3 posts tagged “search engine 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.
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.
