Episode 7 – Brandon Redwine, Digital Marketing & BDC Director at Yokem Toyota

🎙️ Episode 7 – Brandon Redwine, Digital Marketing & BDC Director at Yokem Toyota

Podcast: The 100 Marketers Project

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

In this episode of The 100 Marketers Project, Andrew Street (Dealer OMG) and Matthew Davis (TradePending) sit down with Brandon Redwine, who oversees both digital marketing and BDC at Yokem Toyota in Shreveport, Louisiana.

Brandon shares how his team is consistently moving 120–130 units a month despite thin new car inventory, and why running both marketing and BDC gives him a unique edge in turning campaigns into sales. He dives into:

• How Yokem Toyota leverages a CDP (Fullpath) to unlock new opportunities.
• Why he believes traditional “lead forms” aren’t as critical as they used to be.
• His approach to balancing brand-building with immediate sales results.
• Campaign strategies for driving trades and equity mining with TradePending.
• The role of AI tools in reporting, creative, and dealership operations.

It’s a candid look at how one dealer marketer is blending data, technology, and people to keep business thriving—even when inventory is scarce.

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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.

This is an interesting conversation with a guy who runs the marketing department and the internet department, the BDC at Yokem Toyota. And he has very thin inventory in Shreveport, but he's still able to crush a hundred, twenty, a hundred, thirty units a month. So if you're interested in hearing how he's doing it, some of the tools he's using, the processes, the unlocking their CDP, this is a cool conversation for you. I hope you enjoy it. I'm Andrew Street, owner of dealer OMG. I'm with Matthew Davis from Trade Pending. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Brandon Redwine.

