TK Carsites doesn’t just win top awards. We help our clients win top awards.

That’s what happened with Burnsville Toyota, an outstanding Burnsville, MN Toyota dealership and a model of web marketing excellence. Dealer Communications and Dataium selected Burnsville Toyota out of 230 candidates to be distinguished for their digital marketing. Dealerships were scored on three of nine categories, Leads to Visitors, Searches to Visits, and Returning Visitors, and the Number of Page views per Visitor.

The result: Burnsville Toyota is the premiere Top Winner of the Digital Dealer Website Excellence Awards 2011.

So many factors contribute to our clients’ success. Burnsville Toyota makes its mark with a dedication to its customers and to innovation. And when it comes to website design excellence, TK is proud to help them make the grade.

Teamwork and a hands-on philosophy make it possible for our high profile website to perform so well, says Tony Brown, Burnsville Toyota’s general manager.

The TK Carsites Burnsville Toyota design is our classic Power of 5. It helps maximize both user experience and search engine optimization. With a bevy of plug-ins and add-ons offered by TK, Burnsville Toyota was able to customize the site’s function and appearance to their liking.

TK Carsites is delighted that Burnsville Toyota assembled a top-tier award-winning site. We’re honored and proud to have provided the ingredients and expertise to make it happen.

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Read More Automotive News and Information on the TK Carsites Blog.

Got pressing questions about how to invest in Internet Marketing and what your business should expect from a vendor?

We have the answers!

Tomorrow, Wednesday November 2, 2011 we proudly present the CEO of KPA, Vane Clayton and the Co-Founder of TK Carsites, Richard Valenta, as this week’s TK Carsites webinar presenters. They will be taking the webinar hot seats and answering your questions live during the webinar. That is correct! We have gathered up your questions that you have sent in by request and will be giving back by answering each of them individually.

We truly believe you should remain knowledgeable regarding what steps are necessary to keep your business relevant and remain informed on what expectations you should have from a vendor, which will give you a leg up when choosing which vendor is right for you.

In this week’s special webinar we are not holding back, we believe in being upfront and honest in ensuring that you receive the best quality of service that the Internet can offer and therefore our leaders will be stepping up to the microphone to share with their experiences with you and aid in your business’s online success.

Here are some of the questions we will cover in tomorrow’s webinar. Do not see a question below that you would like answered, you still have time to submit yours!

• -What is the future of Internet Marketing?
• -I’ve heard that 60 dealerships are already using the new TK Connect platform. Talk to us about their experience versus the old platform.
• -What makes the new TK Connect platform different?
• -KPA has some of the highest retention and service levels in the industry; how does that translate to the TK Carsites products?
• -Will TK Carsites continue to differentiate with their Search Engine Optimization?
• -Why would I now select TK Carsites if I didn’t before?

Don’t be shy; remember there is probably someone else thinking the same thing. Click Here to Register for Ask the Experts, The Future of websites, SEO, and Social Media.

We look forward to interacting with you tomorrow Wed, Nov 2, 2011 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM MDT in our weekly webinar series.

Who Are Our Presenters? Allow me Introduce You:

Vane Clayton is President and CEO of KPA, joining the company in September 2006. He brings KPA 15 years of experience in successfully building profitable, growth companies as President/CEO. Vane holds a B.S. in Agricultural/Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Richard Valenta is Vice President of Internet Marketing Products of KPA and Founder of TK Carsites. Richard co-founded TK Carsites in 2001 and led the acquisition of the company by KPA in October 2011. Richard is responsible for advancing the vision of the TK Carsites product line of helping car dealers deliver their unique selling opportunities to consumers via the Internet. Richard has over 22 years of leadership experience within the automotive and consumer finance industries, having held executive and corporate officer positions in the sub-prime auto lending market.

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Read More Automotive News and Information on the TK Carsites Blog.

KPA adds Automotive Internet Marketing to KPA’s industry specific product lines for Human Resource Management, Environmental Health and Safety.

Lafayette, CO (October 5, 2011) – KPA announces today that it has acquired TK Carsites Inc. TK Carsites has over 650 automobile dealership clients throughout the country. The combination of the TK Carsites product line and current KPA product lines establishes KPA as a leading dealer services and Internet marketing provider for over 4,000 automotive, truck, and equipment dealerships and service companies. KPA will provide consulting services and software for three industry specific product lines: (1) Environmental Health and Safety; (2) HotlinkHR, Human Resource Management; and (3) TK Carsites, Internet Marketing.

“KPA’s acquisition of TK Carsites will greatly benefit TK Carsites clients because we are committed to extending our focus on client service to the TK Carsites product line of industry leading Internet marketing solutions,” says Vane Clayton, CEO of KPA. “We will do that by leveraging our presence in 44 states with over 10,000 dealership visits annually, and the commitment of our investors to the automotive industry.”

