Using Social Media for Vehicle Sales
About three years ago before we had any official products on the market, a lot of time was spent trying to find ways to use a blog to display inventory. But after a short while I put that effort to rest because it did not make sense to try to re-invent the wheel of displaying inventory online since so many other companies and websites had already essentially perfected the art. It was like trying to find a technology solution for a problem that did not exist. In the end, we stuck with using dealership blogs strictly for SEO purposes which quickly became the norm in the auto industry.
Today, Social Media sites such as facebook and Twitter are known for their growing benefits in Search Marketing, but I don’t see blogs receiving the hype that these sites are receiving, despite the proven track record that blogs have as a tool for Inbound Marketing. And now with companies like GOSO offering an inventory solution that integrates with facebook, or MediaRevo which manages transaction-geared landing pages for auto dealer sites that are advertised with paid placement on facebook, it seems that the turbines of automotive online retail remain steadfastly drawn towards vehicle sales.
Is this the right approach for auto dealers, to be using Social Media tools such as facebook and Twitter to push their commodity?
Studies and statistics show that Social Media is more about content, conversation, and relationships and less about conversion and transaction. So how will using Social Media to solicit vehicles bid with customers in these marketplaces? Does it not seem that these communication channels may be better utilized by auto dealers to concentrate on other areas of their operation such as service, parts, & financing?
It may be too soon to say what the best practices are for auto dealers when it comes to Social Media. And I am not suggesting that the display of inventory there is a bad or good practice. Dealers respond to this type of marketing because they are accustomed to it. Dealers always want to sell more cars…TODAY.
In today’s economy, new possibilities are opening up. One of those possibilities is for this new marketing medium to offer dealers not just another place to sell autos, but also a place to expand all aspects of their operations.
Use our Back to Old School ticket giveaway to reach out to your customers
Attention Philadelphia Area Dealerships…
AutoConversion and Wired 96.5 FM (WRDW), Philadelphia’s leading hits and hip-hop station have teamed up to sponsor this year’s “Back to Old School” concert Saturday September 19th at the Sovereign Bank Arena in Trenton NJ. We are reaching out to area dealerships to participate in this event.
This throwback concert features club legends such as Salt-N-Pepa, Naughty By Nature, Coolio, Tone Loc, C&C Music Factory, 2 Live Crew, Rob Base, JJ Fad, Snap, and other artists appealing to more than 1.5 million 25-40 year-old music fans in the Philadelphia metro area.
AutoConversion would like to extend to dealerships an opportunity to participate in our ticket giveaway. We are offering a marketing kit that includes 25 general admission tickets plus 5 VIP tickets you can use to give out to customers, employees, family, and friends of your choice.
To help with the giveaway, we have prepared an ad on our blog that you can use on your blog, website, and/or in email promotions. The digital version includes the radio announcement that runs twice an hour on 96.5 FM until the day of the show. In the announcement, AutoConversion.net is recognized as a sponsor with the tag line “Philly’s Finest Cars”. When people visit the website they will see a selection of the latest models from various manufacturers with links to area dealerships participating in our programs.
As a participating dealer, your dealership would be listed in our directory where people are sent to for obtaining their free tickets. This means that people we are reaching out to that that win tickets could be directed to your dealership to pick up the tickets they have won. Thus not only will this promotion drive visitors to your website but also to your showroom.
To take advantage of this unique opportunity, please contact us today.
Back to Old School concert ticket giveaway
This is a promotion we are running right now with Wired 96.5 and Sovereign Bank Arena in Philadelphia. If you are interested in participating in promotion this even please conact us.
Remember the old Hip-Hop days? You know, Salt-N-Pepa and Coolio? Well guess what…for one night only, these legendary artists and others from the early 90s are back. AutoConversion and Wired 96.5 have teamed up to throw the biggest “back to school” party in the Atlantic City area with the “Back To Old School” Throwback Concert Saturday Sept 19th at the Sovereign Bank Arena.
This throwback concert will be featuring gigs such as the legendary Salt-N-Pepa, Naughty By Nature, Coolio, Tone Loc, C&C Music Factory, 2 Live Crew, Rob Base, JJ Fad and Snap.
