6 posts tagged “brand marketing”
Remember five years ago, way back in the Internet dark ages, when the first question anybody asked you about your online brand marketing strategy was, “Do you have a website?”
This time last year, the question was “Do you have a blog?” This year, the question is different once again. Now the question on everybody’s lips is, “What’s your blog address?”
It’s no longer nice to have a blog, it’s assumed. You could almost go so far as to say it’s mandatory. Everybody has one, and web designers are rushing to keep up with the demand from people in every business wanting a shiny new blog for their not so new website. Auto dealers are no exception.
If your auto dealership isn’t already blogging, you’re probably wondering what all of the fuss is about. Why do you need a blog? Aren’t they just online diaries? Not anymore.
1. Blogs increase your auto dealership’s search engine standings.
When you create a static website, search engines crawl through the internet and find your blog once. They investigate the content, find out what your website’s all about, and they leave. If you don’t change anything, they don’t come back and update their information -- there’s nothing to update.
With a blog, your content is dynamic and changing. You’re adding new information constantly, creating a growing inventory of searchable terms, and giving search engine crawlers to come back for. Weekly or even daily you’re filling your website with rich information and increasing the value of the site, making it more and more likely that search engines will list you favorably among their top results.
2. Blogs help your auto dealership build a thriving community.
Imagine having an entire community of people lined up to hear your message. They come to you and answer your questions or help other readers with theirs. They take time out of their day to come and hang out on your website.
That’s what blogging can give you. With syndication services and email signups, a limitless number of potential customers will hear everything you want them to hear -- voluntarily. Your comment section will enable them to communicate directly with you and with other readers and buyers. You don’t just get customers -- you get loyal fans.
3. Blogs can give your auto dealership trusted expert status.
Traditionally, people considered blogs to be glorified diaries. While some people still use them for this purpose, the majority of blogs are topical and often business related. Your blog can be your forum for dispensing valuable advice on the car buying or car ownership experience. You can give advice on how to maintain the resale value of your vehicle, how to keep the new car smell, even how often someone should go between oil changes.
Imagine your potential customers having a question and instead of asking their neighbor, they come to your website. That’s what blogging can give you.
More often than ever before, shoppers are using the internet to do their research and make purchasing decisions. Your potential customers are sitting at their computers and typing search terms into their search engine of choice, waiting to see what the internet sends their way. Don’t you want yours to be the website that they see?
Why Your Auto Dealership Cares About How Search Engines Work
All of the major search engines function in the same way. They send robot “crawlers” out over the internet, thousands of times a day. When they find updated content, they add it to their electronic inventory and remember exactly what every website in the world is saying.
With a static website, the crawlers see your website when it first goes up and they make note of what it says. When the crawlers go back out and find the same thing, the same information is retained and what was on your website months or ago is all it has on file.
If the search engines know that your site has new information all the time, they check all the time and make note of all the new content on your site. As your site becomes a trusted resource of information, your rankings go up and your site is more and more likely to be displayed in the top results.
How Blogs Help Your Auto Dealership’s Search Engine Rankings
Search Engine rankings are vital for your success on the internet, and many dealers are in search of automotive internet marketing solutions. Search engines display results based on relevancy. Their view of relevancy is not just about the relevance of a specific term or page, but based on the content of your website as a whole. If your site is chock full of relevant information, search engines consider your site to be more valuable than one with only a page or two of semi-relevant results.
It’s hard to fill a five-page site with very much content -- there’s only so much you can say in that amount of space. Blogs have a different page for every entry you create. If you create a blog post every week, your site will have 52 pages of relevant results at the end of the year. Imagine if you posted twice or three times a week. Every post creates more value and increases the virtual trust the engines place in your site.
Keywords And Your Auto Dealership’s Site
Many business owners are overwhelmed by the topic of search engine optimization, and for good reason. On a site with limited content, the specificity of the content is paramount. With a blog, though, the importance of this decreases as the quality and quantity of your content increases.
The more topical blog entries you create, the more likely it is that important keywords come up frequently. Just by blogging you can obtain high search engine rankings and save a fortune on consultants who just want to stuff your site full of keywords. You get a quality website that people want to visit, not just one that the search engines send their way.
Blogging is meeting the needs of these customers and the auto dealerships that want their business. The bloggingplatform has created a unique way for customers and businesses to communicate in a non-threatening way and allow customers to be a part of the car buying experience long before they ever think of buying a car. So how do you turn your website into a thriving community?
Be there to help.
One of the most important features of a popular blog is that they provide useful information and a unique opportunity for Brand Marketing. This isn’t just what you as the site owner think is useful -- you need to find out what your potential customers think is useful. If you’re not sure, look around at comparable sites on the internet and investigate which ones are popular.
The list of things you can help with is virtually limitless -- you can talk about how to entertain children on long car rides, about the latest safety ratings on certain cars, even the best way to clean a dash board. If it’s related to cars or buying cars, it’s fair game.
Ask for feedback.
Blogging is not a soap box, it’s a discussion. Make sure to have a comments field and a feedback form readily available for reader interaction. You can use this as a method to just hear what your readers and customers are saying, or you can make it more interactive by asking for feedback or answers on specific issues. Want to know what color looks best on the new model or whether readers like the new site layout? Now’s the time to ask.
Participate in the discussion.
People don’t buy from businesses -- they buy from people. More specifically, they buy from people they know. Designate someone from your team to be responsible for handling reader questions and responding to their comments on your blog. Let them be personal, and make sure they understand that blogging is not a sales medium. Allow and encourage them to be themselves and watch your loyalty ratings go up.
