Episode 9 – Matt Like, E-Commerce Director and Marietta Parente, Regional Marketing Director at Morgan Auto Group

🎙️ Episode 9 – Matt Like, E-Commerce Director and Marietta Parente, Regional Marketing Director at Morgan Auto Group

Podcast: The 100 Marketers Project

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

In this episode of The 100 Marketers Project, we sit down with Matt and Marietta of Morgan Auto Group, one of the largest and fastest-growing dealer groups in the U.S. They share how they’ve scaled marketing and e-commerce across more than 70 rooftops while keeping operations efficient and customer-focused.

From navigating acquisitions and rebrands to refining lead management and leveraging AI, Matt and Marietta open up about the real challenges—and wins—behind managing growth at scale.

Learn how their teams balance brand building with lead generation, why website speed and form completion rates matter more than ever, and how dealer groups can evolve smarter with each acquisition.

🎧 Tune in for a masterclass in dealer marketing, e-commerce strategy, and operational excellence.

Topics Discussed

• Scaling marketing and e-commerce across 70+ dealerships
• Best practices for seamless dealership acquisitions and rebrands
• Website optimization: form completion rates, CTA strategy, and site speed
• Communicating effectively with existing customers post-acquisition
• Balancing brand building and lead generation spend
• Using CDPs (Customer Data Platforms) for smarter targeting
• Turning CRM and AI tools into sales productivity engines
• Importance of manager involvement in lead follow-up and KPIs that matter
• Reducing vendor and script overload for better site performance
• Building consistency and collaboration between marketing and e-commerce teams

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Transcript

How do you take an auto group from a handful of stores to over seventy stores without losing your edge? In this episode of The Hundred Marketers Project, Matt and Marietta from the Morgan Auto Group share how they've mastered going through acquisitions from the marketing side and from the e-commerce side, how they built playbooks that actually work for the dealerships to be able to scale, and how they've redefined KPIs that matter the most. If you're into automotive marketing, into growth, you're in the right spot. This is Hundred Marketers Project.

All right, well, Matt and Marietta, could you guys give us a quick intro to you guys and what you do for the group? Marietta, you can kick us off. Sure. So my name is Marietta Parente. I'm one of the regional marketing directors. We have three regional marketing directors within the Morgan Auto Group. So my role is to help over seventy of our dealerships. Me personally, I work with about twenty five to thirty of our dealerships across multiple brands. And just to help maximize, obviously, the marketing impact that I have on each of the stores. So that means everything from digital media, SEM, social CRM strategy and aligning with Matt and some of our other e-commerce directors. And so that is my primary responsibility. All right, Matt, it sounds like you're more on the e-commerce side, is that right? Yeah, that's exactly right. So I'm one of several e-commerce directors that we have for the Morgan Auto Group. And I've been with us, I think I'm in my fourteenth year now with Morgan and my roles have shifted in a big way, especially since Marietta came on board. And so I have, like Marietta said, we have about seventy four active rooftops in the Morgan Auto Group, and I support twenty one of them in my region. And my job as an e-commerce director kind of starts where Marietta's ends. So she generates the traffic and I work with the teams in the stores to turn those leads into sales, essentially. So we've got a lot of oversight on the dealership website where Marietta and I kind of tag team a lot of things. And then I have my own thing in the CRM and with our sales teams, you know, to come up with best practices and training and accountability and things like that. Well, on paper, it sounds like you guys have a pretty clear guardrail between your roles and how you guys kind of fit those pieces together. Cause I've, there's a lot of groups where it's just like, you know, the internet director, BBC manager, marketing department, you know, it guy over the CRM implementation. And it just seems to kind of like bleed together a lot of times. Yeah. Sometimes that's one person, maybe two. Yeah. But it sounds like Marietta's got a gift for finding ways to help generate leads that fall into your lap. I would say so. And you're able to distribute those accordingly. Is that kind of how you guys are packaged up? Essentially. Marietta works closely with our advertising agencies. We have a couple that we work with. And once they get those leads into the CRM, then that's where my job kicks in. And we work well together. Let me throw something at you. So you guys have, uh, had a little bit of growth the past couple of years, just a little bit there. Matt's laughing. He's like, what has, what has changed for you both? Marietta, we'll hand it over to you first. What has changed in terms of the growth in my position? Absolutely. Yeah. Oh yeah. I started with the Morgan group about three years ago, actually three years, three years in October. At the time, we had two regional marketing directors, and we were dividing probably, I want to say, six e-stores between the two of us. And so