AutoConversion is giving away tickets to this event…You know you want to come out for the Back to Old School Throwback Concert and hear classic songs like, Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise”, Tone Loc’s “Wild Thing”, and Salt-N-Pepa’s “Whatta Man”. For more details, click play on the audio player below to hear our radio promotion.
Tickets are limited and available on a first-come first-serve basis. To claim a free pair of tickets, all you have to do is:
- Leave a comment on our Facebook page describing your favorite memory of the acts performing at the “Back To Old School” Throwback Concert. If you want to qualify for up to four (4) tickets, post a video of yourself describing your favorite memory of the acts performing at the show. Be sure to leave us your email and we’ll get in touch with the winners.
- OR if you’re not a Facebook member, simply leave a comment on this blog post sharing your favorite memory from one of the acts scheduled to perform at the “Back To Old School” Throwback Concert.
It’s like the late great Tupac Shakur said, “What more could I say? I wouldn’t be here today if the old school didn’t pave the way”, so come out and support the artists who paved the way for today’s top musicians.
For more information about this event visit the Wired 96.5 website or to purchase additional tickets go to www.sovereignbankarena.com.
The New Smart Cars
Every so often a good email hits your inbox that is worth sharing. I take no credit for this work and have no one to credit. It was passed along from a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend. Enjoy!
Look at all of the great new choices!
The Smorvette!
The Smaudi A3 AWD!
The Smamborghini!
The Smorsche!
The Smerrari!
And last, but not least,
The Smustang,
Blogging and Social Media setups for Car Dealers
For the past 3 years, the auto industry, specifically the dealer community, has inched its way into blogging and social media. It is actually safe to talk about these things whereas fewer than 2 years ago I purposely avoided using such terms in my conversations with dealers and auto insiders because they were still a bit taboo. Now with the unveiling of such companies and services as DealerFeeder, I think we can say that the past is officially behind us.
Of course this day would come, it was only a matter of time. With the efforts of people like Jeff Kershner of DealerRefresh and Ralph Paglia of Automotive Digital Marketing, dealers and auto insiders are becoming increasingly more emerged in the idea and practice of blogging and social media. But what are these things really?
Let’s be clear about something. Setting up a Twitter account or a Facebook account takes 2 minutes, literally. Setting up a blog takes 5 and it is free. If you are paying someone to do this for you without a master plan and direct correlation to your marketing strategy then you are wasting everyone’s time and money. The set up of these things is the least of your concerns. Utilizing them and incorporating them effectively into your sales process is the real challenge.
Looking back to the late 90’s and early 2000’s, I recall the blitzkrieg of car dealers taking on the Web. In the first few years the big question was “should I or shouldn’t I have a website?” Then it was should I or shouldn’t I do pay-per-click advertising (PPC). Now it is “should I or shouldn’t I have a blog and do social networking?”. It’s easy to say yes to these questions but what is not easy to address is the HOW.
Successful business comes down to 3 things most of us know – People. Product. Process. Car dealers have the product and despite today’s economic situation there is no lack of people. There is an abundance of people at the consumer level and at the industry level. But it is the process that throws a wrench into all this.
Dealers have been able to follow a relatively consistent sales and marketing process for 50 or 60 years or so until the advent of the Web. Since then there has been a constant flux in their business processes. First came email, then came Automotive CRM, then Internet Departments, BDC, e-commerce directors, etc. Now we have blogging and social media. Anyone who thinks that incorporating blogging and social media into their marketing strategy simply for the sake of doing it because they “should” is going to be sorely disappointed. So what if you get 500 people following you on Twitter. Are you selling more cars as a result? Is your service business increasing? Are you improving upon your brand equity?
If you are doing these things, what impact are these efforts having on your results? If you can not draw a clear distinction amongst these things then you may be at risk of treading water. Studying your customer behavior and correlating it directly to your efforts is the ugly side of this business which is no different from any other form or method of marketing, conventional or progressive. Obtaining the tools for the trade is as easy as going to the store and buying them, but that doesn’t mean you end up with a killer deck.
Silver bullets and car sales
Marketing on the Web has taken a hard turn recently towards video and in 2009 video marketing may be all the rave. But will video marketing be just another trend that phases or at least balances out in 2-3 years? Chances are YES, it will.