Once businesses understand that blogging is about community building and not about selling products, the quality of their blogs goes up and their visitor statistics follow suit. So what are you blogging about?
The buzz is everywhere. Marketing rules have changed, and they continue to change almost every day. Your customers don’t want to be sold, they don’t want to be interrupted, and they don’t want to be yelled at. They want to be a part of a community.
Blogging is meeting the needs of these customers and the auto dealerships that want their business. The blogging platform has created a unique way for customers and businesses to communicate in a non-threatening way and allow customers to be a part of the car buying experience long before they ever think of buying a car. So how do you turn your website into a thriving community?
Be there to help.
One of the most important features of a popular blog is that they provide useful information. This isn’t just what you as the site owner think is useful -- you need to find out what your potential customers think is useful. If you’re not sure, look around at comparable sites on the internet and investigate which ones are popular.
The list of things you can help with is virtually limitless -- you can talk about how to entertain children on long car rides, about the latest safety ratings on certain cars, even the best way to clean a dash board. If it’s related to cars or buying cars, it’s fair game.
Ask for feedback.
Blogging is not a soap box, it’s a discussion, even if you're participating in Blog Marketing. Make sure to have a comments field and a feedback form readily available for reader interaction. You can use this as a method to just hear what your readers and customers are saying, or you can make it more interactive by asking for feedback or answers on specific issues. Want to know what color looks best on the new model or whether readers like the new site layout? Now’s the time to ask.
Participate in the discussion.
People don’t buy from businesses -- they buy from people. More specifically, they buy from people they know. Designate someone from your team to be responsible for handling reader questions and responding to their comments on your blog. Let them be personal, and make sure they understand that blogging is not a sales medium. Allow and encourage them to be themselves and watch your loyalty ratings go up.
Once businesses understand that blogging is about community building and not about selling products, the quality of their blogs goes up and their visitor statistics follow suit. So what are you blogging about?
You’re familiar with television ads, radio ads, and fliers. You’re familiar with public relations. You have a pretty good handle on your marketing. But what about your social media marketing strategy? If you don’t have one, or you don’t know what it is, you’re missing out on key sales opportunities for your auto dealership.
Blogs are everywhere these days, and they’re not just for individuals. Businesses, including automotive dealerships, are
blogging with great success as part of a comprehensive social media marketing plan. You already have a website, you say? That’s not enough anymore.
The key difference between a blog and a website is that a blog is immediately updatable -- new content can be added quickly and easily, without having to call in a designer. Entries in a blog are chronological, so you can incorporate current events into your content. More frequent updates means more frequent “crawling” by search engines, and that can lead to higher search engine placement -- when somebody types in “car dealer” and the name of your city, your dealership is more likely to pop up in their results. Back-end analytics are letting dealers know what search terms are being used to find their blogs, which is vital information when trying to position your business for optimum search engine placement.
So what do you put on your blog? Pretty much anything goes, although many dealerships are using the medium as an opportunity to craft newsletter style content that reaches a much larger audience than the traditional paper version. You can tell your readers about everything from your charity car wash earnings -- complete with a picture of your contribution check -- to the sale you’re having next month to announcing that your parts manager had a brand new baby boy. You can do it all from the comfort of your office PC with no technical skills required.
“Blogs are really just another tool for giving yourself a constant presence at all points in the buying process,” says Ryan Gerardi, founder of the online brand marketing and advertising consulting firm web2ologies and an industry specialist. With an active blog, you can position yourself as not only an expert in your area, but as a consistent and stable leader in your local industry.
In a recent article in Dealer Business Briefing, Gary Nixon of CIMA Systems, provider of automated customer interaction tools for dealerships, says that dealers should link to their blogs as much as possible. You should be linking to your blog from your main site, yes, but also providing links to your blog entries in your outgoing emails. Even your service ticket confirmations can bring customers and readers to your blog. Nixon says that you should update at least once a week, and gear your content to the specific makes and models you carry.
Considering many businesses and dealerships are paying for cost-per-click advertising through search engines anyway, a social media marketing strategy costs nothing and can have new readers and customers visiting your site almost immediately. In the experience of many dealerships, more eyeballs mean more dollars, and considering today’s economy, that can only be a good thing.
The thing that is on most dealers' minds is how they can generate more business which, for the most part equates to how they can generate more leads. More people in the showroom, more web inquiries. The Internet has really bred a mentality today that auto sales is all about lead generation. Naturally, we began devising ways for blogs to generate leads.
What we had come up with was the idea of using blog entries to display multi-media rich virtual showcases of cars in stock, but this was met with technical challenges at the RSS level which we need not get in to here. Plus, as we began to realize that using blogs to showcase vehicles and generate leads was just another way to skin the same old stray cat, we started shifting our focus towards a whole other form of marketing...online brand marketing.
Search engine brand marketing is an entirely different thought process for car dealers, but dealers have been doing offline brand marketing for decades through radio, T.V. and print advertising. If there is one thing that seems to lack in online advertising for car dealers, it is the idea of brand marketing. Considering that search engines are the ultimate playing field for online brand marketing and that blogs are equipped to provide superlative SEO, what better way is there for dealers to use blogs today?
The hidden gem for using blogs for search engine brand marketing is that the product can be made completely hands-free for car dealers. Unlike many other forms of online advertising where the dealer is required to prepare vehicles for online display, prepare them for offline display, work with ad agencies to prepare promotions for print and web, deal with software and their providers, yada yada yada, dealers aren't required to lift a finger in order to benefit from this form of blog marketing. A marketing agency with the right tools in place can produce lasting and impacting results for their dealers by saturating search markets and improving overall online visibility, including social media marketing.
