While I can’t say I agree with all that PCG Digital Marketing’s Brian Pasch had to say in his two-hour Supercharged Marketing for Your New and Used Cars Online webinar, we did hear a lot of tips that could carry over to just about any business.

Pasch is co-founder of Automotive Advertising Network, and the new firm’s online home, CarDealerSales.com. He admits to having skin in the game, and AAN is built on the premise he takes in this Webinar.

His basic stance, with which I can’t agree, is that auto dealers are prostituting their inventory by letting others scrape and repost their vehicle listings on sites that serve up competitor ads. His point that dealers don’t watch where their listings end up and don’t track the ROI of those sources, is well taken, however. And it’s not just auto dealers that are being lackadaisical in their online marketing follow-up.

But I don’t agree with Pasch’s contention that an auto dealer “whores out” its inventory when he or she allows high-trafficked sites to take its listings and at no or little money repost them where consumers commonly go to buy vehicles. Yes, there may be, and probably are, competitor listings on the same pages, but is it preferable for those competitor ads to list there without that dealer’s listings as well? Of course, I have to agree with Pasch that ROI is the decider. If it’s not working, fix it or pull out. But to avoid these sites where what you pay is less than what you make, simply because your competitor across town is making money there too just doesn’t make good sense.

Here are some other of his “Paschinate” points, which seem sound advice for many industries:

* Dealers pay many thousands of dollars each month for marketing and advertising yet fail to pay another $1000 to track their phone leads and know what is working for them and what is not. [This problem is rampant is many industries, even in media itself.]

* Dealers must do a better job of posting valuable industry content on their sites, as content rules search rankings, and all too often dealers fail to turn up in Google page on search results, even when the search is local and as specific as make and model.

* A powerful tracking strategy is to assign specific phone numbers to each marketing resource – social media, print advertising, online ads, and so forth.I heartily concur! Such a simple thing, so often neglected.

* If you’re having a dealer special, don’t fail to tell your call center – i.e., the front line phone staff. There’s nothing worse then to have a consumer call and say, “I’m calling about your car sale special x” only to have that CSR say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

* Pasch recommended two vendors – CallSource, and Who’sCalling -  to help dealers track telephone calls that resulted from online searches. CallSource, he said, will actually tell you the keyword or keyphrase Google search that resulted in the call.

Much of his advice centered around testing – making sure your plans, products, designs and online features really work as they should.

“You need to do an e-mail clean-up and recovery process at least twice a month,” Pasch said. “If you are not taking the broken links down and getting your call center to call and update those records you’re throwing tens of thousands of dollars in the trash.” You must also make sure that you offer both text and HTML versions of any e-mail or e-newsletter you send out, he advised the audience.

“Constant Contact is unreadable on a Blackberry,” he said.

Pasch talked about CarPort, and it’s ability to help a dealer – or any other merchant – display its inventory via blog. 

My favorite tip was one a savvy online friend has tried with her travel business. It worked like a charm. Basically, the idea is that all too often when we’re offered a link by another site we simply hand out the home page URL. Wrong, wrong, wrong! If, as Pasch explained, your dealership is offered a free link because you donated money to the local hospital, then create a “Hospital Employee Discount landing page, and that’s the URL where you send those who link from the hospital site. There, for example, your copy might be, “hospital employees, take advantage of our limited time 20-percent discount for your next vehicle service of $200 or more.”

Pasch revealed that both Cobalt (owners of Dealix.com) and Reynolds and Reynolds (both award-winning sites, by the way) are getting ready to roll out new inventory modules.

“Cobalt can now go in and edit all the tags,” he said. Prior to this Pasch has not been impressed by either, though clearly others have been.