From 2003 to about 2006, pay-per-click advertising, particularly in the auto industry, took the field by storm. Car dealers were practically forced to spend thousands upon thousands on PPC advertising to stay in the game. Website technology evolved into a death trap for car dealers because the SEO aspect of car dealer websites was completely disregarded. As a result, when the PPC bubble deflated, car dealers were left with few choices for a truly competent website platform.
Website providers have been scrambling the past 2-3 years revamping or overhauling their platforms to meet the SEO needs for car dealers. Today the SEO rat race in the automotive online retail business is about as over-saturated as CRM was 5 years ago. Mysteriously, while everyone now offers “the best SEO”, many dealers still lack vital understanding about the true role that SEO plays in one’s business.
An example of this was revealed to me during a phone call last week with a dealer group. The dealer contacted us about our content marketing services. He explained that he did his own keyword reporting using Web CEO and that he has effectively positioned his websites across thousands of keywords. He had a good video presence going but still when he searched for a particular set of keywords, his competitor sites appeared in the top results but not his. One of which he suggested sold a whopping “6″ cars a month, which is hardly any at all.
While scoping out everything and listening it was clear that not only did this dealer know and understand all the fundamental SEO practices but also was applying them to his online presence, and I told him this. I explained that he is doing everything we teach our dealers to do and that as far as I could tell he was far ahead of the game.
“But why does our competitor rank higher”, he asked.
My response was two-fold…
a.) Just because a site appears higher in a few searches you perform manually doesn’t mean it ranks higher for others nor does it mean the site ranks higher for the majority of keywords you target.
b.) Just because your competitor ranks higher doesn’t mean they sell more cars.
This second response was key. Dealers tend to approach SEO as some sort of silver bullet to their sales needs. But it’s not. SEO is about attraction, visibility, and possibility. I wouldn’t even classify SEO as creating sales opportunities. That’s what conversion accomplishes. SEO creates the possibility for conversion. Big difference.
I don’t know if this is what the dealer needed to or wanted to hear. I think appearing higher in search was more important to him than having a more successful business. I could be wrong. But what I took home from that conversation was the realization of how even the more sophisticated of dealers that has his head wrapped around all this SEO stuff, can sometimes miss the significance SEO has with your business.
If you are looking at video marketing as “the next big thing” or as a silver bullet to your online marketing needs, be warned. Video is great and highly effective, but it’s time-consuming and expensive. You will need good SEO to get your videos watched, and you will also need an effective conversion mechanism. Video itself is not the best conversion tool. Those that have experimented with viral video marketing may testify to this.
Filtering noise with Social Media
In the past I had often posed the idea of blogging and social networking as part of the CRM or BDC process. I saw it as a way to organize and cultivate individual relationships for dealers to sell more cars. Arguments against this suggest that CRM is about marketing to individual needs and that blogging is about appealing to a mass audience. Valid points indeed, but there is an element to online social networking that rubs right up against CRM and business development which I see growing even stronger today.
I look at social media as a noise filter. The Internet exudes a tremendous amount of noise. Your website must filter that noise and convert what it can to leads. Your CRM must then organize and market to those leads and your BDC process must cultivate what it can. But what about the noise your website filtered out that did not convert. Do you wait for it to come back?
This is where your blog and other social media sites come in to play. Look at them like a buffer between the WWW and your website. You and your employees can use your/their social media profiles to develop network contacts and business opportunities much more effectively in some ways than can your CRM system. A CRM requires either a web inquiry or manual entry and you could never input the quantity of personal information that a prospects social LinkedIn or Facebook profile would have. So isn’t it more efficient to reference a customer’s social media profile?
A blog, be it an employee blog or a company blog has a distinct role too. It’s like your public hub for general information and total public awareness. Use your blog as a buffer to gather noisy Internet traffic to your website or to your social media profiles. The website will do its thing and filter leads into your CRM. Then you can use your social media networks to cultivate those relationships into eventual business.
