Go RVing leads the way, why don’t dealers follow?
Few people will argue with the success of the Go RVing campaign. The award-winning marketing effort spearheaded by the RV Industry Association has built awareness of RV use among millions of potential buyers. It has succeeded in lowering the age of average RV ownership by 15 years as younger families are attracted to the market. The advertisements have generated countless millions in additional free advertising.
Thanks to Go RVing, RV use is hip and cool, and ownership is a dream to which millions of Americans aspire to reach.
What’s baffling to me is the lack of dealer participation in the program. Only about 600 RV dealers fork over $250 per year to become official “Go RVing dealers.” Those who do invest the money get access to an online ad builder features and a professional image library. They also receive official campaign literature and posters which allow the dealers to tap into the national campaign at the local level.
Even with these tools available, surprisingly, only 204 ads have been built. 1,336 images downloaded and 15 customized TV spots have been created for dealers. Why aren’t they taking advantage of these exceptional marketing tools?
Official Go RVing dealers also get access to leads of potential buyers who visit www.gorving.com. RVIA says dealers have downloaded more than a million leads so far this year. To get those leads RVIA will invest nearly $15.8 million in advertising. Yet, the number of leads being downloaded by dealers has declined compared to last year.
Amazingly, less than six in 10 official Go RVing dealers have taken the time to even download the names of their potential customers.
Several years ago, RVIA collected the leads and mailed them to dealers MONTHS after the consumers were mailed a video promoting RV use. I believe the leads went out only three times a year. Dealers complained that the data was too outdated to be effective.
Today, RVIA makes name, address and purchase intention data available within 10 days after a consumer visits the Go RVing website. Ten days may seem to be a long time, but it’s within days of when consumers actually receive their free DVD. We don’t want dealers following up before consumers have a chance to view the informational video, do we?
But now that RVIA has met dealer demands by proving quick access to people genuinely interested in learning more about the industry and its products, dealers seem to be dropping the ball.
Some people have started to question the effectiveness of the lead generation capability of the program. They rationalize that spending $16 million to get less than 1 million leads works out to about $16 per lead which is a pretty expensive way to populate a mailing list.
What people fail to understand is that the ability to get leads from interested buyers is a byproduct of the overall campaign. Lead generation was never the goal of the campaign; building awareness of the industry and its products has always been the primary purpose of Go RVing.
Yet, I’d be interested in knowing why dealers:
- Don’t invest to become Official Go RVing dealers
- Don’t download the leads at all
- Download the leads, but fail to follow-up with consumers
Failing to tap into this highly-effective, highly-visible campaign seems to be a major marketing blunder by the very people for whom the entire campaign was designed to benefit.
June 22nd, 2007 at 10:12 am
I just ran across this thread and glad I did. Lots of good stuff. Here’s my two cents.
First of all, Mr. Scott makes several great points regarding paid keyword searches and including vacation oriented keywords. That’s a must do. However, I completely disagree with him regarding the TV campaign. To say consumers do not pay attention to “interuption marketing”, as he likes to call it, is flat out wrong IMO. There’s more to marketing than just reaching people who are ready to buy. In this day an age with so many messages coming at you, it’s more important than ever to have a media mix that includes TV, radio, print, email, keyword marketing, banner advertising, etc. to cultivate new customers and retain the relationship you have with your current customers. All of these messages should, of course, include your web site.
The TV portion of the GoRVing campaign paints a great picture to potential RVers and reinforces the lifestyle to current RVers. Just the fact that it generates so many leads proves that it does a great job at creating awareness, which I believe is the whole point of the campaign.
As far as the leads go, one thing that they really need to do is put some technology in place to filter out all of the duplicates. It is quite time consuming to do this even with some of the tools we have in place here. Overall, we’ve been happy with the results we’ve gotten.
June 20th, 2007 at 9:31 am
Hey guys, thanks for the good discussion re: the “GO RVING” program. And thanks to Bob for leading us to David Meerman Scott’s excellent book.
However, let me throw in a comment regading the visibility of the $16+ million “GO RVING” project. While staying at an excellent KOA Campground with our RV this past week, we had the opportunity to meet with fellow RVers around an evening campfire. Having kept up with the “GO RVING” comments, I decided to ask the 20 or so Campfire attenders about how they purchased their rigs.
The response was interesting.
1. Only one person could recall having heard about the “GO RVING” advertising. In my book, that might extrapolate to a 5 percent reach for a $16 million program.
2. More than half of the Campfire attenders commented that they use the Internet to find out what is new and exciting in the RV marketplace. Applying the same rule, that might extrapolate to roughly 50 percent reach.
3. Several volunteered that they visit favored Dealers (and some commented that they have a longtime relationship with the Dealer) to see what is new on the Dealer’s lot.
4. The few remaining attenders were new to RVing and had not formed any opinion except to say that the Internet provided them with enough information to guide their purchase of a new rig.