TK Carsites Internet marketing products use the Internet to drive more sales to auto dealerships. TK Carsites solutions provide dealerships with the most advanced TK Connect Website Platform, TK Mobile, and Automotive SEO, along with powerful social media and conversion tools.

“I am impressed by KPA’s 95% year-over-year client retention. There is no automotive Internet marketing company that comes close,” says Richard Valenta, CEO and co-founder of TK Carsites. “For our clients, this means that they can continue to expect high levels of support, as well as a renewed commitment to the evolution of their products.”

Jim Bradford, co-founder and president of TK Carsites comments that “We have had remarkable successes in a highly competitive market since we founded TK Carsites in 2001. The TK Carsites management team has decided that the timing is perfect to align with KPA because of its reputation, leadership, and financial strength.”

About KPA

KPA is a dealer services and Internet marketing provider for over 4,000 automotive, truck and equipment dealerships and service companies. KPA provides consulting services and software for three industry specific product lines: (1) Environmental Health and Safety; (2) HotlinkHR, Human Resource Management; and (3) TK Carsites, Internet Marketing. For more information, visit www.kpaonline.com.

As the Social Media Promotions Director for both TK Carsites and Hasai, Erin Ryan spends countless hours making them both into social media powerhouses and consistently produces amazing results for our clients as well. As a skilled webinar presenter, she is a fan favorite and garners consistently high reviews and attendance. Erin’s tremendous dedication to her duties and extraordinary pride to work for TK Carsites and Hasai are clearly evident and, as such, is unanimously recognized by the Executive Team as the TK Carsites Employee of the Month for September 2011!

Erin is rewarded with a $100 Visa gift card and announcements in our company newsletters, blogs and social media outlets.  Erin is also now eligible for the TK Carsites Employee of the Year award, which is announced annually at the TK Carsites Holiday Party. One of the twelve (12) TK Carsites Employees of Month will be named Employee of the Year & will receive a $1,000 bonus.

Congratulations again, Erin!

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The TK Carsites Employee of the Month is selected by the Executive Team in recognition of employees who practiced team work, went the extra mile, and/or contributed to the company’s success. If you have questions about the TK Carsites Employee of the Month process, please ask your immediate supervisor. 

As the Social Media Marketer in the Social Media Department, Matthew Funk began with TK Carsites in 2010 and since then he has been a helpful hand within our Social Media department and stepped in on occasions to assist in some of our other departments as well. Matt has always shown nothing less than a friendly demeanor and has been a positive person to have around the office.

Most recently, Matt eased the minds of our TK clients by taking a proactive and responsible approach to the implementation of Google + and Google +1 on their websites during the dramatic Google shakeup in July.

He also placed an increased amount of superbly written material throughout our online channels and, as a skilled webinar presenter, garners consistently high reviews and attendance.

It is easy to see why he is unanimously recognized by the Executive Team as the TK Carsites Employee of the Month for July 2011!

Congrats Matt from All of Us at TK Carsites!

Google+ doesn’t add up for a lot of people.

A lot of rumors about it swirl the Net: It’s a Facebook killer. It’s another flop from Google social media. It’s too confusing for people to figure out.

All of these are myths. Pay no more mind to them than you would the Mayan 2012 Doomsday prophecy.

What is true about Google+ is that it can and will change your dealership’s marketing.

Here’s why:

1. Google+ is directly linked to the search engine that the majority of your customers find you through—Google.

2. Google+ weaves into almost every other Google service, influencing how they work and what search results they produce.

3. Google+ directly affects search engine results on Google. The more positive interaction on Google+ with your Web site—or your competitor’s site—the better the search results.

4. Google+ involves the new Google +1 button, which plays a big part in where a Web site shows up on personalized searches.

5. Google+ may be a puzzle to many social media users, but it has been adopted by over 34.4 million people since its launch less than a month ago.

6. Google+ offers a fistful of features other social media doesn’t: Group video chat Hangouts, discreet “Circles” of contacts and even custom content feeds that show users Google’s favorite sites depending on what keywords the user selects.

7. Google+ is backed by a company-wide effort to drive users from its other services—Gmail, Google Places, Google Maps—to Google+.

8. Google has changed Google Places and local listing results, eliminating outside reviews, meaning that Google+ users and reviewers are the indisputably best way to get your dealership reviewed.

9. Google is going to launch a business component to Google+ this Fall, which will link to all your other Google functions—e.g. your site’s Google Place and its search ranking.

10. Google+ is easy for anyone—with any email address, Google account or not—to get on and use.

I’ll break that all down for you:

The most powerful search engine in the world has re-designed the rules of Web marketing so that Google+ holds the most power of any other factor in search results and online sentiment.

It’s that simple. Get on Google+ or get lost on Google.

