BlogPro Automotive

In a meeting the other day with Dealer client. We were showing him around the new virtual infrastructure we were creating for the Dealership, e.g. new Blog, Online Service Forum, some promo pages on their site, etc. The Dealer asked if people would actually use these things. He seemed unsure, despite having already signed up, whether or not people on the Web would utilize these communication tools.

My response was of course was “Yes!”

I elaborated by suggesting that people already are using these things. People do research online in blogs, forums, and social networks. They talk about dealerships (positive and negative). Rate dealerships, etc. Case in point, check out this extreme rant by a blogger about his recent experience with a Ford Dealer in Seattle. This is but one of numerous bad experiences about Dealers that I have come across online.

Continuing on…”We are going to help you join the party”, I stated. “We are preparing you with the communication tools and resources you need to network, connect with, and build relationships with people on the Web in ways that are conducive to your Dealership.”

But just because you show up at the virtual “party” doesn’t mean you will be well received. Just like in real life, you have to get your game on when mingling in a social environment. As nice as it will be to have all these neat new ways to communicate with people, you still have to find your own unique groove in building relationships. That is not easy.

There is a paradigm shift in the works right now because auto shoppers and owners have the leverage they have desired and deserved for decades. Car Dealers have gone through some tough lessons over the past 10 years and things are not becoming any easier. But you have to start somewhere and learn from the school of hard knocks sometimes.

The meat of this article by Arianne Walker in Online Automotive Review is iterated in the final paragraph:

Even though OEMs and dealers have been shifting their marketing budgets online, the data shows that most should probably be accelerating that transition, putting even more money where shoppers - new and used alike - are increasingly going.

These trends are consistent with the recent Cobalt-Polk-Yahoo! study on new vehicle buyer behavior in how it directly and indirectly influences used vehicle purchases.

When I think of car sales, I think of long-term retention. But immediate sales are important to. While you need to invest into new and used car advertising, a primary benefit with investing in to new vehicle advertising is that the investment not only trickles down into used car sales, but it even influences used car sales. That is what the study suggests at least.

This is a key topic today for dealers and providers. Dealers today are cautious of where and how they shift their marketing dollars. It is widely known that the Internet offers the greatest ROI, however establishing your online brand recognition is not an event, it is an establishment that requires years of vision, commitment, and dedication from dealers and their providers.

Dealers must be prepared to take risks and to embrace long-term change in order to meet auto shoppers in advance, but it can be done with the right tools and techniques.

“So what do you do for a living?”

How often have we all heard that question come out of someone’s mouth? Usually uttered at cocktail parties where few people know each other, this question establishes a framework for the relationships we have with everyone around us.

When we find out what people do for a living, we can determine what they can do for us and what we can do for them, creating networks that can last a lifetime. And who doesn’t want a friend who sells cars?

Except there are only so many people you can invite to a cocktail party, and only so many cocktail parties you can attend. So how do you turn this handy piece of information into more car sales without spending the next 30 Saturdays at cocktail parties?

- Utilize social media to make local contacts -

Social media has changed the way the internet — and the world — works. People are connecting with other people in ways they never could before. They would never have the time or ability to meet before this new technology became available. Now they’re not only meeting, but becoming friends.

To use social media to forward your business goals, the first thing you have to understand is who it is that buys your product. In the auto salesperson’s case, those people are local. Focus your energies on meeting new online contacts that you know are within driving range of where you are. There are local communities on all of the major social networks, most prominently Facebook. These are where you’ll meet the people who can come out and buy your cars.

- Make them aware of what you do -

Don’t hide your occupation. Make it easy for them to find out that you sell vehicles, either by putting something simple in your forum signature line or making sure to fill in the occupation and employer categories on Facebook and LinkedIn.

- Don’t sell anything -

Social media is just what it sounds like — social. This is not a way for you to sell cars. It’s a way for you to meet people to whom you may eventually sell cars. Do not try to sell through your social media profile, ever. Just be social.

- Go about your business -

Probably the most important thing to remember about building a personal social networking profile is that you have to be yourself. You can be yourself on your best behaviour, but you have to be honest about who you are and what you’re doing. Don’t pretend to be a churchgoer or a Democrat or a kite-lover, just to sell cars. Do what you would do anyway and meet like-minded people. That will be the secret to your success.