our travel was quite a bit of travel from Tampa all the way to Miami. So I was working with forty-one stores. We did take on an additional regional marketing director, so that was much more helpful to take that on. all of that marketing and divide it into three regional marketing directors. So I would say my role has changed now with having added support, which is immensely helpful. Additional e-commerce directors like Matt and the support team that work together really well and collaborate and set the store up for success. I've learned a lot with acquisitions. You know, prior to acquiring additional dealerships, I cannot say I was an expert with, you know, learning how to set up a new website with Matt's guidance, because he's really good at that. One of many things he's really good at being, I think, much more experienced when it comes to what is involved in an acquisition. How do you build out a website? What are the things that you have to think about and keep top of mind? to set that new store that you're taking over up for success without a huge dip in traffic, so. Yeah. I would say the same on my end, honestly, because we have expanded and our growth has been rapid and it has been very involved. And so when I started, I think we had maybe seven, six or seven stores. And it has been crazy to see a scale in such a short time. And obviously, change management has been one of the biggest challenges in a role like mine, as well as Marietta's. So we've gotten a lot more rooftops under our umbrellas, respectively. And one of the biggest challenges, I think, has been know how do we make acquisitions or rebranding things like that as seamless as possible and so having gotten the privilege of attending many an acquisition we've established some best practices and kind of like a uh you know playbook of sorts to acquire a new store and go from a to z as quickly as possible with minimal interruption to our business, you know, in our operations. So that is, you make it sound easy. It's a circuit. Here's a playbook. We got a framework. Yeah. You know, I will, I will see bullet points. I will say to every every time we do an acquisition, we add to that playbook. Right. We learn by our mistakes. Every acquisition, we take a look back and say, what could we have done better? Where did the process slow down? Where did we have hiccups? And so the next time we have an acquisition, we're more prepared. So I would say, you know, each acquisition we have improved. Most recently was Honda Port Richey. I think that was my most seamless acquisition as far as syndication, website launch, getting an agency up and running, a marketing plan, evaluating the marketing in that particular market, knowing who your competitors are. So now it's more second nature. And did you guys rebrand with that new Honda store? Yeah, it was previously Ocean Honda and we changed it to Honda Port Richey. So when you do a name change, there's also a lot of things that you have to think about that you go and update and change to make sure you're routing all of that traffic to the new website and all of the different social platforms and such are updated. So what's been one of the things you feel like you got dialed in when it comes to acquisitions and What's been one of the biggest lessons learned? Like, we never want to do that again. take that matt or you want me to sure yeah i can jump in there so i think one of the things that we have really gotten dialed in with the acquisitions is dealer websites and that always comes along with an acquisition you've got to change from you know the current dealers or the you know old company's website to your you know company's website and that is one of the things that we have i think really kind of gotten dialed in so you know from from start to to the end of it where CTA placement pricing disclaimers landing pages all of that kind of stuff we've gotten it kind of down to a science and we have a lot of consistency within our group and in our regions and we do a lot of things the same way so after so much time and experience doing those things Marietta and I can take a an old Co's website and turn it into a Morgan website pretty quickly. We are kind of at the mercy of the speed of the vendors oftentimes, which can be a challenge. But that I think is one of the things we have dialed in. And one of the things I think that is the most challenging is taking people who know nothing about your CRM nothing about your digital retailing tools, nothing about anything that you do with your company and trying to make them an expert is. Here it is all at once. Yeah. And you know, being able to, you know, serve our, our owners needs, which is to get everyone up and running as quickly as possible. Right. So there's this kind of a delicate balancing act. And it sounds like, how many different website vendors do you guys have? Just a myriad of different website providers? Are you trying to distill it? We deal with three different website providers currently. That's not as chaotic as it could be. And do you guys have a playbook from the marketing side when you guys pick up a new store, like some unique things that you want to do to help usher the customers back in that are loyal customers already and things like that? That's a great question. We definitely want to clearly communicate, you know, to the existing customers, just the importance of how important it is to us to continue to provide, you know, that same excellent experience that they've been previously