Join the Party
June 19, 2008 by admin
In a meeting the other day with Dealer client. We were showing him around the new virtual infrastructure we were creating for the Dealership, e.g. new Blog, Online Service Forum, some promo pages on their site, etc. The Dealer asked if people would actually use these things. He seemed unsure, despite having already signed up, whether or not people on the Web would utilize these communication tools.
My response was of course was “Yes!”
I elaborated by suggesting that people already are using these things. People do research online in blogs, forums, and social networks. They talk about dealerships (positive and negative). Rate dealerships, etc. Case in point, check out this extreme rant by a blogger about his recent experience with a Ford Dealer in Seattle. This is but one of numerous bad experiences about Dealers that I have come across online.
Continuing on…”We are going to help you join the party”, I stated. “We are preparing you with the communication tools and resources you need to network, connect with, and build relationships with people on the Web in ways that are conducive to your Dealership.”
But just because you show up at the virtual “party” doesn’t mean you will be well received. Just like in real life, you have to get your game on when mingling in a social environment. As nice as it will be to have all these neat new ways to communicate with people, you still have to find your own unique groove in building relationships. That is not easy.
There is a paradigm shift in the works right now because auto shoppers and owners have the leverage they have desired and deserved for decades. Car Dealers have gone through some tough lessons over the past 10 years and things are not becoming any easier. But you have to start somewhere and learn from the school of hard knocks sometimes.
Car dealers can blog for SEO
December 7, 2007 by admin
The buzz is growing. Dealers are online. So too are vendors. Everyone is blogging. Everyone is starting their own blog and everyone is commenting on the blogs of others. Everyone is beginning to see the potential of blogging and social networking for their businesses. It’s a great time to be in the business of blogging for dealers.
One of the greatest challenges every dealer is going to encounter is how to make blog marketing a good investment of their time and their money. Car dealers for the most part look at the Internet as a haven for generating leads. But blogging is not about that. Blogging for your business is about reputation management, brand awareness, and networking. Why would a car dealer want these things? How does social networking help you sell more cars?
Well, right now these questions can only be answered theoretically. There isn’t any data to show where and how online branding and social networking impact your bottom line because it really is only just now starting to occur. But is there any doubt that these things can and do impact dealerships in a positive way?
We could get in to a whole theoretical discussion about these things, but one area where blogging and social networking can impact dealerships in a tangible way is through SEO. Anyone can start a blog, for free even. Anyone can post to a blog and comment on it. But not everyone can make that be impacting on their business for the long term if they do not know SEO and how to apply it to their blogging efforts.
Forward-thinking dealers understand this and are beginning to educate themselves and experiment with blogging and social media.
[tags]automotive marketing, social media, social networking, automotive blogs, car dealer marketing, search engine optimization[/tags]
Blogs that damage reputation
December 4, 2007 by admin
Search engines have a tough job. Thousands of websites, particularly blogs, are introduced almost daily that are designed to trick search engines into responding certain ways so as to benefit a shady blogger. Examples of some of the “shady” techniques search engines encounter each day include:
- cloaking
- keyword stuffing
- mis-spelling of well-known words and websites
- pages loaded with irrelevant words
- hidden text or hidden links
- and more…
Fortunately, efforts are constantly in place and evolving to detect these unethical behaviors and shut down these blogs. Unfortunately, this make it all that more difficult for ad agencies to maintain their own blogs effectively because they are constantly walking on glass so as to not be misjudged by search engines and shut down.
The primary thing to look for when presented with a blog marketing strategy is what the overall objective is of the system. A quality blog marketing strategy should be a win-win-win result for all parties, i.e. for search engines, for Internet searchers, and for the client websites.
Search engines want well-optimized web copy and quality straight forward HTML code on landing pages. Searchers want quality relevant information that makes their search efforts fruitful. And clients want quality site traffic with truly interested visitors so that bounce rates are low and retention is high. These things can only be accomplished by putting forth transparent and ethical efforts to promote websites, not through trickery and deceit.
Be sure to keep on the look out for the quality, transparency, and ethics of a blog marketing system. If you are being presented with the guarantee of receiving dozens or hundreds of leads each month then you could be at risk of jeopardizing your site and even worse, your online brand awareness. While blogs can produce leads, their true value lies in their ability to represent your business with integrity.
