of a trademark on their latency technology. So we're going in with them and I'm excited to see what it can do for us. That is cool. We're going to have to follow up and see how it's going. And you're able to listen to the calls and look at the scripts and see if it went off track? Yep, yep. You get emails. They'll let you know whether or not a customer needs a callback or not. And it's been really helpful for us trying to solve for... all volume overflow. Our service drive gets a lot of phone calls and our advisors and even our BDC is busy taking, you know, it's funny that we've got a website where you can go online and instantly schedule a service appointment, but people still are calling in the number and takes up time for our staff to take those appointments. So now Mia is able to handle all that. It integrates now with our service scheduling tool and it makes it pretty seamless. Have you seen an increase in appointments and bookings and revenue as a result of that? It's early on. We're probably a couple of weeks in right now. It's pretty early on right now. That's the promise there. All the things that have previously gone un-missed, the people just abandon the process and never come back. Now you're actually able to capture those. So that's an early experiment. So when you step back and look at all the stuff that you're investing your marketing time and brainpower and resources into, what's working well for you? I think organic would probably be the biggest win. We looked outside of automotive for a SEO provider. You know, there's a lot of people within the automotive space that offer it, but it seems fairly limited. You get maybe three content pages a month and that might be the extent of it. Meanwhile, it's a pretty significant price tag. So for about the same cost, I've gotten a vendor that does a lot more content pages and really has a focus on Backlinks to the website and focusing on generative AI and making sure that we rank for the AI results. I mean, right now there's not a ton of volume for AI searches, but it's going to happen. The more people use AI and rely on that, you want to make sure that you're laying the groundwork for when it inevitably becomes the main channel. Go ahead, Andrew. What does it look like tactically to do SEO for like the one box search results AI? Is it called AIO or GEO or? SGE, I believe, yeah. It's a lot of, we needed more acronyms in automotive and in general. But is it like working with, like getting your stuff built out on dealer Raider and like all these channels that you'd look, usually look over versus just doing like plugging a bunch of keywords into an article posted on your website. I think that, I mean, that's part of it. There are so many different factors, which is why I outsource it. I leave it to the professionals who are really making it their full-time job to keep up with it because it's an ever evolving space. And a lot of people, once ChatGPT came out and they realized they could batch out content pages, they said, well, screw, I'm going to cancel this SEO company. We're just going to do it ourselves. And I don't think that was the right move. Yeah. Now you've got the AI detecting that it's AI and it's... Unless it's helpful to the customer, unless you're providing real value, Google's going to bury it. It's not even going to be worthwhile. Something we're seeing on our side is our, so we're doing something similar. We're investing in organic and our SEO efforts are blending now with GEO efforts. And what we see is what's called the crocodile where you have like your organic impressions are going up and your clicks are actually going down because people are getting the answers that they want there without having to click through. I'm curious if you guys have seen any trends like that yet. A little bit. Yeah, that is the trend to get your answers without even having to click through. I think that's Google's ultimate goal is to provide all that information without anybody having to click to a website. Which in one way, that's interesting because a lot of those you mentioned, like the quality of traffic, those informational searches that were eight hundred miles out of market that we're never going to buy from you anyway. It's to some degree it's filtering that out. But as a marketer, it still kind of hurts to lose that. My line graph. Exactly. That's true. My charts are going down. Some of the other things that are working well for us, I mentioned Full Path. They've been a great partner. We've built out some new connections with them. We use urban science to get some data. They've got a product called Sales Alert. They'll notify you if there's a customer that's in your CRM and sales alert, urban science knows that that customer bought elsewhere, you'll get a notification. So you can stop wasting communication. Maybe you're reaching out still in the market and they just aren't responding because they don't want to hurt your feelings. Now, you know that customer bought elsewhere. Let's stop wasting follow up and better time spent for our sales staff. But also, you know that that customer is no longer in the market to buy a vehicle, but you could send them some service messaging, we didn't sell your vehicle, but we'd love to service your vehicle. And with full path, I've got it now to where the two are connected. So full path is getting that directly from urban science. So it can seamlessly change that communication. From we want to sell you a vehicle that we want to serve you service your vehicle, service your vehicle. It's cool. And there's like a, an opportunity there to like, just visually look at the battleground of your markets of where the transactions are taking place and where the customers live. Has that been able to empower the advertising to say, hey, we're losing our foothold over here, or let's ride the wave in this volume of sales we're getting in this zip code? For sure. Urban Science has a lot of data on that as well. They've got other tools that really dig into where the vehicles are being sold in your market, so you can make sure to focus on the opportunity zip codes that maybe you're deficient in. We obviously try to own our backyard before we start spreading out to conquer new areas. And then another tool that's been working out for us is a trade pending. We've got trade pending payments on our site. We ended up switching from, one digital retail tool to payments. And I know payments, they don't consider themselves a digital retail tool, but it does a lot of what that other tool was doing. But it converted at a much higher degree. I think we got a forty percent increase in website leads just by putting trade pending payments on the website. So that's been a big win. Good to hear. Yeah. When people can get through the process faster, they tend to convert at a higher rate. And that's essentially the premise there. Yeah, make it easy for the customer to get the information they're looking for. What does that look like? So customers come to the website, look into the trade pending tool for their vehicle appraisal? Do you want to tell them, Matthew, I want me to? You might as well. We'll see how I'm doing it as a marketer conveying the value of the product. I mean, it essentially gives the customer a way to, well, one of the things that they have is what's my buying power? So the customer can enter in some information, how much money they have to put down, and it'll tell them basically what you can afford and then filter out your vehicle selection based on that. And then on