Spring 2010 looks to be huge, is your dealership ready?
Marketing and advertising your dealership has gone from mass channels such as radio and TV to a more personal and on demand approach. Instead of repeating a broad message, today you need smaller more people centric messages. It’s not that marketing your dealership has died, it’s just changed. Today people have more power and more choices. So what’s the best way to reach them?
Be Accessible.
Whether it’s your website, your Facebook page, Twitter or You Tube or any other number of sites, there are more ways to reach more people than ever before. Can your prospects and customers engage you on multiple platforms? Some people prefer to submit a form, others prefer to call, many still use email and an increasing number would rather use Facebook or other social media sites. The lesson here is simple don’t limit access to your dealership to your website and phone.
Be Active.
You don’t have to sit at your desk and post Tweets all day. However, do post something regularly. I would suggest at least three to five times a week. More importantly set up alerts to notify you when your dealership is mentioned.
Short and Sweet.
Because of all the ways to reach people today, this is more important today than ever before. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to send a long email or posts on your social media sites. Use just 10% of your message at a time, so if you want tell prospects about a car and your description is 500 words send to them in 50 word increments. Brevity is king, when people see long email messages they tend to put off reading it.
In closing this is an exciting time to be in the car business. A lot of people have been waiting to buy that new car, waiting for the economy to settle down, waiting for credit to open back up. This spring should be one of the best in a long time. Now is the time to make sure that your dealership is ready. Feel free to call me if you have any questions on how you can put Social Media and your website to work for you.
Social Media Goes Corporate
An interesting study crossed my desk today, the 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Studyby Ben Hanna, Ph.D. the VP of Marketing for R.H. Donnelley Interactive.
While the study does not directly address the retail application of Social Media, it does reflect a growing trend of mainstream use of Social Media not only by individuals, but also by businesses. Over 4,000 respondents were surveyed and even though the study focused mainly on business to business use of Social Media there were some surprising revelations.
If you've read some of my past articles you know that the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is the age 40 to 50 segment. However, it may surprise you that know that of this study's respondents 58% were C-Level Executives (CEO, CFO President, etc.) One thing that jumped out to me was that only 2% of respondents listed their industry as automotive. In case you're interested the leading field was listed as retail followed closely by health care.
Information sources that did not require active participation such as webinars, podcasts reading ratings or reviews etc. were rated as more useful participating in discussions or forums. I found this particularly interesting because it has been said by more than a few experts that Social Media sites will soon be the new search engines. If this is the case then you might be wise to start advertising on these sites.
Webinars were listed as very useful. Is there an application here for the retail car business? Maybe a webinar to show owners how to perform routine inspections or how to use complicated features such as navigation?
Most were new to the business use of Social Media with 35% having spent less than one year managing or involved in the Social Media initiatives of their companies. Over 70% of the companies had less than two years of experience in Social Media.
So what are all these newbies doing for their business? The most popular was maintain company related accounts or profiles on the Social Media sites. Second was monitoring company related "mentions" on Social Media sites. Maintaining the company blog was a very close third.
A lot of companies (54%) reported using Social Media to monitor their users / customers ratings and reviews and 53% monitored their competitors mentions.
The 44 page study reveals that a relative new media is rapidly becoming a mainstream business tool. You can read the study at http://www.business.com/info/business-social-media-benchmark-study.
Is your dealership engaged? If you want to find out simple and easy ways to get your store started call me at 502-689-5370 or contact me at Twitter, I am @dealerist.
Twitter 101: A Guide for Dealerships Part 2
You’re dealership is on Twitter, now what?
As I said previously, you need to post at least every day. If you use Outlook you can schedule a recurring task twice a day to remind you to post something.
Again, you don’t have to be a prize winning author, but it needs to be relevant and interesting. Here are a few points that will help make you worth following:
Be Helpful:
Cars and trucks today have more computers on board than the first space shuttle did. With all that technology comes tons of questions.
Find out what are the most asked questions at delivery. Talk to your service advisors and see what they get asked most often. What high tech features does your OEM have?
Basically all of the frequently asked questions (FAQ) that your customers and prospects ask would be informative and helpful Tweets.