Hey, Brandon, who are you? Where do you work? What falls under your umbrella? Hey, Matthew. I actually work in Shreveport, Louisiana for Yokem Toyota. I've been here for about ten years. I'm the marketing and digital marketing and BDC director. I handle kind of both of those right now. It's awesome. I can kind of adjust the marketing flow and see the leads flow right back to my guys immediately. It's not something I have to look at it month in reports. It's all live with this both roles, I guess. Yeah, I was going to say there that's interesting because you talk about like handling marketing and handling BDC. That would seem like a lot, but it sounds like there's a benefit there being able to have that visibility in between the two departments. So it's not siloed, is it? Absolutely not. I've got a great staff to help me here. I think that makes a huge difference. But yeah, it's great to kind of have your hands in both of them. You can see the immediate effects of what you're doing. I mean, we've run campaigns in the past where later that day you'll see the result from a customer will be in that afternoon buying the vehicle. It's amazing. So being on the BDC side, do you have are you actually chatting with some of the customers, too? I try not to. But yes, if the phone rings after that third ring, I'll have to pick it up and just do my thing. Is that because you can't be trusted on the phone or you would rather have your team doing it? I'd rather have my team doing the phones. That is just not a great skill set of mine. I'm not a huge phone person. The reason I was asking is just because I think it's interesting being in the BDC as well as the marketing role. It's certainly a bit of a hybrid, but it goes hand in hand completely because there's like constant communication back and forth between leads getting generated and quality and BDC's response time. Like from from what I've seen, I've always wanted to like I'm always working with the marketing side. I want to put my head under the hood with the BDC for a little bit and to see what that world's like. And actually I'm gonna chat with a customer and see what comes out of it. See if I can do it. I don't know if I can. No, you gotta do it often or it's a skill you become rusty at for sure. Is the BDC just strictly handling inbound? Are they doing outbound? Is it all sales? Is there service in there? Yes, handling inbound, outbound, sales, service, pretty much everything except for our coalition department or parts department. They would handle those calls. What typically, I know it probably varies month to month, but what does that team see most success with in terms of booking appointments or ultimately turning it into revenue, sales or service side? We're seeing a lot more towards service side, especially being a Toyota dealership in a small city away from a large city. What I mean is we're in Shreveport. We're about two and a half hours from Dallas. You can look on a Dallas lot. You want a Camry, there's two or three lots over there that'll have sixty or seventy of them. We've got zero right now. We've got a couple in the pipeline that are pre-sold, but that's it. That's why I've kind of taken over the service role to push that. That's kind of what it looks like they're pushing us towards almost. People are just going over Two larger cities to pick up the vehicles they have immediately, it seems like. So what does that do for you guys as far as like strategy on what you're pushing? Is it more heavily weighted on other models and pre-owned inventory and fixed ops and the other tangibles that you can control? Yeah, I mean, we still sell sixty, seventy new cars a month. It's just kind of what we are set and we just have to push whatever they're telling us they're giving us. We don't have a whole lot of say in it. How do you think about balancing building the name and the brand of the dealership versus we need leads right now because we need to sell sixty, seventy, seventy five cars a month? Yeah, I think that's really they're the same thing. You have to brand the dealership and make the leads at the same time. Personally, I don't think leads are as important as they were ten years ago. People know not to fill out those boxes almost. That's interesting. You're the first person I've heard say that. I don't necessarily disagree. But at one point, I almost feel like leads can be the lifeblood of the business. But I'm way too biased here because we're essentially in the leads business. Yes. What do you think is driving that shift? Well, I don't think the lead part is the big. piece of the puzzle. You don't need that customer's information. If you do everything correctly and make it easy for them to get the information from their website, they don't need to put in a lead. They have it all right there. If they can see what vehicles you have, what service times are available, they can do it all online. They don't need to call somebody. They don't need to put in a lead. They don't need to be chased down and called eight, ten, twelve times. They can do it when they're ready. When they see what they want, they pop in and they buy it. And it's just an easier experience for everybody. Yeah, it makes it a little bit more of a nuanced conversation, which sucks. We'd like to be right and wrong, white and black, lead or not a lead, qualified lead, not qualified lead. And it's like, if it's true that like Gen Z, the younger kids... are twice as likely to never click ads as millennials. And millennials supposedly somewhere between ten or fifteen percent of millennials actually ever click ads. So now if we're looking at like five percent of our customer