given if they're a repeat customer and to communicate that there's, you know, new management, new ownership and what that looks like and who we are. um so in many cases we're communicating and reaching out to the existing database you know with either like an email blast or communicating um that messaging on social platforms but um or through direct mail that's because that's what i think i i don't have a ton of data on this but every time because there's so many people like us that have had like a front row world-class education and dealership MNA just by the, the, the nature of the industry going through all these acquisitions and coming up with ways for us to ensure like something I've seen with a lot of the stores that we've worked with is just like a dip in the service retention really quickly as there's a rebrand, as there's some confusion and staff changes. And especially if like there's a name change on the, on the sign out front, And whatever we can do from our desks to like, okay, let's just, let's just focus all of our marketing on our own database. And if we have more budget, then we get in conquest and blah, blah, blah. But like, let's just make sure we own our footprint of the customers that you've already earned before we start trying to look at scratching a new month, a new month and getting new customers. And let's make sure that, that we own this. And so I guess it's just like, kind of, it sounds like Marietta, you're able to try to come up with messaging that helps convey why it's a good story that this dealerships had a subtle change. Absolutely. And you know, taking care of your existing customers is a cost from a marketing perspective. It's a lot less expensive to do that than it is to go out and try to conquest and add to that additional customer base. Obviously, eventually you want to do that. But the primary focus is to make sure that that existing customer relationship with the dealership continues and that they receive the same level of service, if not better, when we take over. That's smart. Is there anything from like the I guess from like the e-commerce side that you like to do pretty quickly to change anything or is it just let's get some leads? One thing I was thinking about as y'all were just talking here is we take a very similar approach and strategy when it comes to e-commerce, like you were saying. protecting your own before expanding, right? So we think about, as soon as we come into a new store and we see all of the different lead providers that we have set up, oftentimes we carry on what the previous dealer had. Sometimes we just, chop it all and start from scratch right or there's a little bit of you know mix and match there but once we have that we have our own company benchmarks that we like to get dialed in before we just start adding marketing spend right so it's really optimizing the opportunities that we're already generating and once that is optimized then we can start adding more lead providers and chasing new business but it doesn't make any sense to to really do that if you know we're closing half of where we ought to be with the leads we have so it's a little bit of a balancing act between your you know how are you performing and how much are you spending It's cool, and it sounds like you've been there. You said you've been there thirteen years, Matt? Yes, I just finished my thirteenth, and now I'm in my fourth year with Morgan. I said my thirteenth wedding anniversary on Tuesday last week. Yeah, we were making big commitments at the same time. And so it sounds like you've had a seat at the table from a small mid-sized group to helping set up those key performance indicators that the group might want to look at as you're adding stores. Yeah. What are some of the bigger KPIs that leadership likes to look at? without giving away too much of our secret sauce i'll say that we at morgan have selected a few different kpis especially in the realm of e-commerce we have them for marketing we have them for everything else too but in e-commerce you know historically we have focused so heavily on closing percentages as an industry right and you know, it took some time and some convincing. But after a while, we've kind of gotten our executive leadership to take a step back from using closing percentages as the measuring stick. Right. Because at the end of the day, when you think about closing percentage, it's a very good and relevant KPI and it's good to measure your success by. But it's not, in my opinion, the most important because it can drive behaviors that will potentially you know reduce your your vendors right so if you've got a lead source that's underperforming from your benchmark let's say you want to close ten or twelve or fifteen percent of your leads right and you've got a lead source that's delivering you an additional ten fifteen sales a month but maybe they don't close over eight or nine percent so now you've got the store wanting to chop this vendor because it's not reaching know adequate performance levels yet it's delivering you incremental business and you should take that mindset and extrapolate it to the ridiculous let's say you only have one lead a month and you sold it every month and you've got a hundred percent closing ratio you would sell one car and you would be hurting, right? So we have to kind of mix those things. So as we've stepped back from closing percentage, we're now looking at other KPIs that lead to that, such as engagement or how many of our internet leads