Take an inexpensive video camera and shoot a short video demonstrating the “how to” for your FAQs and post the videos on your dealership’s “channel” on You Tube. (If you don’t have a YouTube channel for you’re dealership don’t worry, that will be our next topic.)
Then you can link to those videos in your Tweet. Remember that Tweets have to be 140 characters or less so use a URL shortener like http://bit.ly. A good example of a FAQ Tweet might look like this:
Need to connect your iPod to your Microsoft Sync? Here's how http://bit.ly/2OWqoi
Be Informative:
Use Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) to notify you via email whenever certain terms are posted online.
So if you’re a Ford dealer you might set an alert for the term “Ford F-150”, then select news for the type of alert and you be notified when there are press releases about the F-150. Then you can read that press release and determine if it’s something your customers might be interested in. If so, shorten the URL like we did above, mention the article and post. An example of an informative Tweet may look like:
Wow people really love their F-150's http://bit.ly/1xhswU
Be a Good Neighbor:
Get with local charities and civic organizations and when they are having local events Tweet about them and where possible link to their site. Say your local Habitat for Humanity is looking for volunteers, you could Tweet something like this:
If u r in the #Indy area @IndyHabitat is looking for volunteers THIS Sat morning/afternoon. http://bit.ly/49wgy8
Be Positive:
Post positive or motivation quotes from time to time. There are tons of sites that you can get a motivational quote of the day emailed to you. You can then Tweet that quote. Who wouldn’t want to pass on something that makes your day like:
“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful”. Albert Schweitzer
Using Twitter to reach out to your customers and prospects is not hard and does not take a lot of time. With just a few minutes each day you can post/Tweet useful and informative items that people will then pass on or “Re-Tweet” to their friends and family.
Then every now and then you can Tweet about a new incentive that the OEM just announced or a great service special. People expect and will respond to an ad occasionally if the routine content is worth their time and attention.
As always there’s so much to talk about so I will post another article soon that will help you use Twitter at your dealership. In the mean time if you have any questions at all please feel free to call me at 502-689-5370 or follow me on Twitter, I am @dealerist.
Use Social Media to be proactive
- Be proactive for excellent service
Had a conversation yesterday with a friend of mine that owns a Nissan store. We were talking about how social sites like Facebook can be used by dealerships.
He was not excited about the prospect of engaging upset customer in the open on Facebook. I certainly can understand his trepidation. We are used to settling a customer’s issues in an office not in the showroom.
But the reality is that while we may have discussed and settled an issue with an upset customer behind closed doors in the past they still talked to their friends and family about what happened. Social media today actually represents a better opportunity to earn the future business of not only their friends and family, but many others as well.
By engaging the customer in an open forum you demonstrate to potential customers that you are a reputable dealer and can be trusted.
So don’t be afraid to open up and engage your customer base online, you’ll be planting the seeds for future customers as well as retaining existing ones.
How to use Twitter to drive traffic
Social media sites can drive traffic to your store
Got 30 seconds, how about a walk-around?
The versatile Flip Video camcorder
Today’s meet and greet, what is it?
Most recent articles
- American Lung Association Bike Trek to Shakertown update
- AT&T Customer Service vs. Verizon
- Change, Uncomfortable but Necessary
- Toyota uses Social Media for discussion
- Spring 2010 looks to be huge, is your dealership ready?
Follow on Twitter
- dealerist: Bike & Hike (@ Waterfront Park) http://4sq.com/cTn9Ls
- dealerist: Riding the Ohio River Trail (@ Farnsley Moorman Landing) http://4sq.com/cSeMa3
- dealerist: I'm at Papa Johns Cardinal Stadium (179 Central Ave, Louisville) w/ 71 others. http://4sq.com/bWC1Rf
- dealerist: I just unlocked the "Swarm" badge on @foursquare! http://4sq.com/9yvoyf
- dealerist: Now here's a car guy having fun with video Check this out -- Louisville Nissan Maxima Harry Caray Spoof! http://t.co/ZI4gWYi via @youtube
What’s on here
- Automotive (16)
- Industry News (5)
- Uncategorized (14)