strategy

The Rules of Engagement

Win Your Customers by Wooing Them through Social Media

Winning the hearts, trust, and life-long loyalty of your dealership’s customers begins by following a few simple rules of engagement on the social media sites of your choice—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, or Google+, just to name a few.  By keeping the following fundamentals in mind when managing the content on your social media venues, you’ll keep in touch and in tune with your customers.  And in turn, this will help you stay on target with your dealership’s sales goals.  Think in terms of your customers’ lifetime value.  Put a greater emphasis on investing the relatively small amount of time and energy regularly to cultivate high-quality relationships that offer long-term satisfaction and returns for both you and your customers.

Be informative.  As often as you can, post on your dealership business pages on your favorite social media sites.  Your customers are anxious to hear from you.  They want to know about your dealership’s latest discounts, rebates, incentives, giveaways, and upcoming events.  They want to know about manufacturer and industry news that may impact them.  They want facts that will help them make the most informed decision when buying a vehicle.  They want service specials, links to other helpful automotive resources, along with maintenance and safe-driving tips.  And don’t forget to share videos and photos as well to engage them.  If you can save your customers time, money, and headaches, they’ll remember you, thank you, and stick with you.

Be ready.  Be on your toes and ready to share news and announcements at a moment’s notice.  Your next prepared post can be online in seconds, and that immediacy works to the advantage of you and your customers.

Be concise.  Your customers will appreciate short bursts of information on your social media sites that they can scan, absorb, and act on at will when it’s convenient for them.  Being brief also cuts the prep time for you in drafting and finalizing the details to be posted.

Be inquisitive.  Strike up a healthy conversation with your customers.  Pose some thought-provoking questions online.  Ask for comments, opinions, and reviews.  They’ll appreciate the chance to speak their minds.  And when they do, you’ll receive valuable feedback that will help you continue to support and satisfy your customers—now, and down the road.

Be yourself.  Being honest and genuine is the key to having sincere, open, and ongoing interactions with your customers online—just as it is in person.

Be committed.  You believe in your business, the vehicles that you sell, and the service that your dealership delivers.  Make sure your customers know this.  Show them every day in the way you talk about your dealership, its inventory, and its services.  Use your web presence to most effectively present the distinct elements of your dealership’s brand personality and to reinforce them.

Be there.  When something goes wrong for your customers, be there for them.  Be responsive.  Acknowledge what happened in general online—and in particular offline, directly with your customer.  Offer your dealership’s apologies.  Research the problem.  Then make it right, and learn from it.  Very often, what began as a strained customer relationship can be transformed into an even stronger bond when a dealership responds sincerely and promptly with a satisfactory resolution to a customer’s complaint.

Be generous.  You and your dealership are a living, breathing, vital part of your neighborhood.  Be sure to let you customers know about the variety of community and charitable events and causes that you and your dealership put your time, money, and muscle behind.  It’s feel-good news that everyone loves to hear, and it’s news that you should be very proud to share.

Be grateful.  Every business is in business because of its customers.  Thank your customers as often as you can—for their patronage, their patience, and for the trust they’ve placed in you, your dealership, and in the vehicles that you deliver.       

Be good.  Keep up the good work that you do at your dealership every day, and be sure to share it with your old and new friends who interact with you on social media forums.  This interaction is vital for developing enduring customer relationships.  And it offers countless mutual benefits for you and your customers—right this second, and right on down the road.

For more information about engaging your customers through social media and expanding your digital reach and market presence, visit our Full-Service Page for details or contact Dealer Impact at (877) 334-9638, or email us at sales@dealerimpact.com.

Google Buys Zagat to Boost Local Reviews

Google’s announcement to acquire Zagat shows a major shift in the local/review space. Most interesting is that Zagat is a content company Google usually only curates information rather than owning it outright.

Google has toyed with local ratings, search and reviews for quite some time, but it appears the the company is now very serious after an acquisition of ratings-mogul Zagat. It’s not a terribly surprising move, when you look at Google’s history with local, ratings and the like, but it’s probably not the one that we thought the company would make. In fact, this might have very little to do with local, from a macro scale.

More details from TheNextWeb.

Introducing Full-Service Digital Marketing and Social Media Programs for your dealership

Dealer Impact Systems is here to let you focus on what you do best, Sell Cars!

Let’s face it, in today’s digital marketing world things are moving so fast it takes a team of people to keep up with everything; writers, bloggers, web developers, marketing personnel, social media experts, reputation management, and someone to manage everything to make sure it gets done on time. All this equates to more employees, more programs, more training, more time, more money and more headaches.

