Social media marketing becomes an everyday part of car dealers marketing. Companies should dedicate resources and harness social media to find out how to use social channels for the brand.
The communication is different now and should include combination of marketing, public relations, brand and product knowledge. The tone should be personal and you should speak with both authority and enthusiasm. This helps you to break through barriers, become brand ambassadors and personally influence those who are important for your business.
Think about your sales and marketing. How do you reach your target audience (true fans, enthusiasts, owners, prospects and industry watchers). What makes prospects into buyers? What social tools could be used to help people through different stages of consideration, evaluation and purchase decisions. Find out what works best for you building awareness, helping to make a decision, converting people who consider competitors, provide services to owners post-purchase?
Always ask yourself “why” are you doing something before “what”. This way you can concentrate on bottom line and real business value.
Here are some tips, examples and links to articles that will help you to get you social media activities going.
Jeep combines different social media tools to tie together the community of fans. Twitter, Facebook, user images and featured content help users to interact with the brand and share it with their friends.
is a really great example on how a local dealership can use Facebook. This car dealer integrated their entire lot to a Facebook fan page so you can can browse all the cars without leaving Facebook. BMW of Minnetonka have created a visually appealing landing page for people who are not yet fans and they have an active wall interacting with their fans.
During 2008-09 iCrossing UK, a global digital marketing agency, ran a programme of social media activity for Toyota GB to help raise awareness of its iQ city car. This initiative was based on a core blog and a series of activities designed to create word-of-mouth referrals that drove traffic to the blog and generated interest in the car itself. Download the iCrossing case study (PDF).
Not a professional reviewer or a journalist but a real consumer who could give honest reviews and thoughts on Volkswagen’s small compact 4×4 the Tiguan. The reviews were then released online to help people see personal reviews and opinions on how this car performs in real life.
Ford Social Marketing+Auto Industry
Presentations from Scott Monty. He is the head of social media for Ford Motor Company.
If I could pick one type of site that is a “must have” for car dealers wanting to get started in social media, what would it be? My answer, hands down, is a dealership blog. Before Facebook, Twitter, or any of the others, a blog is the best place to get started.
The list of 30 Social Media action items come together to form a sound strategy for most dealerships. These 30 strategy and tactic descriptions were graciously supplied by Inc. Magazine. They were originally prepared as part of a comprehensive social media “cheat sheet” for the time-challenged business owner or entrepreneur. Here is a link to the Inc. Magazine Business Owner Social media Toolkit. I really like what April Joyner put together in the following list because each item listed is described in a way that quickly communicates the strategy, tactical execution requirements and the promised payoff!
This whitepaper will provide a brief description of social media, its importance and insights on how dealerships can integrate social media into their marketing strategies.
Creating Value in Social Media
Create unique content every day
Unique content is what people are looking for and Google knows that. Fresh and original content is more valued and you gain better ran in Google which brings you more visitors. Creating great content every day is not hard. Point to other resources, share your experiences, help and give value to customers. Not everyone knows what to do when you got a flat tire or need to jump star a car.
Share your content
If you create valuable content then other want to use it too. Leverage that! Find other sites that are interested in your content and gain more visitors. Which sites might find your blog posts, images and videos interesting and find out if they are interested on publishing your content. This can bring you free traffic and you gain much valued link power that will boost you Google rankings.
Let others know you are creating content
Post links to your material in relevant online communities, social media channels, forums, Facebook, Twitter and so on. It can make dramatic difference if you spread the word. Others will pick up and pas your links on. Search engines find those links and the authority of your web properties goes up
Open comments
The main goal of the social media efforts is to engage people. This is a must! So, everything you put up in the social web should be open to comments, ratings, and sharing. This will help you to tie people to your site as they feel that their contributions are being valued and responded to. Open interaction will give you many benefits, such as being your online focus group and sounding board, getting expert opinions from other specialists, showing an human face, etc.
Less advertising, more value
Social media is not another channel to spam with your banners and self serving salesy news items.
