Can Social Media Make You Car Salesperson of the Year?
May 1, 2008 by admin
“So what do you do for a living?”
How often have we all heard that question come out of someone’s mouth? Usually uttered at cocktail parties where few people know each other, this question establishes a framework for the relationships we have with everyone around us.
When we find out what people do for a living, we can determine what they can do for us and what we can do for them, creating networks that can last a lifetime. And who doesn’t want a friend who sells cars?
Except there are only so many people you can invite to a cocktail party, and only so many cocktail parties you can attend. So how do you turn this handy piece of information into more car sales without spending the next 30 Saturdays at cocktail parties?
- Utilize social media to make local contacts -
Social media has changed the way the internet — and the world — works. People are connecting with other people in ways they never could before. They would never have the time or ability to meet before this new technology became available. Now they’re not only meeting, but becoming friends.
To use social media to forward your business goals, the first thing you have to understand is who it is that buys your product. In the auto salesperson’s case, those people are local. Focus your energies on meeting new online contacts that you know are within driving range of where you are. There are local communities on all of the major social networks, most prominently Facebook. These are where you’ll meet the people who can come out and buy your cars.
- Make them aware of what you do -
Don’t hide your occupation. Make it easy for them to find out that you sell vehicles, either by putting something simple in your forum signature line or making sure to fill in the occupation and employer categories on Facebook and LinkedIn.
- Don’t sell anything -
Social media is just what it sounds like — social. This is not a way for you to sell cars. It’s a way for you to meet people to whom you may eventually sell cars. Do not try to sell through your social media profile, ever. Just be social.
- Go about your business -
Probably the most important thing to remember about building a personal social networking profile is that you have to be yourself. You can be yourself on your best behaviour, but you have to be honest about who you are and what you’re doing. Don’t pretend to be a churchgoer or a Democrat or a kite-lover, just to sell cars. Do what you would do anyway and meet like-minded people. That will be the secret to your success.
Digg with the French for Social Media Success?
January 10, 2008 by admin
The time investment required for success in social media can be pretty intense. There are thousands of good possible places you can concentrate on to promote your cause but it is impossible to utilize them all. Which is why having a vision for what you want to accomplish and a plan to get there.
Chris Winfield of SearchEngineLand recently published a set of things you can do this year to achieve social media success. It’s called, “10 Simple Steps To Social Media Success In 2008″ and I have his list re-iterated here for your convenience. However you may want to visit the article and read them in more detail to get a more applicable use for these activities. The one that caught my attention was the idea of bookmarking posts you like but in another language. In other words, doing the translation essentially on behalf of the original poster to ultimately benefit you at the SEO level.
Here is his list along with a snippet and estimated time you can expect performing each action…
- Connect w/ Others (1 hour per week) - Add 2 contacts per week to your profile on sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook.
- Master a Discussion Forum (2 hours per week) - Become a regular masterful voice on a popular forum that interests you.
- Trim Your Feed Reader (5 hours per month) - Narrow the selection of blogs you read to just a few and comment on them each.
- Meet a Digger a Day (15 minutes per day) - Contact someone on Digg that interests you and form a bond.
- Publish Company Video - Create a video to represent your company and build links to it. (Excellent Idea).
- Think Globally (10 minutes per submission) - Translate articles you Digg into another language
- Focus on Results - Not all social sites produce fruit. You want to closely monitor how each impacts your traffic and stop using the ones that do not produce.
- Answer Questions (15 minutes per day) - Answer 5 questions a day in your niche on Yahoo! Answers.
- Join the Conversation (20 minutes per day) - Find out where and what others are saying about you and join in on the conversation.
- Year in Reviews (15 minutes per review) - Create reviews on the sites where your company is presented.
Excluding the reviews idea and the company video, this equates to approximately 10 hours per week of recommended activity you can expect to perform in order to achieve success in social media. That is no small chunk of time.
Notice there is no mention of producing content. The time required for researching topics, formulating a thesis or an opinion and then writing on a subject is demanding too. Even when you have people writing for you you still want to research topics and review what is being written.
This form of online brand marketing is no joke. You can’t take it lightly. You can’t expect results simply by creating a profile and posting some photos to it once in a while. You have to divulge yourself into it and engage virtually with those you encounter. Social Media success is no small feat.
The fallacy of social media networking
January 8, 2008 by admin
People often equate social media sites such as MySpace and Facebook to an untapped land of opportunity for marketing purposes. While there is indeed tremendous opportunity for marketing in the online social arena, the formula for success is commonly approached with misconceptions.
For instance, this recent article on Digital Dealer states,
Probably the biggest, most important technique that successful social marketers use is networking. Networking with the community should be common practice for dealers. There are hundreds of blogs on automotive reviews, consumer auto shopping, OEMs, and vendors, along with other car chatter on the internet to comment on, link to, and network with.
