Social media for your profit centers

In a recent article by Bobby Malatia of Kain Automotive titled, “Creating Your Internet Dealership”, Malatia identifies several things for dealers to consider when attempting to utilize the Internet for sales in all profit centers versus just car sales. One of the items he presents is the idea of using “landing pages or microsites” to promote the different products in your business. Malatia suggests that they do not have to be “branded by the dealership itself”.

Malatia is right and it brings up a good point.

Consumers are more interested in your product than they are your commodity. Your product is the unique value your company creates, e.g. your brand, by helping customers gain the most utility from your commodity. In the case of car dealers, your commodity is not just automobiles for sale but other things such as service of course and your financing programs, car parts and after market items, rentals, etc.

Within each profit center you often have more than one market audience. Because of this, you might be better off creating a variety of landing pages and microsites to reach out to each of these different consumer audiences.

This is where social media sites can come in to play. In fact, using social media for each profit center and for each consumer audience could be an extraordinary way to accomplish this form of online brand marketing.

For instance, MySpace is probably not the best place to promote high line or luxury vehicles, however it is very fertile land for after market parts and accessories of some economical performance vehicles such as Mazda and Subaru. You could create create multiple MySpace profiles to represent each of these particular market niches, this giving your dealership, or retail center, several representations of its business across numerous social media sites. The primary work entailed to accomplish this is the setup of each profile, but once you have integrated it with the sales process of each profit center then from there it is simply a matter of promoting it via content and SEO.

Imagine a future where automotive retail is not just a physical showroom with a corresponding website but a diverse array of physical and virtual representations of each unique profit center in the dealership that has an automated sales CRM process built into it custom tailored to each specific market niche. That would be applied technology.