and how many of our phone calls actually made it into the showroom. So that's kind of how we have started to approach things as we move forward. And that's really been essential as we've explored new initiatives, things that drive a lot more leads that may not be the highest quality in terms of closing percentage, like our CDP. We utilize a CDP and that can give us new leads from known customers that haven't actually converted just yet right so we know if they go on our website and they interact with our ten second trade value you know ten ten second trade value trade pending tool but they don't submit a lead we'll get their information we know that they're on our website interacting with that and so those come over as leads but you know those aren't going to close at as high of a rate as somebody who's naturally in market ready to go wants a trade value gives us their information right So that's just kind of the balancing effect, right? Yeah, I really appreciate the mindset shift there is when you talk about closing rates and immediately get to attribution and you start talking about attribution with any marketer and they're like, oh my God, my head's going to explode, right? How can you attribute everything to the first source or last source and then all the AD touch points in the middle? So it's refreshing to hear you guys taking a different approach. I'm going to throw a question to Marietta there, so. How do you think about balancing building the brand in a local market for a dealership, whether it's post-acquisition or not, with the Morgan Auto Group, just the name of the company brand, all the way down to where Matt and his people, we just give us leads right now. We need to sell cars. How do you think about that spectrum of marketing spend? Yeah, it's funny. We never get that question. You know, we need leads right now. I think there's definitely a balance, you know, between the two because it's important, obviously, to the both are essential. I think you can't just only chase leads. Right. Because you end up commoditizing yourself and it's you know, you live in like a race to the bottom on price. If you only invest in brand, you risk having empty showrooms. So we kind of follow like, you know, I would say a seventy thirty rule where sixty to seventy percent, you know, towards kind of activation and lead generation. And then thirty to forty percent towards activation and I'm sorry, sixty, seventy percent towards brand and then thirty to forty percent towards lead generation industry research. And there's companies out there that you guys are very familiar with Google and Nielsen, they say. This is kind of their philosophy on it too. And the two should reinforce each other. So every demand ad should still carry a brand story, not just a price point. So we try to marry both of those and find that healthy balance. Where do you like to do the branding? Like what platforms do you like to get messages out there? I mean, connected TV, digital audio, you know, when you're looking at branding and high funnel traditional, I would say there's a certain portion that we like to allocate towards Facebook. That's not as high funnel, obviously, as traditional branding. But the conversions are typically lower on Facebook, as you guys know. But we do a lot of streaming, you know, OTT for I think that's primarily where a lot of our money is placed. Also, YouTube. Do you get your hand involved in the creative much? We do, yes. Yeah, we do work hand in hand with the production team and make sure that the creative is aligned with what the customer is seeing in the commercial to the online experience when they visit our website. Even down to the Google ads in a paid search that are served up and on Facebook, that messaging consistency across all platforms, I think is very vital to have that ad recall and connection. So it's not confusing for the customer. Yeah. Oh, go ahead, Andrew. No, it's just easy for like, that's what my parents think I do is like creative stuff. And like, where's the beef type of marketing when you get sucked so quickly into analytics and conversion rates and attribution kind of stuff. but it is like coming up with that message of here's the hook that's gonna make you listen to the rest of our ad on OTT, on social. And it's, you know, are you looking to level up your career? Here's a story of our recruiting that we're doing right now. And then a call to action is to, click here and tap on this application form or you know to have it built out in a cool creative way that no other dealerships in the market are doing like why everybody else is running oem assets and doing carousel ads on social it's like is there something that we can do it's going to take minimal work for us to have a better creative message than the other dealerships i think it's i think that's one thing that's missed um pretty frequently you know we look at obviously a lot of our competitions you know advertising and website because what you want to know what you want to show something that's going to differentiate yourselves and i think one thing that's commonly missed is having a unique selling proposition a usb every dealership needs a unique selling proposition you know why should i go to this kia store and drive past two kia stores what is it that i'm going to get um differently you know at that store Most recently, we created one actually for one of our dealerships, Kia of Leesburg. And so like we talked about, what are we going to do to make a difference