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.

Technorati 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

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.

Technorati 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

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.

Technorati Tags: Search Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Blog Marketing, Content Marketing, RSS Marketing, Social Network Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Automotive Marketing, Car Dealer Marketing