base are going to actually click on ads and then maybe a smaller fraction would fill out lead forms, it starts to get really challenging for marketers, for BDCs, for general managers, for everybody in the organization to really say, here, let's put our efforts into lead gen with some exceptions of like, we got, you know, super subprime. We can get people qualified here as an audience of people who tend to fill out more lead forms. Um, so it's like, it creates us as marketers to look at substitutions for leads for how campaigns are performing. Have you found like a good way to find some substitution that you're happy with? And that the, especially like the people that you want to look good in front of your general manager, the owner, like a substitution for just leads. That's like, Hey, this marketing. I think the big thing is if you have. your information available. People go to cars.com. They see the same car, the same price on car gurus. They know that car's on your lot. They're ready to pick it up. They've got all the information. They don't need you to call them back and forth, trying to get them in there. They have all the information right there. They can stop in and buy the car when they won't. Especially on our website, our mobile version, I changed it a little bit versus most dealers you'll scroll. You'll see like one car at a time, have like seven, eight CTAs, all sorts of discounts. On our website, I set it up more like a Amazon or Best Buy. You actually see five, six cars at a time on your search results. There's no reason to see all that information until you click on it and go to it, just like any other product on something you're trying to buy, Amazon or Best Buy or any of those sites. That makes a ton of sense. So you mentioned cars.com, Cars Guru, and in my mind, it made me start thinking about attribution. I want to come back to that. We're going to put a pin in that for the moment. So you guys have Proactively, you're running all sorts of marketing campaigns, as most marketing leaders do. What are you running? What channels are you running in? What's working for you? Oh, we've got a lot of channels we run that in. Of course, our third parties, we've got social media, social media ads, Google Performance Max, and that's just the digital side. We also have around billboards and TV ads, everything else. I think the biggest plus we're seeing right now is using a CDP full path, for example. It's just an automated marketing that kind of takes care of a lot of stuff that falls through the cracks. It just fills it out for us. Cool. It sounds like you're one of the handful of people that a lot of people buy into a CDP, then it's hard for them to really activate on it. with all these audiences of they've purchased, they're not doing routine services, they still live in Shreveport. Let's get back in front of them. How do we do that? Have you used your BDC at all with your CDP? Like found a way to be like, hey, let me create some audiences of people whose lease is about to expire and some of these like smaller audiences that could get a phone call. Yeah, we've got one. This is almost a kind of creepy one, but you guys know how well targeting and marketing works at this point. So one thing Fullpath will do is we can see users who are on our website the night before. It doesn't push them to our CRM immediately, but we have all this information that we can turn over to the sales rep. Hey, you sold this guy back three years ago. Last night he looked at these three tundras on the website. You need to call him, but you can't be creepy with this. So that's the biggest challenge with it. But yeah, the BDC can pick them out and let the sales rep kind of handle it from there. That's fascinating. So I know one area that you're having success with for marketing channels, marketing campaigns, you guys have been running value your trade campaigns. You're kind of doing that in conjunction with trade pending full path. Tell us what you're doing there, how you're doing it, how it's working. So yeah, we're running with that trade pending mainly because trade pending is so quick to for the customer. There's not a bunch of clicks and buttons and everything to check like you are with a KBB and some of the other ones. Well, full path will find our customers equity. anybody that's bought and has some kind of equity in their vehicle, let them do a vehicle evaluation. That way you are only picking out the ones who you won't see that, not the one that bought two months ago and see they're in a terrible upside down position. But at that point, you're targeting the right people. They will click on that email, see they have equity in their vehicle and people are quick to hop out of it into something else. I think one campaign we ran last month, set to everybody that has i think more than three thousand dollars in equity um we got two hundred something leads twenty two sales from it in thirty days good lord that's great yeah we might do about a hundred units hundred twenty units a month here so um huge plus huge well that's fantastic so will you keep that going oh absolutely it's um it's set to keep running as people fall into that equity bucket at certain points that will keep remarketing to them and yet just keeps them going. Do you frequency cap it so that like you're not hitting the same person every single month with the same message? Or do you think about it different? Yeah, definitely. It's got frequency caps. I'm really built into it. But you can also just have it do one, then let it fall into another bucket when that customer hits. Say they were at five thousand equity. Now they're at ten