What Should Your Dealership Do? Nothing!!!

Let our Team of Digital Marketing Professionals do the work for you.

1) Retrieve
Your dealership has content in many forms and places. Whether it’s an ad, news, or special generated from your sales or service department, or a marketing agency we retrieve your content.

2) Ready
Once it’s in our hands, we ready your content for the web. Optimizing for maximum benefit.

3) Release
Our content team takes your optimized content and syndicates it across the digital landscape, building your presence and getting you noticed!

4) Radar
Once released, we keep our ear to the ground, monitoring for social media likes, tweets, mentions and reviews. We even help respond!

5) Recruit
Our team creates and conducts proactive campaigns to build traffic, enhance web presence, increase Facebook likes & followers, and requests customer reviews.

6) Report
Your customer success manager will conduct monthly, bi-monthly or weekly reviews of your results, and provide recommendations for content that enhances customer engagement.

Click Here for Details.

If you would like to get going on one of our new programs contact us at 877-334-9638 or email sales@dealerimpact.com and get in the queue first.

5 Ways Social Media Has Changed Marketing Campaigns

Mashable has a great article about how Social Media has fundamentally changed how marketing campaigns are executed.

“Social media engagement.” It’s a phrase that generates a lot of buzz, but what does it actually mean? And, more importantly, why does it matter to companies that are integrating social media into their PR and marketing strategies?

We turned to some of the leading communication experts to discover the importance of sparking online engagement and how this new focus has forced PR, marketing and advertising campaigns to evolve.

via Mashable

Facebook Launches Deals

The Daily Deal space is heating up fast.

Facebook is kicking off its long-awaited Deals program to users in five major cities starting Tuesday with plans to expand in other cities soon after.

Facebook Deals, which will offer online discounts and deals from businesses to its users, marks the company’s entrance into what’s becoming a crowded group-buying deal market that already includes Groupon and LivingSocial.

Via VentureBeat

Get the Most Out of Facebook Insights

This is a great Facebook page resource for small businesses. Bookmark for future reference!

You’re a small business owner and you’ve decided to create a Facebook Page for your company. Or you’re an employee in an organization and, since you are the only one who “gets” social media, you’ve been charged with running a Facebook Page.

You set it up and make it look nice. You put up some photos and videos that you think represent the organization well. You e-mail a bunch of your friends and the page has almost 100 “Likes.” But one day, your boss comes in and asks you the question that you have been dreading: “Is this Facebook Page helping us or just eating away most of your time?”

Enter Facebook Insights, a powerful analytical tool that can help any organization evaluate the effectiveness of its Facebook presence. But, for a small business where time is perhaps the most important (and often rarest) resource, Facebook Insights can help you evaluate whether you’re investing or wasting your time.

The following scenarios are illustrations of how a fictional small business, “Bill’s Tech Company,” can leverage Facebook Insights to evaluate the effectiveness of its new Facebook Business Page. Within each scenario are the different aspects of Facebook Insights that Bill could utilize to answer his questions. Beside each measure (in parentheses) is a note on where to find that specific piece of data in Facebook Insights.

via: Mashable

Social Media Success: 5 Lessons From In-House Corporate Teams

While implementing a successful social media campaign is something to celebrate, longer term, policy-based programs (which may not garner as much immediate publicity) can be even more rewarding.

Here we are highlighting five companies that have enjoyed long term success with their own social media teams and taking a look at some of the measurable returns they have seen as the results of their programs.

Key personnel from within the five companies below (in alphabetical order) have commented on their teams’ successes to offer you an insight into their various processes. Meanwhile, please be sure to let us know in the comments about any other companies that you feel should be recognized for having strong in-house social media teams.

Via: Mashable

Calculate the ROI of Your Social Media Campaign

Here is an interesting article about calculating the Return On Investment of your Social Media Campaign.

First the bad news: If you’re going to calculate the ROI of your social media campaign, you’re going to have to know math. That may come as a disappointment to people who thought social media was only about accumulating Twitter followers or monitoring Facebook “Likes,” but it’s true. The future of social media is about math, metrics and monetization.

The problem is that most companies aren’t doing an effective job of measuring the value of their social media campaigns. In fact, a recent survey by Econsultancy found that 47% of the companies it surveyed said they were “not able to measure” their campaigns and that “the jury is still out” on the value gained from their social media investment.

If you’re one of the people who isn’t measuring your social media campaigns on an ROI basis, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Here are some tips, advice, and a little bit of simple math to get you on the right path to ROI success.

Via: Mashable