2 posts tagged “marketing strategy”
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.
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.