One couple spoke up and told the group that they were inspired by the motion picture “RV”.
So what?
Well, one of the reasons that reasons that Companies spend large sums on adversising is that it creates a “BIG” splash. The executives can stand up and say “Look what we have done to help you sell our product”. That kind of view is OK if you are selling a soft drink…. But, investing funds in a Search Engine is hard to measure and does not provide the “SPLASH” that satisfies.
But the RV Industry is different. The Purchasers of RVs are usually quite smart and know what they are looking for in a new rig. They spend a lot of time researching the new product before plunking down a pile of cash. Virtually all of the RVing public are Internet users.
In my view, the future of RV sales is pointing toward having a good on-line showplace. If RVIA and RVDA do not look toward the Internet in their business planning, they are missing the boat.
Gene
June 18th, 2007 at 6:06 am
Not true Sean, the “Go RVing” title of the campaign doesn’t have to change at all, in fact you don’t want to lose the exposure it has already gained.
The industry must take it up a notch and start to link the various search phrases that the consumers are searching on (as pointed out by Harry Gold), that will bring them back to a central point for information capture and processing through a more defined system, with the end result being a measured campaign that can be tracked through the ultimate purchase of an RV.
Expanding the campaign to include Search Engine Optimization (an art unto itself) that allows for tracking and monitoring of all activity would be a natural extension of the work that has already been done.
Taking a significant percentage of the advertising dollars being expended on this campaign and developing an Internet strategy, SEO, and effective lead follow-up, monitoring, and results would be exactly what the contributors to this blog seem to be asking for.
The message of the Go RVing campaing is raising interest, but it is not getting the results needed to support the investment being made right now.
David and Harry have looked at this from outside the indsutry and have provided some excellent food for thought that the industry, and the Go RVing Committee should take a serious look at. This blog has created a conversation and presented the same arguments that many have only been willing to have behind closed doors for fear of saying anything publice about the concerns of many people in the RV industry today.
June 17th, 2007 at 8:06 pm
We’ll have to agree to disagree Bob. If the medium is the message the GoRVing message we would need a different message for the internet. “GoRVing” would have to be something else. I believer the same message should be sent across various media in order to touch the prospects in may different forms. That and the measurement would take the campaign to another level. I’m not sure anyone is willing to step up and lead at that level.
June 16th, 2007 at 4:58 pm
I disagree Sean. The media always has been, and always will be the “message”. Now what the consumer does after they see the message is a different story. I think we (those contributing here) all agree that the downside of the investment being made in the media by the Go RVing team, does not have an ending point.
A properly placed message, whether it is in an online news release, an industry specific blog such as this, a web site or anything else must have a call to action.
The philosophy of understanding the new rules is to put the entire package together and we are not doing that yet.
A well crafted web-intensive message will have the call to action that this campaign needs, and if it doesn’t, then it will be no better than what the industry is producing right now.
There are many ways to audit, monitor, and measure the results of web-based marketing and PR, but they are to lengthy to go into here. I think we all agree that this is the direction we think the industry should be pursuing at this time.
June 16th, 2007 at 12:25 pm
While the comments regarding search engines may be true, we don’t know the ROI baseline for the current program. Transferring some of the budget to Web 2.0 doesn’t solve the basic problem of the program not being set up to convert actual sales.
One thing to keep in mind is THE MEDIA IS NOT THE MESSAGE. It may be able to deliver the message more or less effectively but it does not convert the message to real world dollars.
Advertising people, no matter what media they tout, will focus the conversation on the media. It’s no different than talking about driving across, flying across or taking the bus across the country. All you want to do is get from here to there and “they” will tell you that one or the other is the best way depending on their point of view.
There needs to be a shift away from this thinking. The focus should be ROI (i.e.-results) regardless of the media.
June 16th, 2007 at 4:11 am
With all due respect to Sean, virtually every demographic uses search engines to research and find information about virtually every product category.
THis is not about “either / or”. The simple truth is that TV is FAR less effective than search engines.
If you guys want to attract buyers, you need to appear in the search engines.
David
June 15th, 2007 at 6:52 pm
I did some research for a major RV manufacturer and found that most of the major RV manufacturers barely have any search presence at all despite the fact that there are millions of RV product searches every month done by thousands of consumers looking for RV information every month.
Having a large search presence allows companies and organizations to access the critical moment when a consumer is researching a product and add a powerful element of influence to their decision making process. Certainly a consumer is going to be much more receptive to marketing messages and lead gen conversion opportunities during this critical moment. All we have to do is look at our own behavior to realize how important the search engines are in our professional and personal decision making process for large purchases.