For business owners this is natural and even for most top-level managers and executives. But for those lower on the totem pole in their dealership or workplace who have little or no vested interest to do this, a new paradigm must arise giving incentive to these workers to use these tools in this way. I see sales in the auto industry evolving to a state comparable to the Real Estate industry where automotive sales professionals are building their own brand equity under the roof of a dealership rather than just trying to use social media to sell cars.
Dealership Racketeering, Part II
In the early days of Internet and the auto industry, some dealers jumped in to having a web presence and either made it work or didn’t. Some didn’t bother. Some waited a while and let things develop. Some pioneered. I remember the bitterness dealers would have for “Internet” customers because they had too much information accessible to them to be ripped off.
This has settled and today essentially every dealership has an “Internet Department” which, really seems archaic now. Why is the Internet still considered a separate doorway to sales? Do dealers have a “radio department” or a “TV department” or a “billboard department”? No. They don’t. So why an “Internet department”? I don’t have an Internet department.
For more than two years now, the possibility I have seen the Internet offer dealers is the opportunity to establish genuine trust and confidence with their customers AND their employees. To accomplish this dealers must lead the way. If they sit back and count on others to do the thinking for them they will be led astray. Dealers need to take responsibility for their desired result which begins with a genuinely perceived possibility.
There is a lot more talk than action out there. The angles dealers take with their advertising is not much different from before and when it comes down to it, dealers just want to sell more cars. By this I mean that dealers struggle to find the vision and lasting patience for cultivating and nurturing sales opportunities. Websites are designed to convert now buyers and the only real Internet tools dealers know how to use for retaining potential customers is their newsletter and CRM.
Dealers must make their blogs tangible to customers AND employees. If you treat your blog as a microsite you degrade its potential power.
Dealership Racketeering
Instead of attending NADA this year in New Orleans I participated in a Landmark Forum which was a 3-day 33-hour workshop designed to help participants bring forth the presence of a new realm of possibility for yourself and your life. While I do appreciate some aspects of New Orleans, attending NADA there at this particular moment in time for the auto industry was not sounding attractive, and so I opted to pursue something different in hopes of attaining something more extraordinary.
Well, EXTRAORDINARY it was.
Like most people in the Forum, I wasn’t particularly excited about being there but my neighbor who introduced me to Landmark has been an active participant for more than 20 years now, so I estimated that it must have something of value to offer. Despite nearly walking out on it multiple times, by the end of the weekend I had experienced a breakthrough that made the grueling effort worth it a hundred times over.
The leading theme of the Forum was about possibilities and I couldn’t help but contrast the message with what I see going on today in the auto industry, particularly with car dealers. The possibilities presenting themselves to car dealers today seems astounding. I would compare it to 10 or 12 years ago when car dealers first began harnessing the Internet.
Next week I will offer some perspective on what possibilities I see today for car dealers and what they can be doing about it. Stay tuned…
Dealerships are not a commodity
Part II.
So here we are, just more than 2 years since AutoConversion was conceived. During this time I have seen blogs and bloggers come and go and I have seen some wonderfully grow. Jeff Kershner for example has experienced tremendous success with DealerRefresh which I think has given numerous people the inspiration to pursue their own dreams and ideas. This is a beautiful thing and he should long be known for his contributions to the industry.
I have also seen networking sites lift some of the industry’s iconic leaders to a deserved “rock star” status. People like Ralph Paglia and David Kain who have highly active discussion audiences. Now even DrivingSales is gaining force. It truly is great to see the auto industry getting its feet wet in the arena of Web 2.0.
Now think of what is to come. There is much hype for the auto industry in 2009. Dealers are hungry to sell cars. Can you believe it? They’re hungry!
Seriously though I think the dealers that are preparing for the upswing with the right tools could be in for a real treat. Tools such as blogs and social networking sites, email, video, and SEO. The coming year should present an opportunity for dealers to take back the purchase mantle if you know what I mean.
The past 10 years have belonged to the customer. Dealers became a commodity along with their automobiles. The Internet gave purchasing power to car shoppers. No more.
This year, car buyers will research automobiles AND dealerships, and dealers will be responding with the right tools. It’s already happening, but not at mass critical. That’s what 2009 will bring. True relational marketing.
Anyway, what do I know. I am just babbling. Happy New Year Everyone! Take care of your neighbor.
