The 2017 Dealers United Wrap-Up
2017 brought with it a bunch of talented new team members, strong digital partnerships, a collection of game-changing product developments, and BIG company milestones for Dealers United. Check out this 2017 Wrap Up to see everything we did this year:
January
- We added 222 new dealer-members in just 31 days thanks to a crazy-successful Facebook ad campaign, and shipped out 222 infamous “Get Out!” buttons!
- The entire team was registered for training through DigitalMarketer, kicking off DU’s year-long certification obsession.
- Pete helped install the first-ever Digital Marketing class at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee campus.
- Our dealers unlocked the power of Offline Conversions to help measure actual vehicles sales on Facebook.
🖐️ Customer High-Five: Direct Auto Mall received 69 leads from their Facebook Lead Ad campaign for pre-owned vehicles.
February
- We finalized “The Perfect Craigslist Template” and added it to our growing resource library.
- Ava joined Dealers United’s Facebook team.
- We formed a new team to help manage dealers’ digital accounts: the Performance Team!
- Pete, Brooke, and Cara became Customer Value Optimization (CVO) certified; Miranda received her Paid Traffic certification.
- We heard from our dealer-members about an industry-wide market slowdown in new vehicle sales.
🖐️ Customer High-Five: Only Used Trucks in West Palm Beach Florida generated 131 leads with Facebook Lead Ads.
March
#DMLab party at #TCS2017 #360 #TeamDU – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA
- The DU Team and Darren D’Altorio (our SEO expert) visited San Diego, CA and attended Traffic & Conversion 2017.
- The Marketing Team went to Arizona and set up some seriously strategic marketing campaigns with Sixth Division.
- Travis started his webinar series to help dealers combat the new sales plateau and focus on pre-owned sales.
- We announced our Craigslist Monthly Payment Generator.
- Dealers United became Digital Marketer’s first automotive Certified Partner.
- The DU office played a prank on Pete while he was out of office.
🖐️ Customer High-Five: Lost Pines Toyota was featured in our dealership Success Stories after jumping on the Facebook ad bandwagon.
April
- The entire team took on the Color Vibe 5k Run.
- Katelyn joined to help bridge the gap between our Marketing and Facebook Teams, and Corey joined our Performance Team.
- DU was honored as one of the University of South Florida’s “USF Fast 56,” the Tampa area’s fastest growing companies.
- We learned some simple but sound advice at Digital Dealer 22.
- Jenn Hepner and Katelyn became CVO certified.
- We hosted a “mini summit” and welcomed dealers to a full day of training and collaboration at DU’s headquarters.
🖐️ Customer High-Five: We published Country Hill Motors’ Success Story, “How An Independent Dealer In Kansas Used Craigslist To Drive 581 New Sales Conversations In 30 Days”.
May
- Josh was hired as our Controller and Phil became the first addition to our Development Team.
- The rest of the DU Team earned their CVO certifications.
- Annette Freetage from Ford of Ventura told us why she loves working with Dealers United for Craigslist and Google PPC.
- Facebook published Sarasota Ford’s success story on the Facebook Business homepage.
🖐️ Customer High-Five: Valley Buick GMC’s raked in 99 calls, 17 emails, 21 texts and 262 clicks from their Craigslist posts in 30 days and landed the spotlight in our Success Stories.
June
- Bill joined Dealers United’s Development Team.
- DU moved all internal communication to Slack and had a battle about the correct pronunciation of “gif.”
- Brooke warned dealers to stop pressing Facebook’s Boost button.
- Heather, Miranda and Ava became CVO certified; Katelyn and Brooke became Content Marketing certified.
- Our home base in Sarasota, FL was voted best city for young entrepreneurs.
- Dev Team began the grueling process of normalizing dealerships’ inventory data to easily create dynamic product catalogs.
- We helped dealers use Make & Model line targeting and interest targeting on Facebook to connect with local veterans.
🖐️ Customer High-Five: Magic City Ford Lincoln reached 8,408 In-Market Shoppers and received 25,179 impressions from their military-focused Facebook campaign
🖐️ Customer High-Five: Valley Buick GMC reached 22,389 In-Market Auto Shoppers and drove 1,285 clicks to their website in 29 days from their “Test Drive For The Cure” Facebook campaign.
July
- We had our first toaster oven fire when Brooke burned her bacon in our *new* toaster oven.
- Our Dev Team launched the biggest expansion to DU’s Facebook program, Facebook Inventory Ads, to help simplify vehicle ads on Facebook.
- Cara wrote this article to show dealers what’s really happening on their 3rd party listings.
- Travis suffered an injury from a stray rubber chicken and a new Slack emoji was born.
- Pete traveled to Austin, TX to visit both DigitalMarketer’s HQ and Facebook’s HQ.