GoRVing should be saturating these critical moments on the search engines with paid and natural search marketing and funneling these active consumers towards their members with dealer searches and geo-specific lead generation and routing. The leads should be pushed to the dealers so they see the results of their investment. Further more an intelligent email auto-reply system could respond to consumers who fill out forms with member dealer contact info, test drive certificates, free gas or accessory coupons, rebates and other materials. Also, the GoRVing website is not following even the most basic search engine optimization principals and is therefore missing out on what could be a huge amount of free traffic.
Finally, the GoRVing site should have some community elements like photo and video sharing and RV enthusiast destination ideas.
June 15th, 2007 at 9:55 am
I’m afraid Mr. Scott is asking that we sprint before we crawl here. His ideas in his book are excellent but may not fit with the RVing demographic/psychographic completely. They should be a part of a comprehensive plan and be held accountable for sales results just as the other media should.
There really isn’t any point in generating MORE interest when we aren’t converting, or don’t know if we are converting, the interest we have. If we knew the conversion rates of the current program we would have a baseline to work from.
June 15th, 2007 at 4:42 am
Thanks Bob for alerting me to this thread.
Wow. An “award winning campaign”! Congratulations! In my opinion, an award winning TV campaign is just the usual interruption marketing nonsense. Thanks, but as a consumer I’d rather go get ice cream during the commercials. And I’m certainly not impressed with ad execs patting each other on the back with awards.
For most industries these days, TV advertising is nothing more than interruption marketing. The average person is subjected to hundreds of commercial messages a day, none of them welcome. zero. Consumers don’t pay attention to “messages” delivered by interruption techniques.
What they do pay attention to is answers to their problems. And they way they increasingly do that is online and with search engines.
What is the RV industry doing online to attract people who are looking for a fun vacation?? What is the RV industry doing to build a lead machine that is 100% trackable and measurable by using the Web? Nothing that I can tell.
I just went to Google and tried a few searches including “summer vacation” and “vacation with kids”. No RVs anywhere. Lots of good stuff, but it aint gonna be in an RV. That’s a shame because search engines is how people figure out what to do. They don’t sit in front of the boob tube and make notes about everything that appears.
People don’t say “Honey, we need to plan a vacation. Let’s watch TV for a week and see if we can figure something out.” Nope. Instead, millions of people turn to a search engine first. They say “Honey, let’s plan a vacation. Maybe we should go to the Rocky Mountains this year.” And what does Google deliver for “Rocky Montain vacation”? Hmm.. First up is lodges and cabins. “Great! Let’s stay in a cabin.” Then Golf, horseback riding, skiing,biking, river rafting, etc, etc. Looks like no RVs this year…
With millions of dollars to spend, you guys could OWN the search engines for the phrases that people are using RIGHT NOW to search for the sorts of things you offer. But instead you are wasting you money to appear next to toothpaste and beer ads on TV.
Good luck,
David Meerman Scott
author of “The New Rules of Marketing & PR”
June 14th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
The industry can not keep spending this kind of money each year without some accountability and measured results.
You can not continue to throw all this money into traditional print and media buys and hope that somebody shows up in a dealers show room to buy an RV. Even if they did, you might not ever know that the Go RVing campaign is what generated the interest in the prospect.
I recommended an outstanding writer and speaker to RVIA, RVDA, and many of my manufacturer and dealer contacts a few months ago. We have used this person at our imaging industry events and his new book has just come out. It should be mandatory reading for every sales, marketing, and PR person in the RV industry. The way companies market their products is changing quickly, but our industry is still using traditional print and media buys when other industries, and forward thinking companies, have implemented a whole new methodology to reach the buyers.
The author is David Meerman Scott, and the book is titled “The New Rules of Marketing and PR - How to use news releases, blogs, podcasting, viral marketing & online media to reach buyers directly.” The book just came out last week and has already moved into the top 100 list on Amazon.com. Scott is an award winning online thought leadership strategist and provides an excellent road map to change corporate thinking that can no longer justify the huge expense associated with traditiional campaigns that no longer work.
The real world stories and staggering results in a short period of time will really make you stop and think about how we do things in the RV industry today. Happy reading!
June 14th, 2007 at 11:12 am
The sad part of this is that it is all not that difficult to do. It just takes some leadership and a plan.
It’s time to change but with the money flowing so easily into the program (it’s only a few dollars per sticker, I say with tongue firmly planted in my cheek), who is really paying any attention to it and monitoring actual sales results (i.e.-market expansion)?
My plan would have all of the following for a lot less money…
1. Set goals before spending a dime.
2. Number of inquiries per week, month, year.
3. Inquiries per dealership location.
4. Revenue targets
5. Market share objectives
6. Return on investment calculations (Cost-per-inquiry, Cost-per-lead, Cost-per-closed sale, Lead-to-sales conversion ratios)
7. Marketing (GoRVing) and Sales (Dealerships) would work as one integrated team.
8. An ideal customer profile
9. A Universal Lead Definition
10. A database to distribute leads to each dealership in real time.
11. Follow-up with dealership brand specific marketing collateral.
12. Lead management utilizing a lead scoring system.
13. Lead nurturing to cultivate sales ready leads.
That is just a few parts off the top of my head but I’m sure the people “collecting” the $16 million budget wouldn’t want to be held to that standard.
