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.
Using Facebook for cross-promotion
When you walk into a venue in your local community, say the neighborhood pizza shop, hair salon, bank, or cafe, often times you see a cork board with business cards and fliers on it for other local businesses. In some instances you may even see a little plastic stand with tri-folds or pamphlets, indicating a deeper connection between the two local businesses. This is a common form of cross-promotion that has existed probably for centuries which was recently referenced by Catalyst Marketers in Ryan Taft’s post “Cross-promote by partnering with local businesses.”
From this conventional marketing approach, the impact of such cross-promotion is recognized by the number of times one of your marketing pieces comes into your place of business as a result of being displayed in a nearby venue. If you are smart you marked or tailored each piece to be associated with each different venue so you can know right away from where it came. If you fail to do this then you may know that your cross-promotional efforts are having an effect, but from which sources and to what extent you may not know.
With the advent of Facebook, the idea of cross-promotion can (and in most cases probably should) be carried into this medium, but with added benefits. Considering the more intricate offerings of Internet technology, local businesses can not only expect to benefit from an increase in patrons coming into their place of business, but also from increased website traffic, more Facebook fans, and more email subscribers. Essentially, by using Facebook, you have more conversion goals and capabilities to consider in your cross-promotion efforts than just phone calls and walk-ins.
The one thing that comes to mind for me when helping local businesses to cross-promote with one another using a site like Facebook is “monetization”. Interestingly, this word does not appear in a dictionary, at least not at dictionary.com. It does however appear on wikipedia.com and is defined as, “the process of converting or establishing something into legal tender.” Monetizing is a common word in the blogosphere that typically equates to the practice of using your blog to generate revenue. I tend to use this term more loosely on the basis that there is a monetary value for every activity you perform and that in most cases you want to associate your efforts online to that monetary value.
For instance, a new email subscriber may be worth $25 to you and a new Facebook fan might be worth $1, so if you launch a marketing initiative that results in 25 new email subscribers and 10 new Facebook fans then you know that the monetary value of that initiative is equivalent to $635. If you spent less than that to launch the initiative then you essentially have made (or saved) money.
All this said, when doing cross-promotions, particularly online with a site like Facebook, the possibilities go farther than just leaving comments on the walls of a venue’s Facebook page. There truly is potential to connect with people one-on-one and in groups. Defining and massaging the monetary value of your activities is key to your success. You want to go beyond just publishing information and going through the motions. You want to make real connections and have real conversations. This is easier said than done, but the rewards are there for the taking.
A Big Bang for SEO and Social Media
Earlier this year we began incorporating Facebook into our monthly deliverables for the AC List Builder product. Based on the way things have been shaping I have to say that was one of the better moves we have made since going into business in 2007. Facebook has clearly turned out to be a social marketing phenomenon.
Our shift to utilize Facebook in behalf of our clients is specific to Facebook “Pages”, which were introduced by Facebook last year in response to business creating profiles on Facebook. Profiles were not originally meant for businesses, only individuals, and the Facebook folk were smart about rolling out the “Page” product.
If you are a business and have had a profile for a while then it might not be realistic to transition to a Page, but if you are new to Facebook (as a business) then definitely refrain from creating a profile for your business and go with a Page. The reason why is due to two specific things…
a.) Profiles by default are set to private and so unless you specify it to be public people will have to request to be your friend. Pages by default are public and so anyone can become a fan.
b.) Profiles, unless public, are not indexable by search engines. Pages are, and you most definitely want the search engine benefits you can experience with a Page.
Which leads to my point…
Last month it was announced that both Google and Microsoft are putting together formal plans with Twitter and with Facebook to start including them in searches on google.com and bing.com. THIS IS HUGE!
Since Twitter hit the scene people have been grappling for the best business use of it. Some argue Twitter is a mass media tool, some argue it is best for one-on-one or small group communication, others might argues it is good for running specials and events. Quite frankly these are all good uses. The challenge is finding the right approach with it for your business and sticking with it. At least that has been my challenge.
But if everybody’s “Tweets” are soon to be indexed by search engines and start appearing as listings in peoples’ search results, this could be as far reaching as having the ability to literally search the minds of everyone in the world. Well, maybe that is an exaggeration but it does mean you would be able to search thethe conversations that people are publishing to their Twitter and Facebook accounts.
You thought blogging made it easy for the every day guy, gal, or business to have a voice, think of what Twitter and Facebook will make possible once this information can be sought out on search engines.
Anyhow, I am excited about this and believe it justifies our decision to start using Facebook with our clients. We have held off utilizing Twitter for clients but with this announcement we are already preparing to incorporate this too. Below is a video supplement to this post for your viewing pleasure. It’s trippay…
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.