and have a customer drive, you know, to this dealership? So without giving all three away, one of the three was including, you know, maintenance on your new vehicle for three years. You know, I think that's something that's a strong hook that resonates with customers that they appreciate that gets them to come into the dealership. And it's a lot like, even if you grab like the OEM incentive and just where the dealership taking credit for it, that we have two percent financing available. And, you know, if I was looking for a vehicle right now, um, with a good loan, here's where I would look and look, it's us because we have this, or we have military discounts and let's go after veterans, even though maybe all the other people carrying our brand have, but we're the ones hopefully taking advantage of it and putting the message out versus just, you wanna see cars, here's cars. We have cars and prices. And Matt, you had mentioned the CDP. I love the evolution of CDPs and people figuring out how to unlock their CDP. Are you guys able to use it and deploy marketing on the CDP right now, it sounds like? Yeah, we sure are. And that's mostly in Marietta's wheelhouse, but there is some overlap there once those leads... come in from the CDP to our CRM. But Marietta works really in tandem with the ad agency and some of our executive level folks to create audiences from our CDP. And it cleanses that customer record and creates that unified customer record out of all the places we have their information, whether it's CRM, DMS, call monitoring, service scheduler, all that kind of stuff. goes into one spot. And so Marietta, the other marketing directors, they do a really good job of kind of segmenting out these audiences and reducing waste in our marketing spend. And have you been able to like distill any of these audiences down small enough to where it makes sense to distribute those to people that are in sales and just have them do outreach? Or is it more just on the out the inbound advertising with email, social? Yeah, I can answer that. I think audience sizes, sometimes that can be a big challenge in growing the audience sizes with the CDP. A lot of the audience sizes are very small, right? I would say And a case where you would want your sales team, where you have a valuable enough audience to make that outreach would be like, for example, your service to sales. We use Automotive Mastermind at a lot of our dealerships, and we're able to identify audiences that have a BPS score, so a buyer propensity score, right, between fifty to a hundred. export that audience, you know, that's a valuable audience for a salesperson to reach out to, you know, most likely those customers are in an equity situation, um, or they might be nearing like the end of their lease. So we utilize, um, audiences like that for that one-to-one outreach from a sales sales associates. It's cool. Like if you get these audiences that are even like, uh, ten thousand people, that's big enough to deploy ads to them. And on social, if you're getting like a ten dollar cost per thousand, That's a thousand bucks to reach everybody. Then you want to get them five times. Okay. There's let's put five thousand bucks into owning our customer database and then let's look outside of there. So the economics start making a lot of sense too, once you're able to make these audiences. Absolutely. And the agencies do a really great job automating that trigger-based marketing. And we are able to do that a lot of times through email, through social, and on Google. So we're working towards texting. We're not quite there yet, but that will be in our near future. So I would like to talk about buttons for a moment. not sure buttons but like jacket buttons you know just general general buttons trade printing uh we do many things but we're in the button business to some degree the call to action buttons get a trade in and they get a payment and i know that the morgan auto group has has been involved in a project i don't think the goal was not to like improve the call to action buttons on the site and the cta stack but that's been an outcome of it what has that project been And what have you seen kind of now from that? Yeah, that was a really great project that we collectively worked on and collaborated with you guys on. So we wanted to determine what is the appropriate amount of CTAs, call to actions, to have on an SRP? What are the appropriate amount of CTAs to have on a VDP without it really interrupting customers' experience on shopping on a website. Andrew asked earlier about benchmarks, and one of the benchmarks that we look at when we are implementing CTAs and buttons on the site is our form completion rate. And that's one of the reasons we ended up going with trade pending. I mean, you guys know that you're at, I mean, I think integrated with ninety nine percent of our stores. If you're not, it's because Possibly the OEM doesn't allow us to have you, but we utilize trade pending because when we were tracking those form completion rates with those tools and those CTAs, there was no denying that trade pending did have the highest form completion rate on your payments tool, also on your value or trade tool, and in many cases on your get pre-qualified, which is why we've had that placement be pretty consistent throughout our stores. And I didn't intend to necessarily set it up like that. So it was like a trade pending plug, but thank you for that. I didn't do anything. I'm just, I'm just the marketing