thousand. Let's market again. They see that bigger number. Hey, let's let's trade that vehicle in now. How are you guys marketing to them? Um, like what channels, social email and text message, uh, just a simple text message. Hey, so, so let's see what your vehicle's worth. There's the link to a trade pending, uh, app. They type in their vehicle and bam, there it is with, uh, several other in the market. Just gives them a range of what the vehicle's worth. Then, uh, they can kind of go from there. What is that through full path or is that through just the BDC? Um, that's through full path, but, uh, yeah, I mean, you could do that with any kind of equity list. Um, full patches makes a little bit easier and pulls it for you. Andrew, I feel like I can see your wheels turning. Yeah, I know. It's like, we're doing a ton of that just through social. And what we're finding is just that if we call out people for the vehicle that's in their driveway, that's in their garage, it's like, Hey, all, do you know somebody driving a Toyota all through the end of September? We're paying a premium for pre-owned inventory because of up, up, up. and click for the five-minute appraisal type of thing. But what we're seeing is that gets a much higher click-through rate and share rate. So if we're just saying like, do you know somebody with a Toyota? We do because that person has a Toyota because they're in our DMS as somebody who purchased from us and we know their equitable position. But what we see is they start to share that with their spouse. They start to like generate conversations before they start filling out the form or after they fill out the form. And I'm just like, I'm super fascinated about this, especially because I keep doing these podcasts with Matthew, who's the prince of vehicle appraisals. And so I'm continually like noodling around with how to help unlock more trades through from my desk. And I'm just curious to hear what was working for you. It sounds like SMS is the primary source for you guys. Yeah. It has a really high return rate. I mean, people get an SMS and they, I guess they've already used the dealership. They trust it. So it's a super quick click trade pending, super quick to go on the evaluation and bam, we have a lead. So bring it back around here. So you mentioned cars, car gurus, and now you're, we're also talking about other marketing channels and as marketers, like, We all love attribution, but we all admittedly acknowledge that it's extremely difficult to figure something out. And sometimes you just pick, well, we'll just go first touch, we'll go last touch, just so we have a baseline, something to start from. How are you thinking about attribution with all the marketing efforts you got there, Brandon? You know, at the end of the day, it comes down to the total profit. Attribution, you're going to use them all. Customers need to see that same vehicle, own CarGurus, own auto trader, own cars.com. That way they see your logo. They see that vehicle. They know that's where it's at. That's where they're going to pick it up from. Um, it's yeah, it's almost impossible to give attribution to one company versus the other. It's going to be multiple. It's the same thing. If we were shopping for cars too, we're not going to just go to CarGurus and look, we're going. Yeah. Yeah. Um, And you're going to have that cookie tracking you to each one of those sites and you're going to confuse the market or whatever dealership you buy that car from. Yeah, I don't really know how you handle it. I don't have a good answer on that one. Well, that's like, I don't think anybody knows. Go ahead, Andrew. No, it's just the same Rubik's cube. Everybody's slowly getting closer to being able to put their finger on. And then because of regulations and things like that, you start to lose attribution windows and you can kind of get close, but it's the same jam. Like I've done some help with like real estate ad agencies and stuff. They have the same, you need to get a sales guy belly to belly with the customer and sell them the car. where did they get started? What was that path? Did they go to the website then, you know, bounce and then see this display ad and see the email and it's like, Yeah, we can see some of that, but not enough to like make empirical like here's the exact recipe for every single dealership. It's just so like a Toyota dealership in Shreveport is so different than that Toyota dealership with ninety Camrys in Dallas. Like that's a completely different conversation to have and strategy and community that you guys work with. Like, are you guys doing much with getting out in front of the community with sponsoring things and cars on site at places? Cars on site, we'll do a couple events a year. We have a big film festival here. We're a big sponsor for it. We don't do a whole lot of cars out. We sponsor a ton of high schools and little sporting leagues and that type of thing with banners and whatnot. But usually moving the cars out. In Louisiana, it's a little bit difficult too. You have to have several weeks notice to a Louisiana vehicle or motor vehicle permission. You have to have, even though it's in our area, we still have to get permits from them and everything before we can pull a car out. It's a big to do to put cars. Yeah. It's interesting that you're like kind of comparing yourself to Dallas, but you still got that Napoleonic state law with some unique nuances too. That's so weird. Yeah, that's a nice way to call it. It's unique. That's why, you know, that's one of the reasons too. It's like we got to do different stuff. And, um, I, I always like gorilla marketing. I don't know why it's