Marketing blog posts, magazine columns, articles and seminar speeches can sometimes make the mistake of assuming that the audience already know the basics of web marketing.

By basics, I mean things like:

• a deep seated empathy for what your customers want
• how to create a compelling case for why people should buy from you
• copywriting and design
• measuring response rates and web traffic effectively

Take a look at this list. How comfortable are you that your website demonstrates a strong performance in each of these areas? If you are comfortable that you have these boxed off, then I would indeed agree that going for the very latest in web technologies should indeed be your next goal – you have obviously got the basics in place, and are refreshing them regularly.

If you require some help with the basics, then of course you can engage web marketing consultants and/or read up on the subject matter yourself. Just bear in mind that unless the basics are right, then the rest will be built on shaky foundations.

A good analogy is that of the sushi chef. When they first start training, they are sometimes simply tasked with making the rice for the head chef – sometimes for months or even years. The idea is that if the rice isn’t right, then it doesn’t matter what you do – your sushi will be hopeless.

One suggestion for making a real improvement in this area is to concentrate on small incremental improvements to your web strategy, rather than wholesale changes that are implemented in unison. The main reason for this is that when you implement a single change you can monitor its effect on your business. If you were to implement a series of changes at once, then you may struggle to measure where any success or failure is coming from. Sounds like common sense, but is rarely done.

Also, try and make your customer’s web experience as difficult to imitate as possible. Many dealers will look at other sites and try to adopt or plagiarise ideas or functionality, but if every site offered exactly the same then there would be no differentiation at all. It would be much better if you enhanced your site by being able to demonstrate what makes you different, and what shows you care. These are the aspects of your web offering that then become very hard for anyone to replicate. Remember, many customers will have had bad experiences of the motor industry, and this is a real opportunity to show you are customer focussed. How about a short website video from the MD, highlighting what you do differently from anyone else? It puts a human face to your business that becomes difficult to copy. Of course, you need to make sure you live up to the promises that are made, but that’s another story.

It was once thought a physical impossibility that a human being would ever run a mile in under four minutes. Yet following Roger Bannister’s achievement in 1954, sixteen runners went on to do the same thing in the next three years. It’s not that human evolution had suddenly taken a spring forward – it was just that there had been a change in mindset.

As there are still many dealer groups that feel they need to withhold certain information from their customers, I think it’s time that there was a similar ‘change in mindset’. I am also aware that I need to be able to evidence that there is a solid business case for doing so.

So today, I would like to ask you to do something for me. Just key the letters ZMOT (pronounced ‘Zee-mot’) into your search engine and soak up as much information as you possible can. Maybe unsurprisingly, the term has been coined by Google, and in my opinion highlights the continued impact of one of the biggest shifts in online consumer behaviour.

If you take your web strategy seriously then ZMOT is something that you cannot afford to ignore. It stands for Zero Moment of Truth, and it refers to that period of online consumer research that a customer undertakes prior to making contact with a seller.

Traditionally, there has been a three-step mental model of marketing:

First, the STIMULUS, where an advertisement for a car first attracts attention. Secondly, the FIRST MOMENT OF TRUTH, where the customer calls in to the showroom to look at the vehicle and goes on to buy the car. Finally, there is the SECOND MOMENT OF TRUTH, where the customer enjoys their new car.

The net has now added the ZMOT to this list. It slots neatly in between the Stimulus and the First Moment of Truth, and involves the customer going online to look at reviews for the car, or to find out more about customer service at your dealership. In more and more instances, the customer has actually made their buying decision BEFORE they arrive at the showroom. The cold facts are that online decision making is rocketing, yet many motor dealers are only spending a fraction of what they should be spending on online marketing.

Your online customers want to research, learn, explore, and then come to you ready to buy with confidence. By not giving them the ability to conduct this research in an effective manner then you will more than likely send them elsewhere.

And don’t forget that it is so easy for people to share how well (or badly) they have been informed by your website or business. So if you allow people to research their next purchase online, they will be more likely to tell people how helpful you were.

It is possible for you to make it easier for people to buy from you at the Zero Moment of Truth stage. You could incorporate customer ratings and testimonials for your business, or include proven functionality such as the integrated Codeweavers finance calculation and payment search services. Either way, the strategy of trying to withhold information from the web customer is looking a bit outdated and ineffective.

