8 posts tagged “internet marketing”
You’ve been hearing it everywhere -- automotive blog marketing is one of the best and simplest ways to improve your search engine rankings without paying a fortune for the privilege. Once you’ve decided to go ahead with it, though, the big question still remains. Who’s going to write this stuff?
There are two main ways to get content onto your automotive dealership blog. You can have someone do it in-house -- either you or someone else who works for you -- or you can hire it out to someone else. There are pros and cons to each option. Here are some things to think about to help you make your decision.
Do you have enough to say?
If you’re doing the writing yourself, you’re going to need to find a lot of stuff to write about. A blog isn’t much of a blog if it’s only updated every couple of months, and you won’t reap many blog benefits if you don’t post often. If you or someone in your dealership can be counted on to consistently have something to say on relevant topics, you might want to write the blogs in-house and give it a really personal touch.
Can you write well?
If the only time you pick up a pen is to sign pay checks, writing a blog might not be for you. If you have good spelling and grammar skills, you’ll probably find blogging easy.
There are two things to think about on this issue. If you don’t write well, you can either hire an editor or you can publish as is and take the risk. Editors often cost more than writers, so you might end up spending more money and time to have someone else fix your writing. If you publish as is, you risk looking unprofessional. But if you’re confident in your ability to get good words on the screen, doing it yourself is a great way to go.
Do you have the time to write a blog?
Perhaps the most important consideration when it comes to automotive internet marketing is time. Marketing initiatives are resource intensive -- sometimes the resource is money and sometimes the resource is time. There aren’t many ways to market your car dealership that are free and fast.
If you have the time to devote to this project or you can delegate it to someone else who does, writing your blog yourself can be a great idea. If you know that this will be just one more project on your ever-expanding to do list, you might be better off paying for the content.
It’s estimated that there are over 200 million blogs floating around on the internet. Do you ever wonder how yours stands up to the rest?
There’s a lot involved in automotive blog marketing. Just getting content up and making sure it’s optimized for search engine traffic is hard enough. But how your blog looks and feels is just as important in making sure your readers come back after their first visit.
Do you allow for comments?
One of the key differences between a blog and a static website is that blogs allow your readers the chance to contribute to the conversation. Many people love reading blogs because they’re not an authoritarian media -- it’s not just you writing and them reading. But many blog owners turn off the comment capacity on their blogs, often fearing spam.
Always allow for comments, even when nobody’s reading your blog yet. Give people the chance to contribute. They may join in and they may not, but they certainly won’t if you don’t let them.
Do you have a contact form?
Even if users can comment, some will prefer to get in touch with you privately. Is your contact form or email information easy to find and use? Do you require too much information from users when they’re filling out the form or can they simply leave their email address? Making yourself easy to find is crucial in this interconnected world.
Can your readers navigate by category and by date?
When a new visitor likes what they see, the odds are pretty good that they’ll want to see more. Depending on what they’re looking for they’ll want to navigate in different ways. If you’re discussing local events or issues that are time sensitive, it makes sense to navigate by date and you’ll want to have your archives searchable by month of publication. If they’re particularly interested in a certain topic -- trucks, for example, or maintenance issues -- they don’t want to have to search through every post you’ve ever written to find relevant posts. It makes sense in that case to allow them to search by category.
Is it easy on the eyes?
In many cases, blogs that look great the first time you look at them on the designer’s mockup don’t look great with lines and lines of text. The human eye can only handle so much information at once, so make sure your text is broken up with lots of white space. And speaking of white space -- it’s supposed to be white, or at least very white. Light text on a dark backround is hard to read for an extended period, and readers will click away instead of squinting.
Luckily, most of these issues require only a few clicks to change so if you need to make some fixes, it shouldn’t take too long. With a few simple tweaks to your automotive brand marketing strategy you can end up with readers staying longer -- and coming back for more.
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.
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?
By now, we know that blogs are all the rage. We know that every website and business should have one. We know that it should be updated frequently for improved online brand marketing and search engine rankings, and we know that blog owners should participate in the community of discussion.
But what’s the point, really? Search engine rankings are wonderful and increased page views are great, but there has to be a higher purpose for any marketing initiative. What does blogging really do?
Blogging is the easiest and cheapest way to achieve the status of trusted expert. In any business -- especially industries with high ticket prices on their products -- trusted expert status is a licence to print money.
Creating trust in your auto dealership blog
The first part of attaining trusted expert status is earning reader and customer trust. Blogs are perfect for this because they are not a sales medium. If you only blogged about why people should buy their car from you, you’d quickly run out of both things to say and readers.
Blogs are the place to be honest and transparent. Your blog is the platform on which you can be yourself and add a personal face to your business. The content on your blog should be truthful, real, and valuable. With each post you write, you increase your readers’ trust that you’re not trying to sell them anything -- you’re just trying to help.
Creating expert status in your auto dealership blog
Trust isn’t enough. If you’re trustworthy but have nothing of value to offer your readers, they’ll quickly click away and go elsewhere. This is when you have to make sure you’re providing content that can increase your readers’ knowledge and teach them the things they want to know.
A good example of this comes from the financial planning industry. If you know a financial planner personally, and they continually give you pieces of information that help you in your daily life regardless of whether or not you’re in the market for their services, you will remember that they are an expert. When it comes time for you to hire a financial planner, are you going to open the Yellow Pages, or are you going to call your expert friend? This is what your blog creates -- a personal friendship with an expert.
Give of yourself and the knowledge that your dealership has to offer freely and you will become known in your industry as the place to go for information. Once the people are there, they might just buy a car while they’re at it.
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.
Last week Dealer Impact posted an entry to its blog titled, "Top Ten signs a dealership is not serious about the Internet". The list includes some legitimate points that I see every day when talking with dealers, but suggesting a dealer is or is not "serious" about the Internet creates the wrong perspective here.
Most dealers today understand they need to take the Internet seriously and most attempt to do so. The problem is that they do not always understand how and so many of the activities suggested in this list that dealers do occur because the providers they are counting on just aren't there for them.
When dealers go with a website marketing company, do you think they are purchasing a software solution or expert consultation from the provider on a regular basis? Probably a little bit of both of course but unfortunately most website marketing companies today are selling a software solution expecting the dealers to manage on their own and then contact the provider for assistance when necessary.
The problem with this formula is that dealers go in to a relationship with the provider with one set of expectations while the provider has another. A few months go by and the dialog between dealer and provider diminishes into daily oblivion and next thing you know the dealer is out on the prowl seeking another website provider in hopes to "get it right" this time. So who is to blame for dealers wanting to jump ship so frequently with website providers, the dealer or the provider?
Moving on, since most General Managers and Dealer Principals are not Internet "gurus", naturally they rely on those who are in order to help deliver success for the dealership on the Internet. While the GM would not likely have this person babysit their 8-year-old daughter as DI suggests, this should not discount the fact that this person can actually help the dealership succeed on the Internet. Flip it around. Should the Internet guru tell the dealer, sorry, I am not interested in baby sitting your 8-year-old daughter and therefore am not interested in helping your dealership on the Internet. As you can see, using this criteria as an analogy has little credence.
Getting serious on the Internet is about incorporating the web assets and the Internet marketing tools you have into your marketing strategy all together. Treating the Internet as a separate entity, which is all too common among dealers, is bad execution. Creating PDF versions of you print ads and making them available on your website is not true implementation of your marketing efforts on the Web.
Marketing strategies should be defined by the dealers without regard to medium and then the dealers should consult with their Internet guru on how to best incorporate the Internet into the defined strategy.
