It's no secret that B2B (business to business) marketing and B2C (business to consumer) marketing has changed significantly in the past five years. One of the primary reasons for this is the growth of social media. Successful businesses are becoming resources for their customers, regularly creating valuable content of interest and sharing it freely across the social sphere.
If your auto dealership (or any business for that matter) has yet to dive in to social media, it's time to get on the bandwagon. You're already behind, so there's no time to waste! One of the big mistakes made by companies, however, is jumping in without a plan.
Here are six tips to prepare your auto dealership for social media marketing so you do it right from the start.
- Set clear goals for the social media efforts of your auto dealership.
Like anything else, without goals you cannot measure whether anything has been acheived. Good goals are measurable and have a timeframe associated with them. - Ensure that you have enough personel resources dedicated to the effort.
If you don't have the personel in house, then consider hiring an agency to assist you. The key to an effective social media presence is great content, consistency, engagement, and monitoring. This does not happen by logging in to Facebook just once per week and making a sales post. - Commit to building great content and giving it away.
This is the age of the customer. Customers have access to more information, reviews, testimonials, and studies than ever before. If you want to position yourself as the expert in your field and have your auto dealership dominate in your area, you need to make helpful information available to your client-base freely and regularly, across multiple channels. - Identify what social channels your customers are using and how they are using them.
There are only so many hours in the day. Ideally, you would be publishing across all the major social channels, but if your time is limited then you need to find out where your customers are hanging out and make those channels your priority. Are they on Facebook? Twitter? Google+? Are they using Pinterest? Find out the answer and make sure your auto dealership has an active presence there. - Clean up your website.
One of the by-products of effective social media campaigns is increased traffic to your website. What does your website do for your auto dealership today? Does it have effective calls to action and lead capturing capabilities? If not, take the time to fix this. When you are driving new traffic to your site, you want to make sure you have the ability to capture information and get the prospective customer to do what you want them to while they are there! - Measure your results regularly.
Remember tip number one? If you've set measurable goals, make sure you actually stop after the time period you specified and review what you've done and the results that you've achieved. Review what did and did not work. Tweak your process, set a new goal, and repeat!
Just like anything else in business, if you start with a plan, your chances of success are amplified! With these simple steps, your auto dealership (and again, ANY business) will be off and running building great social media presence.
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Novera Payment Solutions is well known as a leader in the credit card payments industry and is committed to helping auto dealerships and other businesses improve their bottom line by providing significant savings on credit card processing fees through our innovative flat fee pricing model.
Contact Novera to learn more about how we work with small businesses, auto dealers and auto dealer associations to provide the most fair and transparent pricing structure available on the market today for credit card processing.