You may be familiar with the old saying ‘Know your enemy’. Keeping tabs on what the competition is doing is something that motor dealers used to do all the time – you simply looked at the local newspaper, saw what local dealers were offering, and decided how you would respond. In other words, the focus was local.

I wanted to spend a few moments looking at why competitor knowledge is particularly relevant in the online world, where the focus can be anything but local.

Firstly, your competitors can amend their web offering very quickly, which means that it is a constant challenge trying to conduct an effective analysis of what the industry is doing on the web. Secondly, there are some businesses that are keen to establish a niche within the online car buying process – such as companies that would like to finance the car but not necessarily supply it – meaning that there is pressure on your potential revenue streams.

Thirdly, the more you know about the web the more you can start to see opportunities in areas that you have a potential advantage.

I wanted to pick one area and illustrate an example. There was a recent piece of research entitled ‘The most popular car finance sites revealed’. It highlighted the top 10 online car finance businesses, as measured in terms of web traffic. I spent some time looking at all of them and I came up what I think are some important conclusions for motor dealers.

Firstly, only one of the top 10 was a car retailer – the others were brokers or finance providers. Secondly, most of the sites were displaying finance information that wouldn’t have been compliant with the old credit advertising rules, never mind the new rules that came into force in February 2011.

Perhaps most importantly, the way that these sites highlighted the advantages of their offer varied hugely in terms of quality. Several of them, such as moneysupermarket.com, clearly show that they know little about funding vehicles, as they offer deals where the car can be funded over as long as 25 years. Others highlight their offering very well, and do a great job of informing the customer how affordable their next car could be – largely by using the concept of residual value products. The question is, how are you demonstrating this on your site? If you aren’t doing this effectively, then don’t be surprised if you lose potential F&I income.

You need to put your best offering forward online – every time. Show why people should finance their vehicle through your business – don’t just rely on ‘captive’ people walking in that have no clue as to motor finance, as they are becoming more educated all the time.

This will continue to be the challenge for you in the future. Not just working on your own offering, and showing customers why they should buy from you, but also understanding how the web is evolving and how your business can make the most of change.

A quick question for you: how often do you test new ideas and functionality on your website? The reason I ask is that so many sites remain fundamentally unchanged and unaltered from the day they were created – no new content, designs, or taking account of new technologies, social media or platforms such as smartphones or tablets.

So this blog post is about testing, and trying new stuff out. There are those businesses that do and those that don’t. Especially on the web.

The problem with trying new ideas (not just on the web) and testing them is that most people are not given the freedom to fail or make mistakes. If a company refuses to tolerate any margin for error, then all that happens is employees ‘play safe’ and only use methods and technologies that have worked in the past. Which will never drive that business forward in the long term.

Many businesses (not just technology companies, but motor industry as well) promote themselves as ‘innovative’. Well, I believe that there is a simple way to find out if they are – how many of their ideas are successful? If the answer to this question is ‘all of them’, then I’m afraid they just ‘playing safe’ and not pushing the boundaries.

Try stuff. Test it. Evaluate it. Use the classic ‘feedback loop’ to see what works. And then refine it.

Former England Rugby coach Clive Woodward sums it up well. In his book ‘Winning’ he says that normally when a project fails, there is a post-mortem to find out why, and when a project is successful we go out and get drunk to celebrate. He advocates turning this around – when an idea fails, lets go out and get drunk to forget it, and if it succeeds then have a full post-mortem to establish exactly why it was successful, so the success can be recreated.

The reality is that there are many businesses that take this one step further and allocate budgets to see if ideas work or not. It’s commonly called Research and Development, or R&D, and it isn’t limited to science companies or large organisations. It should be used by any company that is serious in trying to figure out what their customers want and how they think. It’s an investment that will fail sometimes, but I believe is essential to future growth of an organisation.

The good news is that it’s possible for you to undertake this sort of activity. Your website and it’s content or functionality can be viewed as R&D in public. Just come up with ways of tracking the progress and effectiveness of aspects of your site, and fine tune them over time.

As prolific blogger Seth Godin wrote: ‘We shouldn’t be too quick to point the finger at any company that launches web initiatives that fail. In fact, we should be critical of those that don’t.’