guy. But I think what I like about it is that you guys are actually intentional about the process and the project where most times you just can go to any dealer website and they're just slapping stuff on there because the vendors told them to, or even mandated it. And I love it that you guys have been smart about it. You've had a process and you have been intentional. So, Kudos for that. And there wasn't a question there. So Andrew, please have a question. Yeah. Have you guys tried paid media to drive vehicle appraisals in? absolutely campaigns yeah that include you know terms that are related to vehicle acquisitions vehicle acquisition i think will forever be you know a focus for stores um obviously it's less expensive to acquire a vehicle from the street than it is to go to the auction but we do have paid search campaigns that are geared towards driving traffic to um trade pendings trade tool that work really well we build out landing pages on our website um making it easy for our customer to kind of go through that process regardless if they buy a car from us or not um we'll be willing to buy their car so that's generated a lot of additional you know opportunities for the store to acquire vehicles have you or the the agency that you guys are working with found any success through paid social to get vehicles off the street We do have some advertising dollars allocated towards those types of campaigns. I think it's more of a higher, broader approach. I think that the conversions are not as good as they are on certain paid search campaigns. But we like to capture both, right? We don't just focus on low funnel. We also want to interact with customers when they're in that consideration phase of trading in their vehicle too. So I think it's important to be present in both of those areas. Yeah, what I think that's worked sort of well for us for acquisition, like my whole world is just social, like paid social, is going after folks who drive our brand. And it's like the message is like, do you know somebody driving a Kia? All during the month of October, we're doing a buyback campaign because of market conditions. We need to stock our lot, go through this five minute appraisal. And the idea of like calling people out for what they drive has been working well. And if they're just on the title and their wife drives it, that you see them sharing it back and forth and it's like, okay, this, these ads are getting a lot of traction with people sharing and commenting. And then here's the application costs that we're seeing. And then there's the story of working closer, closer with the dealer. Are these turning into trades and are they turning into new customers or repeat customers to see if the juice is worth the squeeze? I think Facebook campaigns, you guys have probably heard of Facebook events. It's a little different than your traditional paid social, but we do a lot of Facebook events where we have the trade-in messages or the conquest messaging to trade out of one brand to conquest into getting into another that are really effective. And I do watch those and I watch how many customers claim their vouchers and those appointments are set and it's nice to see when those customers come in. So we do acquire vehicles that way as well. Do you feel like that's working for all the brands that you guys represent? Are there specific brands that tend to work better? I think there's specific brands and specific markets where it works. Yeah, I would agree with that. And I'd say, too, that the marketing is just one aspect of one piece of the puzzle here when it comes to acquisition. You have to have variable teammates who are following up with these leads that know how to keep the focus on what is that customer's primary buying motivation. What is it that they're trying to accomplish? And so often dealers will get a lead from somebody who might be interested in selling their car. And the first thing that they want to do is talk about what do you want to buy? And it just shuts before it starts. So having that sense of urgency on getting an appraisal and maximizing their trade value and using the data points, the trade pending or whatever providers we're using is offering up to that customer to drive the value. and get them into the showroom. So we collect leads all day long, but if we don't follow up with them correctly, then we'll end up with a lot of waste. Well, you can't talk about sales and leads and follow up these days without somebody tripping over the word AI. Are you guys deploying that in any way when it comes to lead follow up, lead management, lead handling, rerouting, lead leading, anything? Yes, yes we are. And that was actually a big part of our decision to choose a new CRM provider, which we did about two, a little over two years ago. It has been a very long and worthwhile project, but one of the benefits of the CRM company we chose was that it has AI built in to many areas of the CRM, not just customer follow-up. And that's a big vision of this company is the direction they're gonna head is, implementing more AI to just make the dealer's lives easier. And so, but as it stands now, we use AI for customer follow-up. It's basically made email templates obsolete. I mean, there's really no reason to have to pick an email template and hit send anymore when we have ai that can read the entire lead the conversation history the deal like the purchase history the service history we have all these data points that we can personalize our outreach you