Wanted to take advantage of message by Seth Godin in one of his recent blogs. The blog touches on the subject of how Search, or search engines, makes the infinite more finite. It’s a valid point. The masses have come to rely on search engines for helping to initiate or at least narrow down a person’s infinite number of choices. But what does this mean for businesses?

Businesses, Car Dealerships included, can not be everywhere in Search and so you must be selective about where you position your website. If you focus entirely on where your competition is then you are missing out on opportunities to reach market share where you competition is not. By the same token, if you focus solely on where your competition is not then you will miss out on a lot of your market share. Alas, you need a balanced strategy for both.

This is where data and research become important. There is data available and there are tools that are accessible for determining where and how to position your website. For instance, Axandra and Web CEO which are two of the more popular software programs for researching and managing SEO (and to some extent your PPC efforts). There are also good online tools such as Webmaster Toolkit which are good for researching Search Markets too.

Car Dealerships have two choices…they can invest time and training into utilizing these tools effectively, or else they can rely on trusting providers to assist with or even manage these things on their behalf. Regardless, someone needs to be on top of these things in order for dealerships to thrive in today’s online marketplaces. For Dealers that do rely on providers to do this, which is the majority, they still need to be responsible for where and how these providers do position their dealer customer websites.

It’s all about supply and demand and while you do want to position your site where there is an abundance of demand, you also want to position yourself where there is little supply. You can obtain a lot of market share by positioning your site in spaces that are frequented and not saturated with suppliers.

So when it comes to Search Engine Marketing for Car Dealers, remember that you do not need to be everywhere for everyone. You do need however, a well-balanced mixture of visibility within your competitor markets and the market spaces where you can be the bright and shiny star in a galaxy of infinite possibilities.

Shouts out to Andy at Vinart for forwarding the Godin article.

If you ask customers what they want from the companies from whom they buy, you probably won’t be surprised by their responses. Studies show that Customers primarily want two things:

1. Competitive pricing, and
2. Auto Dealers to be transparent with information in a timely and professional manner

According to a recent study by Cobalt, Yahoo!, and Polk, the advent and advancement of the internet have made it possible for customers to demand this from all of the companies with whom they do business. No businesses are more affected by this than Car Dealerships. For most people, their vehicles are more expensive than anything they’ll ever buy but not live in, and saving money and hearing the truth are especially important in the car buying process.

The study reveals that the impact of a customer’s online brand marketing experience in the car buying process cannot be overstated. In every area of their lives, customers are going online to research, to learn, and even to shop, and the purchase of an automobile is no different.

The study found that one of the most crucial aspects of the online brand marketing process is responding to customer inquiries. People are spending an incredible sum of money on their car, and they’re bound to have questions. Customers are taking the dealer responses to their questions very seriously, and for good reason.

A recent article in Dealer magazine on the study says “simply initiating a response is not enough to build customer loyalty. Rather, dealers must respond as consumers request, factoring in content, speed and method of response, in order to increase the chance of selling a vehicle.” It should be obvious, but when a customer wants an email instead of a phone call, or they would prefer to be phoned before 5 o’clock, it makes sense to take heed and communicate with them in the manner they choose.

The concept of sharing experiences with personal networks is not a new one — we’re all familiar with one person telling two friends and those friends telling two more. Existing and potential customers now have access to methods of group communication previously inconceivable to marketing departments. With the rise of internet usage, those two friends are still being told, but they’re being told publicly and there are a whole lot more than two of them.

With forums, blogs, rating sites and social media becoming the fastest growing methods of information transfer, giving customers a professional and helpful experience is more vital than ever before. Automobile dealers have the opportunity to capitalize on good customer relationships and experience growth at exponential rates.

For decades, our car-buying decisions have been based primarily on what our friends tell us, what we read in consumer reports, and the advertising in radio and in television. But the buying world is changing across the board, virtualizing and socializing, and progressive dealerships are getting in to the action. A new survey by The Kelsey Group suggests a warm welcome by car dealers when it comes to today’s Web 2.0 marketing.

According to the survey, 62 percent of those dealers who responded planned to increase their online media spending this year, and 33 percent said they would be using social media, up from 15 percent. At the same time, only 8 percent of respondents said they would be cutting their online spending, as compared to 46 percent who will be cutting their spending in more traditional media outlets.

“These findings point to a significant disruption in the auto dealer advertising space,” says Neal Polachek, chief executive officer of The Kelsey Group. This isn’t your grandfather’s marketing campaign.