[tags]blog marketing, search engine marketing, brand marketing, online marketing, internet marketing and advertising, reputation, reputation management, ethics, ethics and business, unethical business, unethical blogs[/tags]
Overnight success in blogging
December 3, 2007 by admin
Blogging for your business or car dealership can be an invaluable marketing and networking tool. It can also be a lot of work. The idea of blog marketing is to promote and grow your business, but this can be accomplished even without a blog. In order to make blogging a viable part of your marketing strategy, it must accomplish something that nothing else can, or else it must accomplish something more efficiently and cost-effectively than do other means.
Blog Marketing is best distinguished in two forms. Both require an indefinitely long-term commitment in order to be fruitful. Both also require regular if not daily production of quality relevant content optimized for search engines. .
- Relational Marketing
- RSS Marketing
Relational Marketing is the idea of using your blog and other peoples’ blog to build relationships and network with others in your vertical. This involves you reading other blogs, commenting on them, and networking with other bloggers in addition to producing regular content and establishing yourself as an expert in your field. Very time-consuming but very rewarding and it can be done within your company umbrella or off to the side. There is a good article on SearchEngineLand called, “Managing Your Small Business Blogging Schedule” which discusses the pressure business owners can put on themselves about how often and how to prioritize their blogging activities.
RSS Marketing is the idea of using content and SEO to gain authority with search engines on select keywords and phrases, or search markets. This is a sterile approach to blog marketing that can be farmed out, thus requiring zero time and involvement from you. It also is a platform for Relational Marketing.
This is one of the great things about RSS Marketing. Businesses can apply it to their Internet marketing strategy as a hands-free investment and then as they become more comfortable and familiar with the idea of blog marketing and SEO they can begin making cracks at the Relational Marketing aspect. In other words it can be used as a stepping stone to the true power and glory of Blog Marketing.
There are no overnight successes or benefits to blog marketing. Therefore it is imperative to understand what you are getting in to. If you go in to this expecting leads to start pouring in right away you will be disappointed. While the leads will come, it is the other benefits and contributions blogging for your business helps to accomplish. Similar to how you go to business social events for networking purposes that lead to business deals in their own time, running a successful blog is like having a 24/7 business social going on for YOUR BUSINESS.
[tags]blog marketing, rss marketing, relational marketing, search engine marketing, internet marketing, automotive marketing, marketing strategy, internet marketing strategy, blogging for your business[/tags]
Full-service blog marketing for car dealers
October 19, 2007 by admin
The highest priority for auto dealers of course is to sell and service vehicles. This requires personnel to handle things such as managing and qualifying leads, closing deals, upgrading finance packages, delivering vehicles, maintaining an effective [tag]CRM[/tag] process, and running a service department. All things that are typically done in-house with trained personnel.
But some functions, such as blog marketing, can and should be farmed out to expert professionals.
Since [tag]automotive blog marketing[/tag] is in its infancy, dealers should be outsourcing this part of their business so they can reap the benefits of [tag]blog marketing[/tag] without being required to train, educate, and manage personnel on this complex form of [tag]search marketing[/tag]. Blog marketing requires time and expertise that is a distraction for dealership personnel. The industry knowledge has not yet accumulated and the tools for automotive blogging have not matured yet to make this a feasible internal business function inside the dealership.
With a full-service blog marketing service dealers are able to select a handful of search markets that they can orient their marketing strategy which in time achieves stand-out results with a fixed budget. The residual impact of [tag]organic search marketing[/tag] makes this calculated approach a good investment too. Once the strategy is defined and implemented, the effort is put on auto pilot and the blog marketing provider can oversee it on a daily basis, producing periodic reports for the dealership to analyze and make necessary adjustments.
How car dealers can use Twitter to sell cars
October 12, 2007 by admin
Last week I began using Twitter after reading posts about it on DealerRefresh and [tag]Publishing 2.0[/tag]. [tag]Twitter[/tag] is a unique [tag]Web 2.0[/tag] service that has been around since March 2006. The idea behind it is that you can post extremely short messages, literally 140 characters max, that can be emailed or text messaged to those following you. All you do once you have your own profile is visit the Twitter home page, enter your short message, and voilà , it will appear in the inboxes and cell phones of your followers. Additionally, anyone can visit your Twitter page and see all of the entries you made. For example, click here to see my Twitter page which I only recently began using.
