2 posts tagged “rss marketing”
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.
Build Your Brand
Unlike most other forms of online marketing for auto dealers where you pay to build brand credibility for the provider, with AutoBurst you are investing into your own brand. Each dollar you put in to the AutoBurst program results in quality unique content that you own, visibility of your dealership on the Web, and greater overall awareness of your products and services.
Key Phrase Relevancy
One of the great benefits to Organic Search Marketing is relevancy. By investing into a Content Channel, you are not limiting your dealership to just that key phrase. You are investing into a set of related key phrases. This ultimately is what helps attain saturation.
For instance, "ford st louis" and "st louis dealer" share the phrase "st louis". Since each channel will receive an article each day referencing that phrase, along with each landing page using that phrase numerous times, the term "st louis" will become forthright to your dealership more quickly than if only one channel contained that term. This is but one example of how content relevancy takes effect.
Search Engine Visibility
As described previously, search engine visibility is categorized into four categories - Invisible, Visible, Penetrated, and Saturated. With AutoBurst, you are guaranteed to benefit from increased visibility in several areas of your business. Search engine visibility is a natural by-product of quality content, effective SEO, RSS Marketing, and link building. Your business is destined to become more and more accessible to online auto shoppers as you add to your investment.
Increased Residual Site Traffic, Increased Sales
Naturally, the more visible you are in search engines, and thus with Internet users, the more traffic you can expect to see on your site. Plus, since AutoBurst is specific to Organic Search Marketing, the visibility and increased site traffic has residual value beyond the capacity of other forms of marketing and advertising. For instance, with PPC advertising, you stop appearing as soon as your daily or monthly budget is used, or when you halt the campaign. With radio, T.V., and print advertising, your presence disappears as soon as the ad expires or stops airing. But with AutoBurst, your presence remains in tact for an indefinite period of time for as long as you keep the web pages and content live on the Web. Thus, what you invest into today is yours for the future too.