Whenever technology changes — whether it’s the newest gadget or the newest form of marketing –there is always a group of individuals and businesses who are quick to get involved. These early adopters who are more willing to try new things before the rest of the industry does have a chance at new and exciting success. The last few years have been groundbreaking in online technology and social media marketing, and other dealers are catching on after seeing the unprecedented success of their peers who have been quick to adopt the new technology.

There is a growing awareness among automobile dealers that online brand marketing is a vital piece of the marketing puzzle. This includes forms of Organic Search Marketing, Blog Marketing, and online Social Network Marketing. Buyers have not only turned to the Internet with shocking speed and in amazing numbers, but also they are demanding more from their suppliers, and automobile retailers are no exception. The smart dealers are getting on board, capitalizing on this new breed of web savvy customers.

There’s no doubt about it — the world has changed beyond recognition, and it continues to change every day. Dealers across the country and the globe have come to realize that online brand marketing and social media are powerful and cost-effective means for making customers more aware of what they have to offer. It’s an exciting time to be a car dealership, and the future is looking brighter and brighter every day.

The days of seeing your local car dealer ads on TV are not going away, but dealer prominence in online advertising is now reaching unprecedented heights, giving car manufactures a new (but good) challenge. A recent report indicates that car manufacturers are finding competition for their ad slots, and that the competition is coming from none other than the car dealerships themselves.

Ad spending by dealers has increased dramatically over the last two years, and the increase has resulted in bidding wars on third party sites like Edmunds.com and Cars.com. Online ad spending by car dealerships was up to $32 million in 2007, and that number has more than doubled each year since 2005.

It’s a new plan of attack for car dealers to be involved in online advertising, but it’s on the upswing. “Buying space on the Web was never part of the strategy until recently, but now it’s 50% of the conversation,” said Pat Primm, a Cleveland area auto dealer.

Online ad pricing is measured in cost per thousand impressions — or CPM — and an ad spot that came with a $4 CPM price tag two years ago now costs $34. Advertising profits for Edmunds.com went up 64 percent in 2006 and another 93 percent in 2007. CEO Jeremy Anwyl says that “dealers and dealer associations are coming in after years of spending 90% of their ad budgets on TV. They are just now realizing that’s too much.”

While the third party websites are clearly the winners in this equation, the loser is the brand identity. With so many voices trying to tell the same story and sell the same product, the message being portrayed by the original equipment manufacturers can easily become diluted and confused. David Harris, the manager of ebusiness and CRM for Suzuki, Brea, California says,

“Our goal is to make sure we are communicating a consistent message. All of a sudden . . . you have a wide variety of messages.”

This is all the more reason for dealers to make sure they have effective online brand marketing strategies in place. Manufacturers have huge budgets to spend on researching the most effective ways to get the car’s message across. It’s vital to the dealership’s success that dealer marketing not only doesn’t conflict with that, but leverages it to their advantage.

Online advertising has become the new normal for car dealerships across the country. Twenty years ago, local TV advertising was the most effective and prominent method of marketing for automotive dealers, and the game has changed. This report is just the newest data that shows that a focused online brand marketing strategy will be the ticket to surviving and thriving in this new world of car sales.

The time investment required for success in social media can be pretty intense. There are thousands of good possible places you can concentrate on to promote your cause but it is impossible to utilize them all. Which is why having a vision for what you want to accomplish and a plan to get there.

Chris Winfield of SearchEngineLand recently published a set of things you can do this year to achieve social media success. It’s called, “10 Simple Steps To Social Media Success In 2008″ and I have his list re-iterated here for your convenience. However you may want to visit the article and read them in more detail to get a more applicable use for these activities. The one that caught my attention was the idea of bookmarking posts you like but in another language. In other words, doing the translation essentially on behalf of the original poster to ultimately benefit you at the SEO level.

Here is his list along with a snippet and estimated time you can expect performing each action…

1. Connect w/ Others (1 hour per week) - Add 2 contacts per week to your profile on sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook.
2. Master a Discussion Forum (2 hours per week) - Become a regular masterful voice on a popular forum that interests you.
3. Trim Your Feed Reader (5 hours per month) - Narrow the selection of blogs you read to just a few and comment on them each.
4. Meet a Digger a Day (15 minutes per day) - Contact someone on Digg that interests you and form a bond.
5. Publish Company Video - Create a video to represent your company and build links to it. (Excellent Idea).
6. Think Globally (10 minutes per submission) - Translate articles you Digg into another language
7. Focus on Results - Not all social sites produce fruit. You want to closely monitor how each impacts your traffic and stop using the ones that do not produce.
8. Answer Questions (15 minutes per day) - Answer 5 questions a day in your niche on Yahoo! Answers.
9. Join the Conversation (20 minutes per day) - Find out where and what others are saying about you and join in on the conversation.
10. Year in Reviews (15 minutes per review) - Create reviews on the sites where your company is presented.

