4 posts tagged “email marketing”
When you’ve worked hard to set up your dealership blog -- or paid good money to have someone set it up for you -- itcan be frustrating when you think that nobody’s reading.
Even though it’s a relatively new technology, automotive marketing shares the same traits with all other forms of copywriting. You have to give people a good reason to read what you’re writing. The best way to get people to read is to give them a great headline.
Headlines are important for two reasons. You wan t to entice real people to read your posts, but you also want your posts to show up well in search engines so that they can find you in the first place. Here’s what you need to know about headlining for your automotive blog marketing campaign.
Search engines require relevance.
Search engines like Google display entries in their results in order of relevance to the original search term. When someone types in a specific make and model of vehicle, the search engine provides the best matches for their search terms, and the words in your headline some of the most important ones they analyze.
Make sure you’re incorporating what people might be searching for. Think about what information your blog post is providing, and title your articles using words that people would type if they were looking for that information. If they’re looking for ‘used car deals in Denver’, don’t title your post with ‘New Pricing’ because that won’t tell the search engines what they need to know.
Human beings require human interest.
Knowing that search engines rank certain pages well because they contain highly relevant keywords, many first time webmasters try to stuff those words in their headlines just to get high placement. What gets forgotten is that high placement does not guarantee a click. If your title is boring people won’t click on it no matter how high on the page you are.
The way to capture reader attention is to highlight what they will benefit from reading the article. Be as interesting as you can without being boring. To use the previous example, ‘used car deals in Denver’ might get you high search engine placement but it’s not particularly enticing to real people. ‘Used Car Deals in Denver: Best prices in the state’ or ‘How to Find Used Car Deals in Denver’ show readers what they’ll get out of reading your article. Telling them how they’ll be helped almost guarantees a click.
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?
