Social marketing for personal influence
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.
[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[/tags]
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