know our cold outreach when we first get that lead for a much higher quality engagement than we would have had otherwise. So we use it for that. I'll also use AI for internal communication, you know, with my teams or whether it's my recap email to our executive team at the end of the week. And I just keeping track of my notes from everything we've done this week. There's other areas in which we use AI for, you know, just getting data or extracting, you know, analyzing large data sets to help drive decisions that we make. I'm laughing. I'm laughing because I just tried to run a couple of big data sets through ChatGPT. Oh, if you used five, just forget about it. I switched to four. And I ran it through and I said, compare these two data sets. And it came back with stuff that wasn't in either data set. And I was like, well, where did you get this from? They're like, well, oh, I apologize. I made this up. Yeah, I'm just hallucinating. Marietta, how are you? Yeah, yeah. Marietta, how are you finding AI to be a part of your workflow these days? I use it daily. Um, most interestingly today, you know, obviously four to eight hours until our month end close for business for September. And so I, a lot of times I'll, I'll communicate with stores where they'll ask me, Hey, can you help me out? Can you do a deep dive? I feel like something's off, right? Traffic has stopped. It's slowed down. And there are so many things that you can look at right there. You can go through the website and look at the experience of the website. Is everything functioning? Have I called every phone number? Are you going to look at Google ads? You're going to look at the conversions on Google ads. Same thing with GA four. And so today when I was sending the most updated district reports to, I'm actually even going to pull up the email to reference it to you guys, to our ad agencies that we work with, we have five different agencies that we work with on a monthly basis. And so I thought, I know I'm going to forget some things to go through and check, but I did use, you know, um, chat GPT to create a basically, uh, marketing checklist, if you will, that, you know, kind of outlines what's important, um, for a dealership agents, or I'm sorry, for an agency to, to look at. And I sent it to them and I'll even read it to you, but I put, you know, I put this checklist together for your marketing efforts you know an audit if you will like please have your team go through each of the items the ones that apply to you to help determine the deficiencies in our lead count uh this store in particular we're um struggling a little bit with our lead opportunities and it basically just gave me a whole you know audit and checklist from website analytics to paid media um seo and organic visibility and then uh social media and reputation so anything that could impact um lead opportunities and traffic that's badass yeah i guess i'll reference something from today Yeah, because it's easy to have like a fruitful conversation with somebody who knows their stuff on the other end with the agency and on the dealer side and then like the follow through of, okay, what all do we promise? Can we encapsulate that? Can we look at, okay, I've got some homework to do to pull in some data to help us make more educated decisions based on what this specific store needs, not the whole group, but just the snowflake of a dealer that has its own unique needs. And let's speed up that process of coming up with the solution. I think the world's becoming a better place is the point of my, what I'm saying. It's definitely a more efficient way to go about it. Yeah. Well, what, uh, it sounds like you guys have some stuff on the roadmap too, that you haven't quite launched yet with texting anything else big on the, on the radar for you guys. Yeah, I would say there is. We have a lot of corporate initiatives that we have running at the current time, but one of the biggest ones that is kind of part of our secret sauce as well, like I can't really give you guys too much here, but I'll say that there is one thing that we have found as a common denominator between all of our higher performing stores. And so, of course, we want to take that. We want to get all of our stores using this effort here. And so what we've determined is that the stores that enjoy the highest closing percentages and the highest other measurable KPIs that we use to gauge success in our operations is our manager's involvement. with the leads and so one you know big initiative that we've come up with recently is to track our sales leaders activity not just our sales people our internet manager our bdcs but the key decision making managers in the dealership and how often are they engaging with our customers via the CRM, our virtual showroom. So we have a report we've kind of put together that kind of highlights those opportunities to see where have we offloaded the majority of our follow-up to an internet manager or a BDC and how much do we have our key decision-making managers involved with the leads. And I think that is going to be one of the most impactful initiatives that we have launched ever. That's cool. Are you guys looking at marketing as a direction to help with that one-to-one outreach from the GM and from the managers or are you, or is it just like the general managers themselves? How much of a silver spoon do you have to, like, give a silver platter, I guess is the way to ask that. It doesn't make it as simple as possible. Here's the list. Here's