Not to suggest that there isn’t opportunity for networking on social media, but is it really “the biggest, most important technique”? Obviously that is a hypothetical suggestion that is open for debate.
I would argue that for the sake of ROI, especially for car dealers because of the nature of the Auto Shopper, that SEO is a more important aspect or benefit with this sort of online brand marketing. To achieve SEO benefits with social media, auto dealers, or any business for that matter, can outsource the work to experts and have professional grade content designed to promote the dealership at the SEO level pumped to their profiles. The formula to accomplish this can be defined, executed, and measured. The dealer could additionally utilize their profile to do some networking but the SEO rewards would essentially be on auto pilot, thus cost-effective.
Think about the time and effort required to benefit at the networking level in social media. If you approach it with automation then you have to design and maintain an effective CRM process custom tailored to each social profile you run. That is time-consuming. Alternatively you could take your networking efforts with an ad-hoc approach, but would this be fruitful numbers-wise? Is it worth spending 20% of your day networking in hopes to pick up an extra sale or two a month?
Networking benefits with social media do exist but they require long-term commitment and vision, two seemingly difficult concepts to apply in automotive retail with high turnover and the weighty emphasis on monthly sales. The SEO rewards however prove more bang for your buck.
SEO benefits of social marketing
November 19, 2007 by admin
Last week we mentioned that a primary benefit to car dealers in Social Media Marketing was SEO. The value of this is in realizing that using social media and networking sites to promote your business is not just about engaging with your customer audience, although that is a significant aspect, but also in that when executed effectively, social marketing can also help your dealership website gain authority with search engines.
Authority with search engines is essentially a form of advertising because it causes your website to appear high in natural search listings. This of course is extremely valuable to car dealers which is why making sure this is one of the fruits of your social media marketing efforts is important.
One way to benefit from SEO with social media marketing is to properly link the keywords you reference in your articles and even in the comments you leave on other peoples’ blogs and social profile pages. Search engines scan these web pages for links and repetitive use of keywords so, if you leave 2 or 3 related comments a week on various web sites complimentary to your SEO strategy, then linking them to your site can add tremendous value to your efforts.
While it is ideal to link the exact key phrase of your targeted search market, you still want the reader experience to be natural so sometimes you have to use a variation of the key phrase. But this is o.k. because doing so also helps positively impact your relative or long-tail search marketing.
As a result of the enhanced SEO from which car dealers can benefit in their social media marketing efforts, your dealer website will become increasingly more visible to search audiences across the globe. Every word and every link you place on your site and the websites of others should be considered for its impact on search engines and for its impact on readers.
If you spend all your time writing for your customer audience without considering how search engines will respond then you could be investing a lot of time producing results that pale in comparison to what you could be accomplishing simply by applying a few simple techniques. By the same token, if you write exclusively for search engines then you will have minimal readership, if any at all, which also does not help to enhance your search engine authority and thus awareness online of your brand.
[tags]automotive marketing, auto marketing, internet marketing, search marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, seo, sem, social marketing, social network marketing, social media marketing, long tail search[/tags]
Social marketing for transparency
November 15, 2007 by admin
How you present your dealership online to active and inactive car shoppers has become an important part of the Internet marketing strategy for car dealers today. In fact, in a recent J.D. Power study, it was reported that,
While all new-vehicle buyers hope to get a good deal, customers are receptive to spending more than they originally budgeted provided that the salesperson does a good job of educating the customer about the features and benefits they are receiving. Source AutoRemarketing.
With this in mind, the smart car dealer will seek to find cost-effective and time-effective ways to bring this added value to their customers.
One way to accomplish this is by way of social media marketing. With social marketing, dealers are now able to meet their customers at the virtual level and provide an added layer of service and rapport. In fact, with the advent of some social media sites such as Twitter, Pownce, or even digg, dealers can learn to speak with their customers in mass using alternative methods to email. This is not to suggest that email marketing is not useful, but that dealers do not have to limit their outreach to just email and direct marketing.
The important thing to keep in mind when utilizing social media marketing for sales and marketing purposes is to sustain a level of transparency with your customer audience. This means that you want to refrain from trying things that might come across as misleading or deceptive. For instance, when posting information on the Web in places not branded to your dealership, be sure to make it clear who you are and why you are there. This includes things like leaving comments on peoples’ profiles, or in discussion forums, or on other peoples’ blogs.
Anytime you go online in the name of or on behalf of your dealership, engage with people in a professional and honest manner. Using different nick names and screen names for various things can be ok, but the last thing you want do is give someone the impression that you are trying to trick them in to visiting your dealer site or giving you their info when normally they would not. The rapidity of these negative impressions circulating across the many social networks can become a viral catastrophe if it gets out of hand.
But don’t let risks like this discourage you from going in this direction, unless of course you have no intention of being honest.