In february, HubSpot released a report about the state of inbound marketing in 2010. The report was based on a survey of 231 professionals, who were familiar with their company’s marketing strategy. With direct mail, telemarketing and trade shows, outbound marketing has gradually lost its effectiveness (and importance!) in the marketing strategies of companies of all sizes. So has inbound marketing been any better? You bet.
Some key findings from the report:
Inbound Marketing Channels Continue to Deliver Dramatically Lower Cost Per Lead Than Outbound Channels Do Businesses spending 50% or more of their marketing budget on inbound marketing activities spent 60% less per lead, than businesses spending 50% or more of their marketing on outbound channels. Inbound marketing channels are clearly maintaining their low-cost advantage.
Social Media and Blogs Are the Most Rapidly Expanding Category In The Overall Marketing Budget Social media and blogs are becoming marketing powerhouses. They are the fastest growing category in lead generation budgets and they continue to be ranked as the lowest cost lead-generation channel.
Businesses Are Generating Real Customers With Social Media and Blogs Are potential customers really reading twitter? Does Facebook do anything more than build brand awareness? The answer is “Yes!”. Over 40% of respondents who used social media channels like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, acquired a customer through each of those channels. Social media is not just for brand awareness – it can be used to directly generate leads that translate into customers.
The difference in Cost Per Lead between inbound and outbound marketing:
The difference between the Cost Per Lead of inbound/outbound marketing has been clearly understood by marketers aswell. When compared to the average 2009 Lead Generation Budget, the 2010 budgets for inbound marketing have been increasing, while the overall budgets for outbound channels have been steadily decreasing (down 5% in one year). Businesses rate every inbound lead generation channel as being more important than any outbound channel. This trend will clearly be continued in years to come and agencies offering only outbound marketing services have been steadily losing their clientele.
The trend to focus more in inbound marketing rather than outbound, is especially seen in smaller companies. With not much to spend on TV advertising, they have no choice but to turn more of their attention to social media, Facebook being the most popular from the group.
Customer acquisition through blogs is directly related to frequency of blog posts
Although it has been a common knowledge for a while, the survey gives statistical evidence that the more you blog, the better are your chances of attracting that necessary customer. We have also seen the same trend among our own clients. If they have taken blogging seriously and devoted some time for it, then it has paid off. An interesting finding from the survey is, that almost all companies blogging multiple times a day, have acquired clients through their blog. But daily blogging isn’t your only way of attracting customers. Over 50% of companies blogging only once a week have still acquired customers through their blogs. Not bad for an hour a week. And what the data tells us, the frequency of blogging once a week is also the most common approach among companies.
Traditional outbound marketing techniques have been clearly losing their effectiveness. People are spending increasingly more of their time in social networks, so these are the places to go to. Shouting out and hoping people will hear you, is not working anymore. What works is initiating a real conversation with your client and hearing what they have to say. Whether you do that through giving out good advice or something else, is yours to decide.
10 Best Social Media Case Studies. There are many companies have used social media to promote their brand to improve and some of those companies have achieved remarkable success.
Social Media Optimization Case Studies & Tips. Optimizing social media for search engines, presents a tremendous opportunity to grow social networks and build traffic to content that allows visitors to consumer, engage and share.
The 5 types of social currency. The social web has created a hyper-word-of-mouth platform that has tipped the balance of power away from brands. As a result, brands are now beginning to realise that engagement is the new communications. In order for a brand to achieve engagement with its stakeholders, it needs to consider the value that their content will deliver, or to frame it from the recipients perspective – what’s in it for me.
Social Media Complicates Work-Life Balance. Social media usage has soared not just among the general population but also among at-work Internet users, who are heading to the sites for both personal and professional reasons in greater numbers.
A collection of successful social media cases to show the audience on the Capgemini Cloud Computing Conference in Utrecht (February 17th) what social media can offer. And that investing in social media provides a return on investment.
