Last updated 3 months ago
Your dealership should be using its website to attract prospects, convert leads, and keep current customers coming back for more. There’s no better way to do that than to leverage your social networks to share the content that you create, and ultimately drive traffic to your website. Of course, the key is creating content that your customers will find helpful, relevant or entertaining – and articles that inspire sharing. Do you want to learn how your dealership can attract and convert more customers with content marketing? Read our tips below.
Build Awareness
When looking for a new car, consumers are going to want to explore all of the options that are available to them. Therefore you’ll want to write informative articles that showcase not only the features and benefits of your new vehicles, but how those features and benefits work to solve customer problems. But remember, blogs aren’t the only way to deliver this information. Videos showing the features of your new cars in action can also be a great way to get customer attention, as are eye-catching images and infographics. Once you’ve created this content, be sure to share it on social networks, and don’t be afraid to direct potential customers to your videos or webpages should they ask a question on one of your social media channels.
Convert Leads
Once a customer finds your dealership online, they want to know why they should do business with you instead of your competition. This is where you need to build trust, and establish that your vehicles, sales people and service department are as good as they look on your website. Have a member of your service team walk you through setting up Bluetooth in one of your new vehicles and video tape it for your blog and YouTube channel. Write an article about a ‘day in the life’ of your sales and service manager to show potential customers how they work, or allow your web visitors to take a virtual test drive of some of your vehicles. Of course, one of the best things you can do to establish trust is to show reviews from other consumers. When those positive reviews come in, don’t forget to share them on your social media channels, blog, and email newsletter.
Retain Existing Customers
It’s easier to keep an existing customer than convert a new one. That’s why it’s important to continue to work to build a positive relationship with consumers – even after they’ve purchased a new vehicle. Do your best to promptly resolve any potential issues with their vehicle, and offer helpful tips – like how to get their preferred in-car settings, or get their vehicle ready for the upcoming season. If you notice you’re getting plenty of questions from your customers on a specific topic, create a video, blog, or how-to guide and place it on your website and social channels. By proactively offering guidance to your customers, you’ll increase their satisfaction and loyalty, making them more likely to do business with your dealership again, and maybe even refer their friends!
By using our tips above, you can use your dealership’s content to move customers through the buying cycle. How does your dealership leverage content to guide customers through the sales process? Share your tips in the comments below.
Last updated 3 months ago
With nearly half of all social media users actively seeking customer service or support on social networks, businesses need to pay attention. Your dealership is no exception. Customers are talking about you, and you need to be listening. How can your dealership monitor its reputation online? Read our tips below.
Listen for mentions of your dealership.
Set up alerts to track mentions of your dealership name, and your vehicle makes and models. If your sales and service manager are also very active on social media channels, it’s a good idea to monitor for mentions of their names as well. Performing searches on Twitter, setting up Google Alerts, or using a third party monitoring system, like our miSocial program, can be a great way to understand where your customers are and what they’re saying about your business.
Track the competition.
You know those alerts that you just set up for your dealership? It’s a good idea to use those same tools track your competitors as well. Doing so will allow you to understand what your dealership does well compared to others in your community, and also identify potential areas of improvement.
Get to know your audience.
Once you have an idea what’s being said about you (and your competitors) online, start to get to know who is doing the talking. This is your target audience. Identify influencers, journalists, and bloggers who have positive reputations within their online communities and look for ways to interact with these individuals to build a relationship. Understand the types of topics that your audience is interested in, and more importantly, the type of information that they like to share with their networks. This will help you to guide your social media strategy.
Set goals.
Monitor your social channels with purpose. That means, knowing the type of information that you hope to find while tracking social networks for mentions of your dealership and your competition. Whether you want to understand your market share in comparison to other dealerships in your area, or track overall customer satisfaction, it’s important to know what you’re looking for – and track those metrics over time. If you don’t it will be nearly impossible to know whether or not your efforts are generating positive results.
Develop a strategy.
After determining what you want to monitor, it’s time to develop a clear strategy as to how you’re going to do it. Write down which channels you plan on monitoring, who is responsible for tracking consumer posts and what tools they will use to view customer conversations. If there are multiple people who will be listening on behalf of your dealership, have a plan in place as to how they will divide the work, and identify key personnel who should be informed should any issue be detected.
Formulate responses.
The whole point in monitoring customer conversations on social media is so that your dealership can respond appropriately to customer feedback. Think about how you would respond in certain likely scenarios – to a positive service review, or to a negative service review, for example – and write down some preliminary thoughts so that you’re totally prepared when the time comes. While you want each response to be personal, it is sometimes a good idea to know what you want to focus on in various situations so that you’re able to provide a response as quickly as possible.
Is your dealership currently monitoring its reputation online? Share your tips for success in the comments below.