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 III
Read Part I or II
When I engage with dealers about how blogs and social media can effectively cultivate sales opportunities, they like what they hear. They get charged. But often in the midst of battle some dealers seem confused and unsure of their role. They struggle to incorporate these new tools into their existing BDC processes.
This is not the case for all dealerships and in fact some are vigorous in their online networking, but there is a persistent sense for many of “when will it pay off”. But this is dangerous thinking. It’s not a matter of when but rather a matter of how. It pays off when you address the “how?”.
A blog isn’t a showroom like your website. It’s more like a radio station, a television channel, or even a broadcast network. Find a way to harness the power of that with customers and see how sales get.
As a car dealer, you must take that one step and start blogging. I don’t mean to get a blog to look at, but one to play with. Surround yourself with people you trust that have proven methods and innovative ideas. Get your brain wrapped around things that are new (to you) and be creative in finding ways to engage with your audience. Build trust and the car sales will come.
Invent for yourself the possibility of being a truly approachable dealership. Your website can not accomplish this but your blog can. This must start at the heart with you and those working with you at your dealership. Otherwise, your blog will just be a front for typical dealership “racketeering” (that’s a Landmark term in context, not mine).
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…
Car Dealers and Web 2.0
There is a lot of talk these days about blogging and Web 2.0 for car dealers. But when you cut through the fluff of what is discussed on these topics what you will find is that there is an abundance of “dealers should use Web 2.0″ proclamations and not much in the way of how, i.e. REAL SOLUTIONS.
Over the past couple weeks I have come across emails from companies touting messages to car dealers on the use of blogging and social media, driving high-quality or residual site traffic, and building long-term relationships with customers. While these topics alone are not particularly new for dealers, they do signify to me a new era in Automotive Internet Marketing because of the source of these marketing messages and their timing and context.
While there certainly is value in blogging and social media, this is still uncharted territory for car dealers. Primarily because these forms of marketing, these “tools” so to say, do not in-and-of themselves produce results. Rather it is in how these tools are utilized throughout your dealership that will make a difference in your business.
A good analogy to contrast the use of Web 2.0 as part of your marketing strategy is to consider your DMS and your CRM. Dealers typically make a pretty hefty up front investment to implement such systems into their business and then spend months training and learning the systems before they really experience the full benefits, sometimes even a good year or so.
With Web 2.0 dealers can expect to spend several months building what we call their virtual infrastructure just to have a chance at cultivating a truly engaged customer audience fit for doing business in your interactive marketing arena. All things considered, I suggest writing off the first 6-9 months as R&D versus marketing and advertising.
I am weary of venturing into the early web days of the auto industry where dealers were battered into making web investments because “they should” that not only didn’t prove fruitful but also that created a rift between car dealers and the “Internet Customer” that dealers are still paying for today.
If you want to get in to Web 2.0, start by defining what you want to see it accomplish and then work with your providers to obtain those objectives. This will prove more beneficial than throwing money at it and waiting around for something to happen because someone suggested to “just get into it”.
Promise in Automotive Blog Marketing
Just returned from a workshop we held today with the Automobile Dealers Association of Greater Philadelphia (Shouts out to Greta, thank you). The workshop concentrated on providing attendees with an applicable technique they could deploy at the dealership using their Blog, Email, SEO, Social Media Networking sites, and Video.
Interestingly, none of the near 30 attendees representing more than a dozen dealerships reported their dealership having a blog. While I am not surprised by this, I do think it hints at the blue ocean still remaining before us in the auto industry of incorporating blog strategies into a car dealer’s Internet Marketing Strategy.
The purpose of our workshop today was to show dealers a real-life way to utilize their blog in their Business Marketing and Advertising plans, the importance of permission-based email marketing, and how SEO must be considered a core part of any online marketing campaign. It was presumed that attendees had already crossed the Internet bridge and the SEO bridge, and we anticipated that many people present would be hoping to learn how to get a blog or start blogging. I confess not clarifying well enough in the beginning that our emphasis was on how to utilize your blog versus how to get one but I am confident people still were able to take something home that was useful.
The message we shared today is one that I have seen evolving in recent years and fortunately being embraced by most dealerships today. It’s the idea of selling a relationship and not a car which really is just Sales 101. But more important than the message is the “How?” and “Why?”. While the idea of selling a relationship and not a commodity sounds good and all, pulling it off is a challenge, especially for car dealers. And that is what we really covered today. Why use a blog and how it can be utilized?
So while the dealer industry is still in its infancy for incorporating Blog Marketing Strategies into their Business Marketing and Advertising plans, it was evident today seeing how much more welcome the idea of using blogs has become for dealers. A year ago I would have been chased out the room for saying the “B” word. Today it seemed we couldn’t talk about it enough.
