Well, okay, maybe not stop altogether. But here’s the deal, your advertising campaigns aimed at the younger generation might not be working. Why? The simple answer is that millennials are not responsive to the same kinds of advertising methods that worked on previous generations. Now, if you’re already tired of reading this post, here’s the main point: Stop trying to advertise to millennials and just interact with them.
In this week’s video, we talk about content marketing. Most dealers have blogs now, but they’re forgetting the marketing part of their content marketing. They’re not posting the right kind of content, and they’re not sharing links on social media.
We share tips on the right kind of blog posts to write, and lots of helpful information about the social sharing side of blog posts. We explain why Open Graph tags are vital, and where and how to share links to your posts on social media.
As always, if you’ve got questions or comments, leave them down below and we’ll get back to you ASAP!
Facebook rolled out a global update this morning to the ubiquitous Like button. After years of hearing complaints that there was no “dislike” button, Facebook has added several new Reactions to the like button.
This week’s video explains how to access the new reactions on both desktop and mobile, along with showing what each one looks like. Check out the video for all the details…
If you’ve ever experienced birds chirping, singing, calling or screeching at night, you were probably annoyed by it. Today, businesses including your dealership must be aware of birds chirping into the early hours of the morning. The “birds” are the consumers of our modern, or some would say, post-modern era and they don’t always sing during business hours.
Twitter and Facebook offer us the opportunity to say whatever we want, whenever we want and that presents challenges for most dealers. Contrast the Twitter, Facebook and Instagram realm with how difficult it was to praise or shame a business in 1995. BIG difference. If you’re a little young to remember life at that time, it’s important to know that less that 5% of Americans were using the internet before 1995. Unlike today, where 87% of adults in the USA are on the internet and the percentage grows to almost 100% among those living in households earning $75,000 or more. BOOM!
You have a voice that can be amplified online more than any other time in human history, but… so does every single person that visits your website, sees your advertising efforts, calls your dealership, buys a car from you, services their car with you and so on…
What’s your social media strategy look like right now? Are you one of the many dealerships that have scaled back believing that the effort yields nothing in return? Many dealers started running the social media race primarily focused on capitalizing on a new way to sell cars. Unfortunately, none of us knew exactly how to approach the sales side of social media and totally missed the communication importance offered by social media. Yes, you can and should be selling some cars through social media, but you are unlikely to sell any if you aren’t watching, listening, engaging and answering when the birds start chirping.
One way to be sure you hear the birds is by using social media tools like Mention. Mention is specifically a listening tool that allows you to hear what’s being said about your business on the web. They recently released an infographic based on Twitter data they’ve assembled and crunched. Along with the data, they gathered opinions on the information from a handful of social media experts. I highly recommend checking it out.
Here are some takeaways:
If you’re looking for a simple way to make sure you never miss a thing. Check out Mention here and download their mobile app to make sure you always hear the birds chirping.
Until next time, may you find yourself and your business more attractive, attentive and aware.
#birdschirpatnight
Your dealership probably has at least one review portal that your marketing efforts are focused on…Google? Facebook? Yelp? DealerRater? Which portal works best for your car dealership? Is your focus in line with the portal your customers prefer to use?
Mike Blumenthals, a local search and Google Places expert, recently created a Google survey to find out where American adult Internet users prefer to leave reviews online. After filtering out the 77.8% of survey takers that self-reported that they never or almost never leave reviews, Blumenthals asked the following question:
When you leave a review online for a local business, which site are you most likely to use?
While the margin of error allows for Yelp and FB to be neck and neck, this does show a growth in the desire to leave reviews on Facebook, even though they aren’t necessarily known as a review aggregator.
So, while users prefer to leave their online reviews on Facebook, it’s unfortunate for small businesses like your dealership that Facebook doesn’t highlight business reviews, nor does it really promote them. In fact, it can be downright difficult to find the reviews on your dealership’s business page. What is your dealership to do?
First, continue to focus on Google reviews. They are still the clear leader, and provide the most bang for your marketing buck given their dominance in the search engine market. Having a healthy number of reviews consistently flowing into your Google+ Local page gives your dealership a better chance of a high ranking in Google’s search results.
But don’t sleep on Facebook Reviews. They are a smart company, and they will put more of a focus on business reviews in the future. Given that their platform has almost accidentally become the 2nd biggest consumer review site, it is just a matter of time before business reviews become a highlighted part of Facebook for businesses. Make sure your dealership is ahead of the curve. Spend some time and effort building positive reviews on Facebook, since many consumers are already looking at them, and the number is likely to grow dramatically over time.
As for Yelp, could the recent controversy surrounding the quality and validity of their reviews beginning to discourage consumers from leaving reviews there? If you have shied away from Yelp, one thing you should be aware of is that Google’s recent Pigeon change (which I wrote about last week) has given Yelp reviews MUCH more visibility in Google (see this article by Matt McGee). But, it may just be easier and smarter for the long term to focus on building your dealership’s review volumes on Google and Facebook, since there’s little question about their long-term consumer influence. Has your dealership seen an increase in Facebook reviews?