A really interesting presentation by Michael Donnelly laying out Coca-Cola’s sosial medai approach. Michael is Group Director of Worldwide Interactive Marketing for Coca-Cola. The presentation was created for the iStrategy2010 conference. You can follow Michael on Twitter @MichaelDonnelly.
7 Key Findings On The Use of Social Media And E-Commerce: New Study. Online retailers have been rushing into using Social Media as the next big marketing thing and yes it is showing some promise. A recent study by Compete which evaluated online shopping trends, unearthed some interesting findings about the use of Social Media and online shopping, especially about Facebook and Twitter.
Case Study: Social Networking Does Work. M+R Strategic Services released their 2010 NonProfit Social Media Benchmark Study: An Analysis of Growth and Social Engagement Metrics for Nonprofit Organizations. The findings in the study are quite re-assuring for some of the best practices we already know.
Paul Gillin’s Guide to Choosing Social Media Tools. Most companies have the same problem: They’ve dabbled in blogs, Twitter and Facebook fan pages but after several months they lack traffic, followers and fans. They’re frustrated and confused. Wasn’t this supposed to be a cheap and easy way to build their brand and bring in sales? Social media demands a strategy, and that’s where businesses usually don’t go far enough.
B2B Case Study: How to Get Started in Social Media. The second in a series of “How To’s” to help you add social media to your integrated marketing communications program. Integrated Marcom Minute interviewed Katherine Watkins, Marketing Communications Manager, Eastman Chemical Company, to learn how she and her marcom team integrated social media into their marcom mix.
Adopting Social Media in the Enterprise. Most enterprises have made attempts at dipping their toe in social media mostly by establishing a presence on what we will call the “free social web” – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. While these social outposts are extremely important for branding and driving traffic to an enterprise’s web site or online community, they are difficult to measure and track and, most importantly, it’s difficult for the brand to own the conversations happening within the broader social web.
Here is a collection of case studies and social media examples. The cases have been selected so that they would show how social media is being adopted in large organizations.
Marketing in the Age of Social Media – Examples from Procter & Gamble (video), by Stan Joosten. Hear how P&G’s brands integrate social media into their marketing activities, what lessons they’ve learned, and how these efforts have made them better able to serve their consumers.
General Mills Goes Social Media (video), by Mark Addicks. Mark Addicks, General Mills’ Chief Marketing Officer, shares how social media is changing they way they communicate. Mark’s presentation covers how when first getting started, General Mills built internal portals to demonstrate the power of social to senior management and peers, how many of their brands had an inherent offline “social network” behind them and these new tools are making it easier for them to connect, and several specific social media case studies on brands like Betty Crocker, Fiber One, and Progresso.
From Grass Roots to Global Scale: The Four Phases of Social Media at Intel (video), by Ken Kaplan. Intel is a big company with over 80,000 employees in hundreds of countries around the world. It may not be able to turn on a dime, but its culture of innovation mixed with a dose of paranoia has empowered its employees to walk, run and leap ahead into the world of social media. Ken highlighted four phases that moved Intel to a stronger role of participating online from blogging to communities to advertising: Pioneers, Settlers, Shift to Online, and Global Scale.
Intel Developing an Enterprise Social Computing Strategy, by Laurie Buczek and Malcolm Harkins. Intel IT has deployed an enterprise-wide social computing platform that combines professional networking tools with social media such as wikis and blogs, and integrates with existing enterprise software. Read how Intel IT transformed collaboration across Intel while addressing top business challenges such as helping employees to find relevant information and expertise more quickly, breaking down silos; attracting and retaining new employees; and capturing the tacit knowledge of mature employees.
How Nokia is Connecting People with Social Media (video), by Molly Schonthal. Molly Schonthal explains that, for the world’s largest manufacturer of cell phones, ‘connecting people’ is much more than a tag line — it’s a focus of business. Social media communication is a top priority for Nokia, both internally and externally.