Twitter has a page rank of 7 right now which indicates a tremendous amount of traffic to the site (in addition to good indexing). I would suspect that the people using Twitter are what I call Internet power users, i.e. people that blog, run blogs, run social networks, and frequent discussion forums. The question to ask then is…
How many Twitter users are shopping for a car, or need service on a car, or might need after-market parts on their car, or have some sort of automotive need or interest?
If 100% is not an accurate number, then what is? Does it even matter? The point is, everyone in America is an auto consumer of some sort at some point, and Twitter users are no exception. So now the next question to ask is…
How can car dealers use Twitter to sell cars?
Car dealers have an opportunity here to explore. Imagine a car dealer with Twitter, posting tidbits about specials and promotions that might be of interest to shoppers. You visit a dealer site because you are shopping for a car, you start following their Twitter, and every day or so you get a text message or email (your preference) about something relevant to your interest. You do this with several dealers that Twitter and when the information they are Twittering no longer is relevant to your interests, you stop following. No harm done, nothing personal, you just don’t need Twitter messages from the dealer anymore and when your needs change you can start Twittering again with them.
This concept might be a stretch for some, but the simplicity and effectiveness of it is real. So real that you can expect to see it incorporatd at some point into our own Blog Marketing program.
Relational marketing-purposed blogs not realistic yet for auto dealers
October 8, 2007 by admin
An article by Gary Nixon of CIMA systems recently published on IMedia Connection provides some useful statistics and insights about auto dealer blogs and the consumer market.
[...]16 percent used interactive marketing in the form of blogs or discussion groups and more than 20 percent of respondents between 18-34 years of age used web groups and social forums when compiling information [for shopping autos].
The key points in his message are:
- Newsletters are declining in their effectiveness
- Blogs fill that gap
- Blogs should be used for relational marketing purposes
The term “relational” marketing was not used specifically in Gary’s article, but that is essentially what he was driving at. Read the first paragraph in the section labeled, “It has to inspire feedback “. He states,
[...]dealers that are taking full advantage of technology are the ones who are blogging about their own thoughts, theories and opinions of the vehicles on their lot and the industry in general.
This is a noteworthy insight, and I am certainly an advocate for dealers using blogs in this way. But this is a stretch for dealers. He cites Fiesta Ford’s blog which has been around since January 2007 and is being utilized for relational marketing purposes in an effective manner. But this is rare for dealerships. Mercedes-Benz of Haggerstown is also doing this, but I know they have some dedicated and expert resources (DealerRefresh) behind that effort too.
The reason I point this out is because like lot management, getting dealers to blog is a challenge. The knowledge is not there and the culture certainly isn’t either. This is why a full-service blog marketing solution for auto dealers are important. While out of the box, a full-service blog like [tag]AutoBurst[/tag] does not focus on the relational marketing aspect of blogging, it does not restrict it either. With this approach, the blog can be optimized for driving traffic through effective hands-off [tag]RSS Marketing[/tag] regardless of whether or not the dealer utilizes it for relational marketing. And if the dealer does take advantage of the blog for that purposes, then all the better.
Take a look at our recent post titled, “The 5 principals of an effective blog marketing strategy for auto dealers” which explains more about why full-service blogs for auto dealers make sense and how they can create a foundation for dealers to delve in to relational and social marketing aspects of blogging.
Kudos to Gary for the great article, too.
Good SEO is the foundation for effective RSS Marketing
September 26, 2007 by admin
There seems to a growing awareness that search engine optimization ([tag]SEO[/tag]) in the auto industry has fallen to the wayside in recent years to pay-per-click advertising, or PPC. In fact, when people talk about “search engine marketing” these days often times what they actually are referring to is pay-per-click advertising. But there is more to SEM than just PPC and the few companies that have been or are beginning to provide quality SEO services for their dealers are in for a real treat, and the reason why has to do with RSS marketing.
Unlike PPC which does not depend on quality SEO, RSS marketing revolves around it so before you can even think of getting in to RSS marketing, you first must have a solid SEO foundation which, for effective search marketing today comes down to two primary things:
- Relevancy of content
- Good SEO practices
Relevancy of Content
While the word “content” is a generic term, the context by which it is used in SEM has to do primarily with static text on a web page that search engines can read and index. Relevancy is the term used to identify the consistency by which your content is with your business, your product, your services, and other content on your sites. Thus, “relevant content” simply indicates that the information on your sites is consistent with your message or theme and that search engines can identify this.