[tags]auto marketing, automotive marketing, car dealer marketing, internet marketing, social marketing, social media marketing, social network marketing, brand awareness, brand marketing, online brand marketing, internet brand marketing, twitter, pownce, digg, J.D. Power, AutoRemarketing[/tags]
Social marketing for personal influence
November 14, 2007 by admin
Similar to social marketing for brand awareness, marketing for personal influence can also be realized in social media marketing. With brand awareness your purpose is essentially to gain increased exposure of your dealership on the Web, but with a focus on personal influence you can target what have been referred to as “opinion leaders” where your marketing message is either confirmed, negated, or spread across other the consumer marketplace by word of mouth and in this case by word of their social network.
This may be a fuzzy stretch for car dealers in social media marketing when you consider the amount of unrelated and often stale networking that occurs on some social networks, particularly on places like MySpace and Facebook where people often seek to add friends simply to have them, but by the same token, this could also benefit car dealers in that their social web presence is all the more visible to people online. Of course, marketing at the local level is the preferred emphasis for dealers and with social media sites, geo-audiences are not part of the formula in most cases.
Regardless, dealers putting an emphasis on using social media sites to meet customer audiences at a virtual level have a means for winning over new business and even new market audiences. Plus, this gives dealers and their customers a vehicle for sharing their experiences with their real friends and even their virtual network friends. A consequence that could have tremendous positive or negative effect, but where the playing field for dealer and customer is a mutual and transparent level.
Be sure to apply the golden rules of blogging such as honesty, transparency, and informational utility rather than the “best price” or “sell, sell, sell” approach and you will find your dealership winning over new business with built-in customer retention interests too.
[tags]auto marketing, automotive marketing, car dealer marketing, internet marketing, brand marketing, brand awareness, social marketing, social media marketing, social network marketing, personal influence, opinion leaders, Elihu Katz, Lazarsfeld, Columbia University, MySpace, Facebook[/tags]
Social marketing for brand awareness
November 13, 2007 by admin
In addition to SEO benefits of social media marketing, increased online brand awareness is also an important fruit. Much like placing ads in magazines and newspapers, or on the radio and on television, getting your dealership to appear before online markets in visual and interactive ways can be a terrific form of brand marketing for your car dealership.
Although most social media sites are not designed at an enterprise level where individual social net workers can represent multiple brands or clients under a single user account, dealer profiles can still be created and then made accessible to numerous people interested in having an active role in representing the dealership online. For instance, you can create an account for your dealership on MySpace and then make that log on available to select people at the dealership, or even to third-party social networking providers like web2ologies, where these users can then carry out various actions and activities that ultimately benefit your dealership.
Although no true protocols have been devised in automotive marketing to measure the performance and ROI of using social media sites for networking and marketing purposes, brand marketing is one of things that is not always measured at that level and so can be an area of good and important focus for car dealers to leverage social marketing. While there will be a sense of throwing money at something to see what sticks, the SEO benefits make up for the intangible brand marketing benefits. SEO benefits can be realized if certain SEO-friendly techniques are applied, and then the general benefit of giving your dealership more online exposure is more of a bonus.
[tags]auto marketing, automotive marketing, car dealer marketing, internet marketing, search marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, sem, seo, social marketing, social network marketing, social media marketing, brand awareness, brand marketing, online brand marketing, internet brand marketing[/tags]
Social Marketing for SEO
November 12, 2007 by admin
The concept of blogging is becoming common place throughout the automotive community, and naturally the idea of social media and network marketing is now perking some ears too. The reason why is because social media or network marketing is a natural evolution to blogging.
For the most part, blogs are a one-to-all mechanism meaning that one person or party produces information meant to be read by anyone and everyone. Unlike email which is one-to-one or one-to-all, blogging requires a level of transparency and responsibility that is different from email and social networks. With social networks, success is often determined by the number of friends in your network whereas with blogs success is identified by distinctiveness of voice and readership.
So how can car dealers make use of social media and network marketing?
Brand awareness is a significant factor in social media marketing. Dealers could fund a full-time staff to run a ring of social network sites for itself, but would the ROI be there in the time frame expected? Probably not. But this does not discount the fact that there is great benefit to social media marketing.
The reason why is because success in brand marketing online for car dealers does not necessarily require full-time staff and persistent blogging on behalf of the dealership. It does however require thorough knowledge and understanding of Search Engine Marketing, Blog Marketing, Content Marketing, RSS Marketing, and Social Network Marketing, all things that dealerships can not be expected to execute.
The primary benefit to car dealers when it comes to social marketing is the SEO benefit. Dealerships can make their websites visible, penetrated, and saturated across several online search markets by incorporating a few simple strategies into their online marketing efforts.
[tags]Search Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Blog Marketing, Content Marketing, RSS Marketing, Social Network Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Automotive Marketing, Car Dealer Marketing[/tags]
K.i.T
