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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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”