The Impact of Social Media for The Home Depot (video), by Nick Ayres. Nick showed how the company uses social media to expand these tenets, and how social media is fundamentally changing the ways in which it engages with its customers. Social media is a growing part of what The Home Depot calls its “digital orange apron.”
Boston College, by Jeff Brainard. Boston College required social software to stimulate the education process & create lively interactions between students and faculty; Socialtext provided easy-to-use platform for wiki collaboration that seamlessly integrated with email, RSS feeds, search and other popular web-based technologies.
UPS: Protecting your brand through social media (video), by Debbie Curtis-Magley. UPS will give a first-hand account of how it recently dispelled rumors by using social media. Learn about crisis strategy, tools used, and lessons learned.
Zero to 60: Ford’s Social Media Story (video), by Scott Monty. Scott’s presentation covers how they’ve worked to “set their content free” by making it available for download and sharing, how the Fiesta Movement has put a bunch of talkers (and their unfiltered opinions) behind the wheel of new cars, and how Scott has connected fans directly to CEO Alan Mulally via Twitter.
AT&T Collaborative Integration, by R Todd Stephens. This case study provides an overview of the first 5 years of an evolving journey with Enterprise 2.0 applications within a large telecommunications company.
Vitamin Water’s newest flavour created by Facebook fans, by Matt Rhodes. Vitamin Water’s latest flavour, launching in March this year, was developed and named by the brand’s Facebook fans. The black cherry and lime flavoured drink will be called ‘Connect’ and one Facebook fan, Sarah from Illinois, won $5,000 for her role in developing this new product.
Social Media Engagement During a Financial Crisis (video), by Joel Nathanson. Joel’s presentation focuses on whether in crisis or during everyday business, fundamentals are critical: 1. Social media should be used in coordination with other channels; 2. If you’re not there, someone else will be; 3. Take advantage of the high value, low cost benefits; 4. Start building now — you don’t want to be building the infrastructure when you’re in a crisis.
Case study: Scott Brown and social media, by Larry Kim. While it is difficult to explain exactly how Scott Brown’s social media campaign went so viral, some basic social media marketing best practices may have tilted the race in Scott Brown’s favor.
Social Media Case Study: LEGO CLICK, by Matt Rhodes. They have launched LEGO CLICK, an online community that brings together innovators, designers, artists and creative thinkers to develop new ideas related to toys. The site is designed to bring together ideas in written form, images and videos. They want to capture and catalogue ‘lightbulb moments’, ideas that are relevant to toys and to the market LEGO serves.
General Motors Case Study. Often referred to as a great example of a successful corporate blog, General Motors FastLane was one of the first blogs personally written by a senior executive. On FastLane, GM’s Vice-Chairman Bob Lutz and others share their thoughts and opinions about the automaker’s product line.
Pizza & Beer – a successful E2.0 launch, by Rickard Hansson. Recently we launched Incentive as a part of the E20 roll out on SBAB. SBAB is a government owned bank in Sweden. Let me emphasis GOVERNMENT OWNED. You direct response – I assume – is… stale, complex decision processes, rules – on and on, and on.
Carnival Cruise Lines, by Guy Hagen. Carnival Cruise Lines has been a pioneer in leveraging social media to build customer loyalty and satisfaction. Interview with Carnival’s Senior Manager for Interactive Marketing Strategy Jordan Corderra and Social Media Strategist Stephanie Leavitt about how they built such a successful and loyal online community.
And whe you are through with those then: WOMMA’s Case Study Library. A how-to resource intended to help you gain a better understanding of the different types of word of mouth marketing that exist, as well as how to put them to work for you. We’re showcasing the best work from the best marketers, giving the people who create noteworthy word of mouth campaigns the recognition they deserve and providing an educational tool for those who want to learn a little more about this thing called WOM.
Great presentation from Matthew Lehman, web experience director at Progressive Insurance. Insurance business is very conservative and there are not many good case studies of social media usage in that sector. Matt presents ideas and examples how they engaged people with the “most boring product in the world”. Examples include Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
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