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Read more Automotive articles on the TK Carsites blog.

Social media isn’t just as necessary as breathing for a business. It can also be buckets of fun. In fact, you have to make it fun to make it successful.

That’s the reality of the modern market: Clients don’t just want to do business, they want to be entertained. They expect points, prizes, contests and more. They don’t just want you to sell to them. They want promotions—ways you’re making your dealership look like a fun place with plenty of fringe benefits they can enjoy.

Here’s how.

First and foremost, you want a friendly dialogue on your social sites. That’s a simple step that we often discuss here at TK Carsites. Social media requires dialogue to be successful. You need to talk about what your clients want to talk about. They, in turn, will talk about you.

Once you’ve got them interested, it’s time to have fun.

One way to do that is with gaming. Promotions are most enjoyable when there’s some incentive for the customer to try to “win.”

Just about anybody can manage to make a game out of their promotions. Even if you only have Facebook and Twitter accounts, using them to spread the word of the prizes, points and rewards they can get from your dealership gives clients a reason to participate.

Another way to go when it comes to adding that gaming element to your promotion is by working an actual game into your social media. It’s a popular technique that you can find through services like Frima Studio and Zynga. These marketing groups take your business and tie it into a game that people can play on social media.

It makes business with you more than profitable. It makes it more than just fun.

It makes it a real game. The more customers use your business, the more they feel like they’re winning.

The drawback of the strict game approach is that it carries a steep price point. Social media game designers often charge steep fees. Their time is hard to come by. Good thing that TK Carsites has a middle road.

We’re soon to offer an array of promotional tools that work that “game layer” into your social media. Just like the businesses above, we seamlessly work a social, sharing element into the promotion. We make the promotions fun and we make sure that customers score points by sharing the good word about your business.

Sharing is natural. So is having fun. That’s what social media is all about.

TK Carsites will be bringing those together into a single tool and making sure that when it comes to digital marketing, you’re a champion player.

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Read more Automotive articles on the TK Carsites blog.

Google screwed up. Don’t be like Google.

Now, we’re not saying there’s anything wrong with making billions. By all means, go ahead. But don’t stand by when the future of marketing speeds up around you, like they did.

If the top Web technology provider on the planet says, like former CEO Eric Schmidt just did, that the key to future success is social media, you best listen. Learn from their mistakes. Get on social media, get with the latest technologies, and get active.

But how? I’ll tell you how.

The first step to recovery, experts say, is admitting a problem. Take a look at your social media to see if it hits these six criteria:

Are you sure you know why you’re on social media?

Think it over. If you can’t come up with a quick answer all on your own, here’s one: You’re on social media to get social. Talk to people. Talk to them like you would talk to them when you’re meeting at a wedding. Talk to them like real people and address their real concerns.

Are you aware of the latest tools on the market?

There are tons. TONS. And many of them are redundant, overvalued or just plain broken. But here’s the good news—many of them are unique, inexpensive and brilliant. Know which is which. If you don’t know, ask someone—someone like, oh, say, TK Carsites Facebook.

Are you putting your personality out there?

Don’t just decide how you want your dealership to be seen on social media. Decide how your business’ personality should be seen. If you deal with your customers like you’re just a business, they’ll consider you just a business. If you deal with them like a friend, they’ll treat you like a friend. So get friendly and put some personality out there. Talk music, talk films, talk sports. Just talk something—don’t just sell.

Are you growing a Fan base that’s local?

Try to extend yourself to the local community. A lot of dealerships fail to find their Fans locally and then wonder why their social media followers aren’t coming in to do business. If you grow locally, you’ll attract locals. So, make contact through social media with people, charities and businesses in your local area.

Are you engaging your Fans and Followers?

It’s this simple: If you don’t talk to them, they won’t talk to you. If they don’t talk to you, they won’t talk about you. To talk to them, talk about what they want to talk about. Don’t try to talk to Indianapolis Colts fans about Japanese automobiles day in and day out. Talk about what’s going on, about what’s on everybody’s mind and, most of all, about your Fans and Followers themselves. By coming to know them, they come to know you.

Are you linking all your digital marketing together?

You’ve got to be linked with the latest tools. There are just too many moving parts in modern digital marketing to not link them. It would be like trying to drive a car if you had to manually operate each wheel and every part of the engine. Get a tool like the TK Connect social and search dashboard that combines all of your social media in a single place, monitoring it and operating it together. You get ahead by staying with the leading technology. It’s as simple as that.

If you can answer “yes” to all these questions, then congratulations! Pat yourself on the back and give yourself a treat. You’re not going to be like Google.

You’re going to be the future.

We can accept that everybody is getting into social media—your high-school pals, your grandma, your pets.

We can accept that social media is getting into everything—phones, cars, planes.

And we can accept that all these folks on all these outlets are relying more and more on social media to make their purchasing decisions.