June 13th, 2007 at 1:15 pm
To add to Sean’s excellent comments … this was always categorized as a market expansion campaign and there is no PROCESS in place to gauge ANY measure of success with this significant investment in our industry.
The campaign does a very good job of creating RV branding and awareness and does have a mild “call to action” by having respondents requesting something and providing their contact information that is then posted as a “lead.”
In some ways, the problem is not the campaign, it is the dealer’s sitting back and waiting for the “lead” to call them or walk through their door.
Some of this money should be spent on developing the rest of the PROCESS that utilizes a CRM solution to track every step of the journey from the initial response through a sale … and some of these people do actually buy RV’s.
However, who among us can validate the sales created that specifically came from the buyers exposure to the RV industry through the Go RVing campaign. Unfortunately, the answer is “none of us!”
June 13th, 2007 at 10:44 am
This one is right in my bailiwick so I might have to comment more than once.
The GoRVing campaign has a VERY loose lead definition. In fact, I have never read a formal definition of a lead as defined by the campaign. Is there one? Do the people running the GoRVing campaign define a lead as a person who requests information? If so, they may want to get out of the “lead” generation business because they don’t understand it. The campaign does nothing more than generate awareness.
A lead, as defined by a $16 Million dollar campaign, should have a strict definition. A lead is step one in a sales PROCESS. More money has to be invested in a lead to get it to convert into a sale. Or, $16 Million dollars should be proportioned differently.
Someone should stand up and demand an ROI calculation. Of course, they wouldn’t be able to calculate one because there is no one accountable for tracking it. Do we see any similarities to government programs here?
This campaign is a classic example of a group not understanding what it takes to succeed in actually creating customers at the street level of a business.
June 13th, 2007 at 12:29 am
I’ve said for years that the RV industry is about as far behind the technology curve as any industry out there.
A friend of mine asked me what we could expect at the last Louisville RVIA show. I told him we’d see a lot of RV’s and a lof old men. Thats exactly what we saw.
It’s time for some changes in the RV industry…
The tagline on our new RV site: ‘Change your direction’
http://www.swirv.tv
June 12th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
When the GoRVing program started years ago … we were allowed to use the advertisements and tag our dealership info after the commercial. We had great success with people walking in and telling us how great our commercials were … they tied it to the dealership because most of the national advertising wasn’t getting to our customer base.
GoRVing got away from this for a while and although we continued to pay the $250 … we never really did much with it other than hanging the posters and promoting the campaign interanlly and occationally following through with the leads.
This year we ordered the TV footage and started an advertising campagn through out the summer months to tie into the national advertising. Our first commercials aired May 11th … Other than our show promotions we have not done TV advertising of any kind in several years. The first week after we started running the adds we sold 16 units. We finished the month of May with the highest net profit in the 30 year history of our business. We have heard from other dealerships in our state that during this same time frame their lot traffic was way off … ours was awesome.
This may be a coincidence but it is the only thing we changed.
If you are only going to the $250, follow up leads and that’s it … you probably won’t get anything out of it. By piggy backing the national campaign, your dealership gets tied to the advertising … so people will automatically think of your dealership when they hear all of the adds … not just the ones you pay for. The increase in lot traffic is the reason we participate and promote the GoRVing program.
June 12th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
I submitted my information to get in this program and no one contacted me to set it up!
Here I sit……………………..
Thats my reason
June 12th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
I think many dealers who have fallen off the “go rving” band wagon have had less than profitable experiences. They have paid for the subscription, downloaded the prospects, sent the follow up letters and brochures and received no direct return on their investment. They feel their efforts have a better payoff in other areas. If it was an immediate way to boost lot traffic and sales every dealer would subscribe.
June 12th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
I’ve said this for years in my RV seminars, “If I worked for a dealership that DID NOT pay the $250 to participate in the program, then I would pay it out of my own pocket and keep all the leads to myself.”
Or, more than likely, I would seek employment with a dealership that has an Internet sales and marketing strategy that doesn’t mean wholesaling over the web, but does mean the establishment of a prompt and effective lead followup system, database construction, e-mail marketing and newsletters, and search engine optimization techniques to showcase the dealership as web-savy.
There is simply no excuse for the numbers you have quoted here, yet this same question has come up every year since the Go RVing campaign started.
In the end, the responsibility lies with the owners of the dealership. They must lead by example and they must establish programs that maximize the opportunities that are provided to them by this campaign. It would be interesting to hear from dealers that are not using this program. The few that are participating know something the others don’t and will be less likely to share their success stories.