2 posts tagged “online brand marketing”
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.
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.