So how do you promote on social media? How do you get all those eyeballs to look at what you’re doing?

Easy. Do something interesting and make it look good.

Sound complicated? It’s not. It requires you have three things:

1. Strategy

2. Promotion

3. Tools

Getting the first part, strategy, requires you think about what you want to say on social media. What makes your business interesting? What makes it distinct? What about your personality do you want to associate with your brand?

Those are simple questions, but few businesses ask them. Auto dealerships too often assume that they need to just be louder than the crowd. They don’t realize that standing out takes looking at the unique qualities of their dealership’s personality.

Find those qualities and create that personality.

Now you know who you are. Time to figure out what to say.

That’s where promotions come in. Promotions are attractive to social media because they hit on two key components of effective social media marketing: An incentive for your customers to listen and the activity that makes dialogue interesting.

Your customers want a reason to listen to you and want to be inspired to talk back.

Do it with a promotion to get things ramped up. You want a promotion that speaks to your dealership’s personality. Are you an eco-conscious Toyota dealership? Do a promotion with a Green charity. Do you sell Ford trucks? Try something patriotic. Finding a cause to bring your personality into activity is what brings it to light—as in the case of Fresh Encounters, a grocery business that surged to 1,000 loyal Likes on Facebook with a single campaign to give food to the needy in their community.

They got busy and it got them talked about.

You know best what you want to say. Then comes how to say it.

That takes tools. You don’t just want to grind away at Facebook and Twitter without optimizing your social media so that it doesn’t take as long to use. You also don’t want to just do what everyone else is doing, and rely solely on services like TweetDeck. Tools like the TK Connect dashboard, which centralizes all of your social media, letting you monitor and post content from a single source, while providing you with metrics on the results, are solutions to that.

You also want to consider what tools will let you stand out. You want to show off your social swagger, with services like micro-sites, graphical outreach campaigns, and social sign-in. TK can direct you to some of the best on the market. Just ask.

As you may or may not know, TK Carsites holds a free weekly webinar every Wednesday on related Internet Marketing topics. On Wednesday April 6, we gave our loyal online community a surprise with an opportunity to win a ticket inside the Digital Dealer 10 conference held in Orlando, Florida.

This time around, we decided to highlight those of you who have stood by TK Carsites and have been an exceptional asset within our continuously growing online community. With that said, we could not have thought of a better way to say thank you, than offering Dealers the opportunity to experience Digital Dealer Conference and Exposition with us from April 19^th – 21^st. The two randomly selected winners are:

WINNER: Dane Brooks, a Social Media Specialist for O’Brien Auto Group

WINNER: Suzanne Brief, Internet General Manager for Baron Auto Group

We are so excited to announce the winners who we will spotlight during Digital Dealer 10 and will be snapping photos and videos to highlight them as our special guests, which we will then share with you across our Social Networks.

After breaking the news to our winners, we received some enthusiastic responses:

“I was STOKED! I have never won anything before, and to win a ticket to #DD10 is huge!  Thanks TK Carsites, you guys Rock!  Can’t wait to be Social with you in Orlando at #DD10!” Dean Brooks says.

Further adding how he first found out about TK Carsites, “I was invited to one of TK’s weekly webinars by a friend who thought I would see some value in it and haven’t missed one since then!”

We are so pleased that Dane did not miss a webinar since first hearing about us and we bet he is too, for it helped him win his ticket inside the doors of Digital Dealer 10. Here is what Dane Brooks had to say about us.

“TK Carsites is the authority on Digital Marketing and Social Media in the dealership world as far as I’m concerned.  Their knowledge and willingness to help, puts them above any other company out there.  Their free weekly webinars are both informative and fun.” Says Dane

We also spoke with our second winner, Suzanne Brief from Baron Auto Group and she had much to say about TK Carsites.

“I have found TK Carsites to be the most cost effective, technologically advanced website solution for dealers seeking an edge in the market. The staff is beyond knowledgeable and consistently innovating new solutions for their dealer clients.”

We were thrilled by Suzanne’s thoughts about our company and curious as to how she had first heard about us.“I first came in to contact with TK Carsites about 3 years ago while researching a new site provider for the dealership I was working for at the time.” Says Suzanne

Suzanne was so excited about her winnings; here is what she had to say,“I was floored. With the exception of a dollar or two on a lottery scratch off ticket I have never won anything”

It is only a couple of weeks until we take on Digital Dealer 10 and we look forward to connecting with you. We encourage you to stop by our booth #917B and there you will have another chance to win one of two iPad 2 giveaways.

We look forward to meeting with our winners, both Dane and Suzanne, as well as all the other attendees at Digital Dealer 10, and further embracing our online community, offline.

(Each winner receives a free ticket to Digital Dealer 10, which does include meals. (Airfare and Hotel stay not included.)