Good SEO Practices
Search Engine Optimization ([tag]Automotive SEO[/tag]) is the practice of preparing your site for indexing with search engines. This includes things like publishing relevant content, using relevant titles for your pages, applying relevant META information in your page headers, being smart about how you name your image files, and more. Search engines routinely inspect all the pages of your website, looking for these things and updating its databases of websites and information. When users perform a search on the Internet, the search engine wants to present the most popular, relevant, and up-to-date sites and pages it knows of. By optimizing your site properly, you increase the chances of appearing in the top SERPs, or search engine results pages.
RSS Marketing vs. PPC
Once you have established these things on your sites, RSS marketing can then be applied to help produce long-term, or residual, results with a far better ROI than PPC. RSS Marketing consists of using XML syndication services to make your relevant content available to a myriad of other sources and destinations on the Web, including search engines. This makes your content, thus your message, visible to more than just those searching for it on a search engine that happen to notice your paid ad.
Residual Benefit
Keep in mind that with PPC, the more people click on your ads, the more it costs you and the more you drive up the price of PPC tomorrow, so you are fueling a vicious cycle of expense that only lines the pockets of our famed search engines. With RSS Marketing, however, your content will appear not only in the organic listings of a single search engine, but also in hundreds if not thousands of other search engines, directories, news feeds, and more within hours. Additionally, other Internet users can link to your content which adds an entirely new dimension to RSS Marketing. Each time someone clicks on a link to your content, search engines ooze with joy because they know people are interested in your message. Thus, your popularity comes back to you exponentially and at NO ADDITIONAL COST.
If you are doing well in the SEO aspect of your SEM, whether you are a dealer or a service provider, then the time is ripe for you to incorporate RSS marketing into your game.
Relational Marketing vs. RSS Marketing
September 25, 2007 by admin
Blogging is a lot of work. Anyone running a blog already knows this, or will come to know this very soon. In addition to producing content on a regular basis that keeps the interest of your readers, you also have to develop a relationship with search engines. This requires much research, persistence, guidance, observation, trial and error and creativity. Hardly the sort of things on which dealers should be spending their time.
But blogging is an important part of today’s business and dealerships are no exception. Dealers need blog marketing too.
There are two primary approaches to blog marketing.
- Relational Marketing
- RSS Marketing
Relational Marketing is the idea of using a blog to engage with your customers and build real relationships. RSS Marketing is essentially using content relevancy and Atom or RSS feeds to build trust with the search engines to create search visibility of your dealership’s web presence and drive traffic to your site(s). It is a technique that has been around for years and leveraged by many other industries.
So how does a dealer execute an effective blog marketing strategy without wasting valuable resources?
Much like lot management, dealers have a choice. They can do it in-house or they can outsource it. But unlike lot management, there are not many choices for outsourcing a blog marketing strategy. This will change as ad agencies learn to incorporate blog marketing strategies into their service but right now dealers have few places to go for this sort of thing.
Free dealer blogs
September 24, 2007 by admin
The cost for having a blog sitting on a server is not the expensive part of running a blog. Blogs are free. That’s right, FREE. Anyone can, including businesses can start their own blog simply by going to places like Wordpress.com or Blogspot.com. Even if you choose a paid hosting provider, your cost literally is dollars a month. So how come every business doesn’t have a blog by now?
The reason is that because producing content, keeping the blog optimized, monetized, and tied in with your other marketing and CRM efforts is challenging, requires commitment, and can be a waste of time and money if not executed effectively.
This is where dealers need assistance…blog marketing.
Blog marketing is the practice of utilizing a specific software platform, called CMS for content management system, for publishing content on a regular basis for at least one or more of the many benefits which blog marketing produces. CMS software is typically free to and you don’t even need your own server to run it because there are companies that offer this for free also.
If you are being charged to have a blog that you manage and maintain then you are being ripped off. Do not pay a dime to anyone charging you for this.
However, if you have a blog that requires little or no action on your part, what we call full-service blogs, then this is a different story. Full-service blogs, like AutoBurst, are blogs from which you benefit but that are managed and maintained by another company. Depending on the blog marketing strategy you may or may not be required to participate occasionally with the direction of the blog, but ideally a full-service blog is one in which you reap the rewards of increased search visibility and traffic to your site.
K.i.T