just like so fun to be what's creative. What can we put out? Who can we sponsor? Let's not talk about click through rates or cost per lead or lead, but like, it's just, here's the community. Here's a way that we can give back as a dealership and kind of connect our name with it. Um, is there a way that you're trying to like look for return from any of these like endorsements and high school sponsorships and stuff? It's one of those things, again, they might see that banner, then they're going to look on CarGurus, then they will see an ad on Google. Did the banner sell it? What sold it? I don't know. It's kind of more or less just helping the community at that point. It's sponsoring football jerseys and baseball equipment, that type of thing. Are you going to get a huge return on it? I don't know. I mean, the community goodwill, though, is worth its weight anyway. Yeah. And here's okay. This is, I know I'm cheating probably, and maybe this isn't good, but it's like, it's stupid. It's silly. We're silly. Gooses is a dealer. If we're saying, Hey, come by from us because we sponsor all these things and we give back to the community through these charitable efforts. But if it's one, it's one of the employees or somebody from the community or even somebody like from the marketing team to say like, if I was going to buy a Toyota this month, here's why I would come here. This company gives back, you know, like talking from a third party perspective of talking about these sponsorships, the money donated, the charity stuff that you guys do. And then right now they're doing, here's some OEM incentives maybe. I like to think it's tasteful. The ads we're running are getting a lot of engagement. And you can target these philanthropic people, but the jury's out. So, so it's, I'm just interested in finding a tasteful way to get something in front of people besides vehicles and prices and OEM incentives, but maybe be like, okay, Hey, we're part of the community. We employ two hundred thirteen people right now that are part of the community. And here's how we're giving back. That was not a question. That was interesting. That's on my, what I most wanted to comment on was the, the rating of this podcast might change if we're going to use foul language, like silly goose. And I don't know if you noticed there was a little double meaning in there. Foul language. Watch out. Oh, this is sliding fast. We might have to do, we might have to chop some of this out. Oh, stop it. Brandon, what are you doing with AI? Oh, AI, we've got mainly Fullpath is running as AI, but I mean, I've got a ton of other things I do with it. We're building a lot of our web banners, our billboards even we can build with AI. Yeah, it's a couple clicks and it's done at this point. It seems like at this point, a lot of the AIs are getting the words right, like the spelling, which was the huge issue for years. No, I mean, it's pretty much ready to go. We might have to crop it down a little bit. It doesn't fit the exact format for the billboard companies, but No, AI will build it. I recently started using it just for month end reports, putting all of my data into it that I have to submit to my AR department upstairs and for what our department produced. Just let AI build it. ChatGPG's been great for that one. Yeah. Are you getting like, I guess Toyota's kind of not, you're not getting any co-op stuff really, right? Not, Any AI co-op offhand that I can think of. Yeah. And Toyota's kind of funky with it. But Toyota's rad. What a brand to be able to work with. I feel like if there's any brand of car dealer or any brand of vehicle I could work with on your, in your shoes, it'd be Toyota. They make a hell of a good car and they freaking sell. My only problem is they last a little too long. I like one that falls apart a little quicker. so that we can get the higher customer lifetime value. I mean, that issue, you know, with my wife, she's got a four and we bought new in twenty sixteen. She's like, I want a new one, but it runs perfect. You really in ten years, the only thing we've had is a seat latch go out of it. I mean, it's an amazing vehicle for sure. Having that same discussion in my family right now. You're not alone. If you had to take a swing at all the stuff you're doing with AI right now, is it enabling you to do more with less or are you saving time, saving money? How do you think about that from just a business impact perspective? Yeah, I mean, you're getting a ton more done in a way quicker time. But yeah, it's just more and more that it seems to add on to your workflow every day. Oh, Andrew died. He disappeared. Andrew, are you there? Oh my God. I just getting a, getting a new camera here has made me get all kinds of new software. Isn't it? I'm impressed. I made it this far. You went to the black hole of webcam. All right. So what's what do you, what do you have up your sleeve for experiments for the back end of the year here? I'm not sure yet. We're still getting going with full path. I think that's where it's going to be for us this year. done pretty well so far and we'll keep rolling with it. Of all the capabilities that it has there, what percentage do you think you've tapped into so far? Twenty, thirty maybe. I mean, it's insane. Yeah, just what it does on its own is huge. If you could have probably two people just working the data inside that to build leads in addition to what it does, it's impressive. It really is. Andrew, I feel like we need to call Full Path and ask for them to sponsor this episode and we can get a little extra. Yeah, I know. I'm going to put my name in every time he says Full Path. I'm just going to