who you're calling. I have taken all of our employees that are performing at an acceptable level or, you know, achieving excellence in that department. And I have done sort of a meta-analysis on, you know, what are these managers doing all day long? And why are they getting the results they're getting? And it comes down to activity. Right. It comes down to the quality of that activity. And so for my stores to need a silver spoon or like how to figure out, well, how do I get into the green? You know what I mean? So I've taken that analysis and boiled it down to the right number of phone calls, text messages and e-mails. every day and how long that's going to take every day for all of our managers to accomplish this and so you know the the quantity of the follow-up is just one piece but then dialing in that quality of follow-up as well is what really puts a bow on it and it makes it effective I would love to have more of that of like, hey, here are our top clients. These are your best friends. These are the people you need to concentrate your energy and outreach and networking. Amen. Amen. Marietta, what's on your radar for the back half of the year, the back third quarter of the year? I think something that we just... Almost fourth quarter. Catch up, Matt. I'm just kidding. I think I will say one thing is kind of a common known thing, but I'll tell you something that is not necessarily new, but something we continue to work on that I think is really important and it doesn't cost the dealership any more money to do, but it is very impactful, is focusing on the site speed of your website. We did an audit most recently of you know, the UTM codes and all the tags that we had listed on our websites. And I mean, it was quite shocking. There was a lot of, you know, things on there that companies were no longer doing business with that were like slowing down the speed of our website. I mean, you can have a perfect advertising plan, but if your website experience is horrific and it's slow and it's annoying, you're going to have, you know, your engagement rate is going to be really low. So we focus heavily on engagement rate and making sure that we only have like the bare minimum of scripts on our site that are needed and so that we can make sure that our site speed and experience is really easy for our customer to to navigate through um it's not that easy just to to monitor that i mean we have a vendor vetting process every monday so anytime we add a different company a different product and matt knows this because we've been doing business with trade pending for a long time but Anytime we add trade pending to a store, even though we do business with you, we send that submission through vendor vetting so that we can track all of these tools that are going on the website so that it doesn't get out of control and kind of bog down that site speed. So form completion rate and site speed, I would say, are two things we focus heavily on. I feel like that should be in a world that's perfect. That should be on that vendor to be like, okay, we're no longer working with them. Let's pull our stuff out. You guys just happen to have the internal staff to know the value of pulling scripts off of a website and codes and GTMs and all the stuff. you know, the containers and all that stuff is just dangerous. It's just, it slows the site down and other vendors can now work with competitors. And now they have a growing list of everybody who's coming to your website to be able to retarget and to, you know, pull data from them. where the dealers just kind of left exposed. So it's cool. Like not a lot of dealers talk about taking old scripts off of their website because that's number sixteen thousand on the list of things that are important. But it's pretty important. Our CEO, Tom Moore, does not he does not skip a beat. I mean, he he will tell you every single time, make sure that, you know, we have a designated person who has a running Excel spreadsheet that has a list of every script and every, you know, button and vendor. that we interact with and have on our website. So we don't rely on the website companies to keep track of that. We've realized that is wishful thinking. And in many cases, we do ask our vendors to kind of be a safety net to make sure that they back us up in that process. And a lot of them do a great job to help with that. Well, you guys do a great job of representing, for one, yourselves and you seem like incredibly capable people and for what you do. And also just like representing the Morgan Auto Group. Like you guys make it seem like such a well-oiled machine. So don't tell me if I'm wrong with any of these things. But anything people should know, like, do you guys want anybody to come follow you on LinkedIn or anything like that? Sure. The more the merrier. I check my LinkedIn once every six months when I remember to... That's about how often I hear from Matt. Yep. Or they come like us on social media on all of our stores in the Morgan Auto Group. Yes. Even better. And buy and service and trade in with them and maybe parts. Who knows? There you go. Well, Matt and Marietta, it's been a pleasure talking with you guys. And Matthew, it's good to see you out of your studio where I look maybe a little bit more professional than you for the first time. Yeah, for the first time for everything. Guys, it was a pleasure. And thanks for joining me. Thank you, Matthew. And you too, Marietta. Thank you. Yeah, we'll see you soon, guys. Take care. Bye-bye.