Excluding the reviews idea and the company video, this equates to approximately 10 hours per week of recommended activity you can expect to perform in order to achieve success in social media. That is no small chunk of time.

Notice there is no mention of producing content. The time required for researching topics, formulating a thesis or an opinion and then writing on a subject is demanding too. Even when you have people writing for you you still want to research topics and review what is being written.

This form of online brand marketing is no joke. You can’t take it lightly. You can’t expect results simply by creating a profile and posting some photos to it once in a while. You have to divulge yourself into it and engage virtually with those you encounter. Social Media success is no small feat.

People often equate social media sites such as MySpace and Facebook to an untapped land of opportunity for marketing purposes. While there is indeed tremendous opportunity for marketing in the online social arena, the formula for success is commonly approached with misconceptions.

For instance, this recent article on Digital Dealer states,

Probably the biggest, most important technique that successful social marketers use is networking. Networking with the community should be common practice for dealers. There are hundreds of blogs on automotive reviews, consumer auto shopping, OEMs, and vendors, along with other car chatter on the internet to comment on, link to, and network with.

Not to suggest that there isn’t opportunity for networking on social media, but is it really “the biggest, most important technique”? Obviously that is a hypothetical suggestion that is open for debate.

I would argue that for the sake of ROI, especially for car dealers because of the nature of the Auto Shopper, that SEO is a more important aspect or benefit with this sort of online brand marketing. To achieve SEO benefits with social media, auto dealers, or any business for that matter, can outsource the work to experts and have professional grade content designed to promote the dealership at the SEO level pumped to their profiles. The formula to accomplish this can be defined, executed, and measured. The dealer could additionally utilize their profile to do some networking but the SEO rewards would essentially be on auto pilot, thus cost-effective.

Think about the time and effort required to benefit at the networking level in social media. If you approach it with automation then you have to design and maintain an effective CRM process custom tailored to each social profile you run. That is time-consuming. Alternatively you could take your networking efforts with an ad-hoc approach, but would this be fruitful numbers-wise? Is it worth spending 20% of your day networking in hopes to pick up an extra sale or two a month?

Networking benefits with social media do exist but they require long-term commitment and vision, two seemingly difficult concepts to apply in automotive retail with high turnover and the weighty emphasis on monthly sales. The SEO rewards however prove more bang for your buck.

In a recent article by Bobby Malatia of Kain Automotive titled, “Creating Your Internet Dealership”, Malatia identifies several things for dealers to consider when attempting to utilize the Internet for sales in all profit centers versus just car sales. One of the items he presents is the idea of using “landing pages or microsites” to promote the different products in your business. Malatia suggests that they do not have to be “branded by the dealership itself”.

Malatia is right and it brings up a good point.

Consumers are more interested in your product than they are your commodity. Your product is the unique value your company creates, e.g. your brand, by helping customers gain the most utility from your commodity. In the case of car dealers, your commodity is not just automobiles for sale but other things such as service of course and your financing programs, car parts and after market items, rentals, etc.

Within each profit center you often have more than one market audience. Because of this, you might be better off creating a variety of landing pages and microsites to reach out to each of these different consumer audiences.

This is where social media sites can come in to play. In fact, using social media for each profit center and for each consumer audience could be an extraordinary way to accomplish this form of online brand marketing.

For instance, MySpace is probably not the best place to promote high line or luxury vehicles, however it is very fertile land for after market parts and accessories of some economical performance vehicles such as Mazda and Subaru. You could create create multiple MySpace profiles to represent each of these particular market niches, this giving your dealership, or retail center, several representations of its business across numerous social media sites. The primary work entailed to accomplish this is the setup of each profile, but once you have integrated it with the sales process of each profit center then from there it is simply a matter of promoting it via content and SEO.

Imagine a future where automotive retail is not just a physical showroom with a corresponding website but a diverse array of physical and virtual representations of each unique profit center in the dealership that has an automated sales CRM process built into it custom tailored to each specific market niche. That would be applied technology.