switch it out. That's why I love these conversations because we just get exposed to the tools out there everyone's using. And otherwise, we're just kind of stuck in our own little bubbles of our own universe and thinking everything we do is amazing, which, of course, it is. But... There's it's a big world out there. Yeah. It's like, I make all of our account manager, like I don't make it, but it's like, you've got a car dealership guy. We've got, uh, a soda pot, like all these really short form bips of content like this should be, but we go a little bit long. Uh, for our staff to be aware of what's going on with legislation, what's going on with different manufacturers, what are some of the headwinds that our dealers could be facing, and what can we continually be doing to shift a little bit of what we're delivering, the conversations we're having with dealers to be able to provide help, whether it's with new cars, used cars, services, fixed stops, absorption, retention, vehicle acquisition, all these different things. Is there like... are there some like North stars that you try to follow to keep up to speed with, with what's going on in the industry or what's going on with digital or the best of BDC life? Um, for me, yeah, I'm in a, uh, NADA twenty group. Um, so we meet with, uh, yeah, of course, twenty other internet managers, marketing managers do the same thing. I, um, just three, four times a year talk about what works, what doesn't. Um, yeah, it's been a huge plus for, uh, for me personally. Um, Yeah. There's a, and there's like a little sliver of therapy. I feel like that comes with that kind of stuff. I'm like, Oh my God, I'm not alone. You have these same issues. What have you been able to do? I love a good twenty group. That's why I met Matthew really. We're in a vendor twenty group together. So I got, I got one more I'll throw at you here. That's a two part question, but I think they're both pretty easy to answer, but relatively, if you had to take a guess at how many tools you have to use to do your job, all the software providers you work with, what's a guess of how many of that is? And then the second part of that question is how many dashboards do you have? And do you want a number? Oh, um, fifteen to twenty at least. think every one of them has a dashboard nowadays. Everybody wants you to look at their dashboard. Yeah, there's a ton of them. I couldn't even begin to think. They all have dashboards. Andrew, when we're done with the hundred marketers project, we should do the hundred dashboards project. Yeah, I'm making a dashboard right now. I think dealers don't want to look at any more dashboards. Sometimes it happens. Of like, hey, here's your battlegrounds. Here's what we've got. That's enough. Absolutely. If somebody could build an all-in-one dashboard, that would be wonderful. A dashboard to rule them all. Yes. You know what? I just talked to somebody who was working on doing that. And I'm trying to remember who it was. And this is terrible for recording because I'm offering no help here. But I did talk to somebody about it. about building an all-in-one dashboard yeah it wasn't me no um well brandon any any shows on your radar are you gonna get out to nada possibly oh i don't know i would hope so um i know i've got a twenty group meeting coming up uh next month in new orleans of all places so um yeah i'll check that out and uh i don't know what's what'll come up next it sounds like uni you've got your like best idea contest submission like already ready to go with the Yeah, I think that's pretty easy. Yeah, almost writes itself there. I've been listening to, I don't know if you can see it, it's the New Orleans Jazz Vipers. They've been my favorite Friday morning music. They're good. Well, Brandon, where can people follow you, connect with you? You can't. Don't bug me. Okay. Do you have a fax machine that people can make? Possibly. No, I think I'm on LinkedIn, Facebook, or just Brandon at yocamboido.com. Don't bug me. I'm in the same way, but it's my job. But what if people need a golden doodle? Can you point them in the right direction? I could, yeah. I actually have plenty of those. All right. So Brandon's side hustle is marketing and BDC, but his true, what pays the bills is the Golden Doodles, but you're just doing a passion project at the dealership, it sounds like. Well, actually the Golden Doodles, we've transformed more into a boarding business now. We built a really nice kennel a couple of years back. We still have a couple of litters a year, two or three. But yeah, we turned it into a luxury kennel that's really unlike anything else in the area for sure. Holy smokes. Love it. Yeah. Noble Nose Boarding is what that's called. That's a great name. Thanks. It's okay to have your nose in the air for that one. I feel like with the role that you had, like with, it sounds like you have a lot of autonomy from your role to try stuff out and to figure out what you feel like is working, what's well, and be a good fiduciary for the dealership. And you have the, the flexibility to try new stuff out, which is straight up entrepreneurship. And it sounds like you've been able to get a good foothold with another business. Absolutely. Yeah. And, uh, I think learning with all the tools you have in the auto industry, it just, um, There's so much money and so much development into it. Going into other things, it's like you've got a leg up for sure. Awesome. Well, we appreciate you sharing your story with us. Yeah, man. I appreciate you having me. Thanks so much. Brandon Redwine. Thank you, my friend. Awesome, man. Thanks.

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