Last updated 3 months ago
It can be hard to keep track of everything that happens in a week. That’s why we endlessly roam the Internet in search of some of the most interesting stories from the automotive and social media industries – so you don’t have to. Take a look at what we’ve found this week:
It’s Time to Move TV Ad Spending Dollars to Digital
“A recent IAB study has found that moving TV ad dollars to digital advertising can increase reach while lowering overall costs. IAB officials say that moving 15 percent of a firm’s TV spending dollars to digital ads can increase the reach of consumer-packaged goods (CPG) by over 3 percent in the 18 and over demographic. In non-CPG categories, the study found that incremental reach grew by over 6 percent on average in the same demo…”
Blogs Outrank Social Networks for Consumer Influence: New Research
“Are you wondering how to influence potential customers and prospects? The latest findings from Technorati’s 2013 Digital Influence Report show that ‘consumers are turning to blogs when looking to make a purchase.’ In fact, blogs rank favorably with consumers for trust, popularity and even influence…”
Personalized Marketing Drives Buyer Readiness and Sales
“Cross-channel, customer-centric marketing (AKA personalized marketing), the practice of tailoring offers and promotions to consumers across multiple touch points based on their past shopping or browsing experiences, appears to increase buyer readiness, engagement, and sales activity, according to a study by MyBuys and the e-tailing group…”
19 Sure-Fire Ways to Amplify Your Social Reach
“Marketers… we’re on the hook for lead gen. Marketers… we’re on the hook for using social media, too. Those two things ever seem at odds with one another? Maybe. Because aside from just publishing more links to landing pages, the ways you can generate leads on social media sometimes seem a little lacking. But you can scale your social media lead generation if you do one thing extremely well: Grow your social media reach…”
6 Parts of Your Marketing You Should Always Be Optimizing
“It probably goes without saying, but we’re huge fans of optimization here at HubSpot. But we also know that optimization can be exhausting. Most marketers have a lot on their plates – it’s enough to try and design a marketing strategy, write an ebook, and hit your monthly lead gen goal without the worry of testing and optimizing everything...”
Last updated 3 months ago
With all the talk about content marketing, it’s likely pretty clear that your dealership needs to create great content to share with your customers on your website and social media channels. If you’ve started writing additional blogs or creating short videos for your customers, you also know that good content marketing takes time – and when you’re running a business, time is money. But, there is a way to maximize the time it takes to create each new piece of content: repurpose it!
That means turning similar blog posts into e-books, vehicle brochures into slideshare presentations and ‘how to’ guides into infographics. Want to learn more? Read our tips for repurposing and reusing your dealership’s content, below!
1. Create a video brochure for your vehicles by having a member of your sales team showcase one of your new cars.
2. Write a series of ‘how to’ guides for your customers (i.e. how to get your car ready for spring, how to get the most value for your trade in, how to buy your first car) and then turn those into infographics, ebooks or slideshare presentations.
3. Start a ‘Tip of the Week’ feature on your social media channels by sharing one tip each week from your ‘how to’ guides on Facebook and Twitter.
4. Turn frequently asked customer questions into blog posts, and then use that content as part of your dealership’s monthly newsletter.
5. Share your favorite customer social media posts from the month on your blog, or in your newsletter to encourage more conversation online and grow your community.
6. Add links to previous blog posts in other articles, presentations or web content where appropriate.
7. Refresh old web content with new stats, photos, or information and re-share it.
8. Summarize an interesting article from the automotive industry for your community by sharing key takeaways and how they affect your customers.
9. Turn a longer blog post into a series of shorter ones on the same topic by splitting the post into smaller updates that emphasize the key points.
10. Share your most popular videos on your blog and write a short summary of the content for each one.
Repurposing content helps your dealership to make the most of its time without sacrificing customer engagement. Does your dealership reuse content? Share your tips in the comments below.
Last updated 3 months ago
Pinterest has quickly grown into one of the most popular social networks online. But many dealerships are still confused as to how to leverage the channel in order to gain traffic and connect with customers. Are you thinking about adding Pinterest to your dealership’s social media strategy? If so, read our tips below.
Be picture perfect.
Pinterest is packed with awesome images from around the Internet – so if you’re planning to use the social network, you need to think visually. Look for ways to show off your dealership, your vehicles and your service department with unique, eye-catching images that your target audience will want to share. Apps like instagram, Diptic and Pixlromatic make it easy to take beautiful images with your smartphone. Just be sure to link your masterpieces back to a relevant page on your website to capitalize on all potential traffic.
Lose the obvious sales pitch.
Strike a balance between your featuring your own products and services and building boards that highlight other areas of interest for your customers. For example, why not build a ‘Road Trips’ board and share photos of some great cities or landmarks within a few days drive of your hometown? Including a few interest boards like the example above along with featuring your own vehicles will go a long way in helping you build a following on Pinterest.
Show customer stories.
Rather than tell your customers about the great features and benefits of owning one of your cars, show them! Tell visual stories about your vehicles, your customers, your staff and your community by using creative images that you take yourself or repin from other users. A picture really is worth a thousand words.
Build relevant boards.
When building out your pin boards, think of things that your customers could be interested in, but also try and ensure they relate (even a little bit) to your core business: automobiles. Things like road trips, animals in cars, concept vehicles and an art and design board could be of interest and also help your dealership to expand its reach on the social networking site. Plus, you shouldn’t feel as though you have to do all of the work yourself. Create a few public boards and allow others to contribute. That makes it easy to stay current without doing all of the work yourself!
Don’t forget video.
Most people don’t realize that you can pin videos just as easily as photos. When adding videos to your dealership’s Facebook page or YouTube account, don’t forget to share them on Pinterest as well. Again, be sure you’re linking back to your dealership’s original video on YouTube, or to a relevant page on your website in order to take advantage of potential traffic.
Use the ‘pin it’ button on your website.
Make it easy for people to pin and share your content on their own boards by adding the Pinterest button to your website, alongside other social sharing buttons. This is an easy way to get more traffic and repins, and show your customers that you’re active on Pinterest.
Optimize pin descriptions.
Pinterest allows users to search for information pinned on the site, so write your pin descriptions with high value keywords in mind. Write your pin description similarly to the way you would a blog title – by incorporating relevant keywords that drive traffic while also providing a brief description of what the pin is about. Just like Twitter, Pinterest users can use hashtags in pin descriptions. For example, when sharing this blog post on one of our pin boards, we used the title as the pin description but also added #AutoMarketing to the end, ensuring that people searching for ‘Pinterest,’ ‘Social Media’ or ‘Auto Marketing’ could potentially find our blog.
Has your dealership included Pinterest in its social media strategy? Share your tips in the comments below.
