I just finished reading Questlove’s new book, Creative Quest. Now, 99% of my time reading it, my focus was on how it could speak to writing, theater, and writing for the theater. In fact, I read a decent chunk of it between scenes of the Shakespeare show I’m performing in across the Twin Cities right now. But I also found myself connecting some of what Quest said back to 9 Clouds and the creativity that goes into our marketing. Here are three big takeaways from Questlove on creative marketing.

We love the HubSpot marketing software. There are few tools that can challenge HubSpot when it comes to automating inbound marketing, and we’ve worked hard to find all the best ways to maximize its potential for the auto marketing industry. Still, there’s some definite room for improvement. I picked the brains of our team at 9 Clouds and came up with this HubSpot wishlist for features and changes we’d most like to see.

I live in an old house, and the A/C works best in my bedroom. So, I spend a lot of time with my shows. Bob’s Burgers, Riverdale, Game of Thrones — they’re all on the binge list. (In the office we have a few Game of Thrones experts, but I’m not one of them, so no spoilers please this is my first time through). But enough about Netflix and HBO and Hulu (oh my). Here’s some binge-worthy digital news from May 2018.  

We’ve long praised Ford for its digital-focused co-op program. And it just keeps getting better. This week, Ford made an announcement that caused quite a celebration around the 9 Clouds office. Ford doubled the amount of money available in the co-op pool and improved the payoff for dealers that invest in digital marketing efforts. Read on to find out exactly what’s changing and how it can impact your marketing strategy.

Every year, NADA Show brings together automotive minds from around the world to share the latest insights on marketing, sales, management, and more. This year, I spoke to the best practices and potential of Facebook ads for auto dealers. I not only shared our latest learnings, I also brought a ton of energy and humor (if I do say so myself)!

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is more popular than Kanye West. If you’re on Twitter — or pay any attention to celebrity gossip — you’re probably familiar with Kanye West and his Twitter rants over the last month. You probably don’t believe me when I say GDPR is more popular than Kanye West. But look at this Google Trends comparison from May 17 to 24, 2018!

INTEK Cleaning & Restoration, a company based here in Sioux Falls, faced a weird dilemma when looking through its search terms within Google Search Console. While INTEK doesn’t make, sell, or even install sump pumps, it was regularly receiving clicks to its website from sump pump-related terms. But since the company does help those who have experienced flooding from backed-up sump pumps, we saw an opportunity to help educate those leads.

Any decent automotive digital marketer will tell you that good messages require good targeting. But even here in 2018, targeting is still a challenge for dealerships running Facebook ads.

Email’s here to stay! And the further we move into 2018, the clearer it is that to keep your customers’ attention, you have to move away from cold and impersonal emails — and move toward relying on automation and good data to make your message personal.  That’s not really a new idea, especially in auto marketing emails, but the best ideas get better with time! So if you’re looking to improve your email marketing tactics for dealers this year, keep reading for the top five email trends of 2018.

In every relationship, you have to take the good with the bad. Some unique relationships — like business relationships — may seem more heavily weighted on one side than the other. Part of the time, things suck. A lot of the time, things are awesome! All of the time, things are a lot of work. But establishing a solid working relationship is worth it — both for you and for the client. As a project manager, I’ve had my fair share of client relations. Here are my seven best tips on working with clients.

Most people have a financial budget. Even though my generation gets a lot of flak for being bad with money, most millennials have budgets, too. We’re not actually just spending all our money on avocado toast. But a lot of people I know do not have a balanced schedule. Why not? Money and minutes are both finite resources. If you ask me, it’s time we start treating our time like money and balancing our books across the board.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is something a lot of people forget about. It’s easy to get caught up in something “more fun,” like Facebook ads, where there’s a lot of fluidity and creativity involved. But SEO is foundational to a healthy website, and it’s not something you can just leave to chance. We’re hosting a SEO webinar to bring some attention back to the bones of your website. Join us on Tuesday, June 12, at 1 p.m. CST to dig into SEO.