What Future Of Automotive Digital Marketing Support?

Back in the day IT people at the dealership used to fix and troubleshoot printers, fax machines, devices and configure email accounts all day. While the IT person was fire-fighting While your IT person was too busy troubleshooting Outlook for you the IT industry exploded with an array of easy-to-use applications to make IT administration a breeze. Physical and remote support through apps like LogMeIn, TeamViewer, Lync and GoToMeeting made supporting and pro-actively monitoring technology from anywhere a breeze. IT support costs decreased and availability of IT support increased.

Helpdesks are no longer – Outsourced technical help is in

Most dealerships have done away with their in-house ‘help desk.’ They still keep a technical person on staff, but mainly because that person knows the organization. These techies cringe at your sales manager’s sticky notes to remind them of calls and suggests a CRM like One Eighty or DealerSocket.

These people act as the CIO now. Most dealerships outsource the IT support function of their business to Managed Service Providers (MSPs). It’s the MSP’s job to support, grow and maintain your technology on a fixed budget for the dealership. Training and providing technicians is on them. Not you. They have the people, technical knowledge and availability that one or two in-house IT help desk guys could never have.

He same phenomenon is happening in automotive digital marketing.  Your current ‘digital’ person may be the one uploading specials every month, managing search campaigns and responsible for getting leads. Their role will need to change to something more results-based than task-based for them to survive.