each VDP, it's kind of a finance calculator. You're able to estimate what your payment would be on that vehicle. It's not gonna be penny perfect, but that's not really, they give you a range and I'm fine with it because penny perfect kind of causes more headaches than benefit a lot of time. We haven't found that customers really wanna purchase the vehicle on the website from A to Z, but do a lot of the research on the website and then still come into the dealership, see the vehicle in person and finalize everything there. Yeah, you nailed it. Brian Pass just put out a whole research project. We partnered with him on it and he looked at all the Morgan Auto Group stores and ten of them that had the trade in tool, but not the payments tool. And so they added the payments tool and basically came back, said, yeah, when you have them both on there, they actually work better together. And he looked at he made up a new he made up a new acronym, the CCR. which is not Creedence Clearwater Revival. Dang it. It's the CTA conversion rate. But now that I'm thinking of CCR, I kind of have to go listen to it. But anyway, that's a fascinating study. For anyone listening, I would check that out. Nice. What do you experiment with? I mean, voice AI is pretty experimental at this point. I would say so. Really trying to make as many connections between vendors as possible. In automotive, historically, it's been very siloed. But I think in the advent of companies like Techion, where they have a very open philosophy and a CRM DMS that are under the same roof, I think it's forcing the industry to rethink their stance on that and become more open. We're using DriveCentric as our CRM right now. And I think DriveCentric, they got acquired recently, which I think most people know. And since then they've got a new philosophy to really be open and make new connections. And they've made more connections this year than they have in the entire time they've been around. So I'm excited to see that similar to what I did with urban science and full path, just as many vendors that I can have talking to each other, working together at the end of the day, everybody wins when we all work together and as cheesy as that sounds. Yeah, there's an attitude which permeates some of the software space, not everybody, but it's like, we've got to kind of protect our little area and we want people only to come to us And that's very self-serving when you think about, Joe, in your role, you need everything to communicate with each other. For sure. And a lot of times the vendors don't understand that their customer is not only the dealer, but it's also the other vendors. So you have to play well, nice with them or play nice with them. Otherwise, they're going to go back to you and be like, these guys suck. Get rid of them. Right. Yep. What else am I experimenting with? Building out Fullpath, really leveraging the CDP and taking full advantage of it. I mean, out of the box, it works really well communicating with the customer wherever they are in their ownership journey, that lifecycle marketing, but then taking it to the max and making new connections. DriveCentric was another one that we built out together. A lot more information is now being pushed back into the DriveCentric CRM. via full path um i'm looking forward to instead of drive centric right now i think is primarily doing ftp exports once we get an actual api connection i'm excited about that and it would just be a better flow of data between the two um yeah another thing we're doing right now is unlock pricing on our website it's not like a new technology but it's something that we wanted to do we were about to implement it right around the time COVID happened. So we were getting ready. We signed up for V auto conquest where you can get a lot of data to really price your new inventory aggressively. And then COVID happens and everybody's pricing an MSRP. So it was like, well, we don't really want to go below MSRP right now. So we abandoned that. And then of course, now we're back to a very competitive market. So just implemented that with dealer inspire. And since implementing it, we've seen a pretty significant increase in website conversions. Yeah. And I would just say that if anybody listening out there has an idea that they bring to a vendor and maybe they tell their account rep and the account rep just says, I'm sorry, we can't do that. Let me know and I'll reach out to the head of the company and we'll start talking because don't take no for an answer. Yeah. Joe Brown, don't mess around. That's right. And it's like for the vendor to have some system in place where there can be good ideas that escalate to the decision-making table of like, hey. DriveCentric's pretty good about that. They've got kind of an upvote system where you can make a feature request and then the whole community votes on it. And if it gets enough votes, then that's how they prioritize their updates. So I've had a couple suggestions that I've leveraged my contacts and had them kind of push them through. Yeah. Joe, I feel like you should run a masterclass on how to roll up your sleeves adjacent to the vendors and help push products that help you, but then also help the industry. Well, I'm fortunate enough. I'm, you know, the automotive community is very helpful and I'm an auto genius and it's been one of the, greatest groups of people I've gotten to know. Some of the smartest people in automotive, super generous with their knowledge. And I can't say enough good things about that, but I'm in that community daily. It's very active. And if you ever have a question about how to do this or how to track that, you can get plenty of answers from everybody within AutoGenius. So shout out to AutoGenius. Anybody in my role in a marketing role should definitely check it out. Are you doing stuff on Clubhouse or any of that stuff? Tuning into those? Not super active. I've jumped on here and there. I haven't found any great rooms around marketing. A lot of it seems to be about sales, like used car sales, new car sales process. Seems more geared towards general managers. Every once in a while, there's an AI conversation, but I haven't really... I haven't found them. So if there's any good ones out there, let me know. Check it out. Okay. I'm going to convince Matthew to start one with me. Love that. Yeah. Any shows coming up that you're going to? I'm going to be going dark for a little bit. I've got a new baby due next month. So I'm going to be taking some time off, but hopefully next year I'll be making it out to some conferences. I like to make it out to a couple of conferences a year and see what the latest greatest is. What's what's the, is AI still a thing? CDPs, you know, stay current and uh that's i mean really that's where you get to make the connections with some of the higher ups at the companies that's how i've built out my network primarily is going to these conferences and meeting the heads of the companies that you're doing business with something to be said for working the crowd absolutely yeah anyway people listening should uh follow you Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn, Joe Brown. Just search Joe Brown. I'm probably the only one that'll show up. Joe Brown, Frank Lita should probably pull me up. I've also got LinkedIn forward slash the Joe Brown, I think is my URL. So find me there. Joe at Frank Lita is my email address. Feel free to reach out. Happy to connect. Cool, Joe. We are grateful for your time this morning, man. Yeah. Thank you, guys.