June 1, 2009 – BURLINGTON, VT – Dealer.com, the leading provider of online marketing solutions for the automotive industry, today announced strategic relationships with key automotive advertising agencies to provide maximum benefit for auto dealer websites and online marketing.  Dealers can now work with website providers and ad agencies in a collaborative partnership to capitalize on the strengths of the different vendors.  Open lines of communication between ad agencies, website providers and dealerships increases efficiency and consistent integrated marketing communication.            

Dealer.com partnerships with leading automotive advertising agencies include: Zimmerman Advertising, The Titan Agency, Moore & Scarry Advertising and Blue Flame 6.  Dealer.com offers dealers the most powerful websites with the most effective backend tools and reporting, and top ad agencies provide the most cutting-edge creative and marketing strategy.  Dealers benefit from working together as a team and sharing information to maximize the dealership’s investment.  Ad agencies help dealers merchandise their brand and drive more traffic to the website from traditional and digital media.  Dealer.com’s focus remains on leading technology and staying ahead of the continual changes and advancements of the Internet. 

In the past, some automotive advertising agencies considered expansion into dealership website development, but most now opt to focus on their clear strength: providing dealerships with the most creative, branded content.  

“It is imperative that dealers keep their offline and online advertising consistent. No matter how compelling the message is, most consumers will still visit the dealer’s website before going to the dealership," commented Dan Kissell, Zimmerman Automotive Division EVP.  "Our strategy takes advantage of this and puts our offline message on the dealer’s website. In fact, our traditional creative sends consumers to the dealer's website. We chose Dealer.com as our partner because they understand the importance of what we are doing offline and created websites that allow us to put our ad message on the dealer’s home page. While a few other web providers have this capability, Dealer.com allows us more flexibility with the creative, and more importantly, quick turnaround.  We can make creative changes in just a few hours as oppose to days or weeks.”  

Specific ways that agencies and website providers can work together to help dealerships get the most out of their online marketing include: branding the dealership on the website; creating interesting, credible, searchable website content; producing informative and interesting website videos; highlighting local cultural and community characteristics; creating text, Twitter, direct mail and email campaigns tied directly to the dealership’s website or microsite. 

 “We are excited to continue developing our relationships with the industry’s leading ad agencies,” commented Dean Evans, Dealer.com CMO.  “The power of these partnerships for dealers is clear and helps ensure maximum benefit and return.  For example, we partner with Blue Flame 6 to provide the Van Tuyl Group the most innovative, creative and analytical solutions to get the highest return, both online and off.  Integrated marketing communication is more important than ever to make sure that the physical dealership and the virtual dealer (the website) are consistently represented online and offline.  When we work together and focus on our strengths, we create an outcome for the dealer that is greater than the sum of its parts.”     

About Dealer.com
Founded in Burlington, VT in 1997, Dealer.com is the leading provider of online marketing solutions to the automotive industry. Dealer.com offers NADA award-winning SmartSites™ website design incorporating dynamic video; user-friendly lead management tools; the best in search engine advertising and unparalleled metrics and web analytics. Excellent customer service, innovative training and proven results are just a few of the reasons why more of the top 125 dealer groups use Dealer.com than any other vendor. Dealer.com was also the 2008 top rated web provider on Drivingsales.com, the industry’s largest online dealer community. 

Dealer.com’s suite of online marketing solutions is the only set of tools that effectively creates a 360° view of auto dealers’ online and traditional marketing investments and results. Dealers are easily able to track spending and determine which activities are leading to the highest return on investment, allowing them to streamline advertising and marketing efforts into targeted activities that increase sales and improve the bottom line.
fer Auto Dealers the Best Creative and Technological Online Solutions