- We saw just how big an impact removing price from Craigslist posts can make.
🖐️ Customer High-Five: Shelor Motor Mile’s Facebook Inventory Ad campaigns reached 44,123 In-Market Auto Shoppers, drove 3,537 clicks to their VDPs, and were attributed to 63 matched vehicle sales.
August
- After Hurricane Harvey, our team joined a fundraising baseball game at Tropicana Field with the Houston Astros.
- Derek joined our growing dev team!
- Dealers United and The Cause Network became partners in order to help dealerships support their local communities.
- We announced our VDP View Guarantee and put our money where our mouth was on our Facebook Inventory Ads program.
- “Jordan (Jordy) Belfort,” our office’s beloved 5 year old betta fish, said his last goodbye.
- Pete filmed our first-ever Facebook LIVE video.
- We launched our 25-part Community Video Series to help dealers tell their unique stories online.
🖐️ Customer High-Five: Lost Pines Toyota added Facebook Inventory Ads to their Facebook strategy and were blown away by the results.
September
- Leader Auto Group visited our HQ (again!) for a full day of collaboration on their digital campaigns and strategies.
- Oracle Data Cloud shared how they work with Dealers United to help dealers use data to paint a bigger picture of auto shoppers.
- We delivered one of our favorite live sessions, “The Art of PRE-suasion” at Digital Dealer 23.
- Jim Scott from Jarrett-Scott Ford and Brooke were quoted in this article.
- We realized not all Facebook Live videos are perfect…
- Brooke FINALLY (!!!) updated our homepage and resource page.
- Ava received her Customer Acquisition Specialist certification.
- Half our team evacuated, the other half hunkered down, and we ALL survived Hurricane Irma.
🖐️ Customer High-Five: Highline Car Connection received 354 clicks, 125 phone calls, 30 emails, and 48 text messages from their Craigslist listings.
October
- The team hit a major milestone and took a half day to adventure around Sarasota.
- We became the first official automotive partners in Oracle Elite Partner program.
- We shared “The Art of PRE-Suasion” one last time at #DDWNE
- Katelyn became Social and Community certified.
- Dev Team created an entire Inventory Ad campaign from scratch using the Facebook API.
- Pete MC’ed #SRQHacks for the Education Foundation of Sarasota County
- Derek was promoted from his long-standing role as “Temp”.
- Our write-up, “Not All Dealerships Are Experiencing A Sales Slowdown: How Dealers Are Coming Out On Top” was featured in AutoSuccess.
- We celebrated Halloween…
🖐️ Customer High-Five: Hub City Ford matched 13 total sales in 1 month with Facebook Inventory Ads.
🖐️ Customer High-Five: Highline Car Connection used Inventory Ads to drive 17,944 clicks to their website at a CTR of 7.4%.
November
- DU sponsored a table at University of South Florida’s “Brunch on the Bay.”
- Katelyn takes the win for the most DU DigitalMarketer certifications after adding Digital Response and Copywriting certifications to her belt.
- Brooke’s powerful article was published in The SHOP Mag.
- Pete served as a panelist at Ringling College’s “Mind the Gap” event to encourage young talent to stay in Sarasota.
- We celebrated Thanksgiving with our awesome office neighbors, FloorForce!
🖐️ Customer High-Five: Driveaway Motors received over 180 Facebook retargeting leads over the last 2 months.
🖐️ Customer High-Five: Toyota of Wausau ran a “mailer lookalike” Facebook Lead Ad to their direct mail list and generated 6 leads in just over a week.
December
- We hosted the STATE OF AUTOMOTIVE webinar with executives from Facebook and Oracle Data Cloud to help dealers unlock secret automotive data in Facebook.
- The Facebook Team hunkered down to upgrade all New Vehicle Facebook Ads with 2018 models.
- Luke joined the Dealers United team.
- Phil made us proud when he landed our team’s first Facebook Blueprint Certification.
- Our Dev Team published their technology to push Facebook leads directly to any dealer system without the need for a third party CRM integration.
- CEO Pete Petersen was named to the Gulfcoast CEO Forum’s board of directors.
- We started drafting the **OFFICIAL** Dealers United Playbook.
- The DU Team celebrated the holidays the only way we know how: in ugly sweaters!
🖐️ Customer High-Five: Herrnstein Auto Group matched 13 vehicles sold to their Facebook Inventory Ad campaigns in the first 2 weeks of December.
All in all, 2017 was our best year yet with 16 employee certifications, 4 huge product developments, and 8 amazing new team members.
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Written By Brooke Jensen
Brooke handles all of Dealers United’s digital marketing. In addition to her love for design and copy, Brooke also adores her two dog-like kittens, playing the electric violin, and walking barefoot around the office.
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