DreamGrow Social Media

Social media for car dealers

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.

Examples and cases

Jeep Community

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.

BMW of Minnetonka

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.

Social success for Toyota GB’s iQ

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).

Volkswagen have been searching for The People’s Reviewer

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.

Car Dealer Social Media Basics: Blogging

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.

30 Social Media Marketing Tips for Car Dealers and Automotive Marketing Professionals…

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!

Whitepaper: Navigating Social Media in the Automotive Industry

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.

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Image credit Henk L

Reaching out to customers without direct branding – the Facebook way

Creating a Facebook fan page for your business or product is quite a common approach today. We create a page for product x and then go on the journey of getting as many people as possible to like our product. A good enough way to get clients, when done right – but you can push it even further.

A much less used tactic today is using the same fan pages, but two of them. By that I mean creating the first fan page for the generic field itself. So lets say that you are in the yoghurt business. What is the wider field connected to that? There are probably more than one, but the main one would be milk (I am in no way connected to the “Milk” fan page in Facebook, I’m just using it as an example). This is the first thing you should do – create a fan page for the generic field. Why? Because if people will like Momma Jane’s yoghurt better than Pappa Jay’s, they will still like dairy products. People may not be familiar to your own brand, but they may very well be fans of the overall field. This is your main advantage – with a generic page, you will now have a group of people interested in your product field. So get that generic page living, generating discussions and content.

However you should consider that Rules for Facebook Page Usernames state: Generic words such as “flowers” or “pizza” are not available as usernames.

The second step would be to create the fan page for your product (Pappa Jay’s). Use that fan page as you normally would, but now you have one more extra channel to market it in – the generic Milk page. Just keep it light – flooding the generic page with Pappa Jay’s will decrease the credibility of the Milk page to zero. You can advertise your own product in the sidebar, or sometimes give away your product as prizes. Just don’t get into the habit of doing it weekly What will you get from it? A well-segmented group of people to market your product to. If people will already like milk, they might be interested in your yoghurt brand as well. Slowly directing them towards your brand is an effective way to go.

This strategy is getting increasingly more difficult to use, at least when your’e trying to make it happen in English – most of the generic fields have already been taken in Facebook (you may reach a deal with the generic page’s owner, though). There is, however, plenty of room for this strategy among smaller languages. So go for it, just keep in mind to have a good product aswell

Businesses spending 60% less per lead in social media

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

Download the full report here

Facebook is now the most visited website in the US

Event predicted by us and numerous other analysts has finally arrived – Last week, Facebook surpassed Google.com to become the most visited website in the United States.

Facebook has enjoyed an enormous growth since the day it was created, having it’s fastest growth ever during the last three months of this year. When compared to the same time in 2009 (which in itself saw a huge spike in visits compared to 2008), there has been an enormous, 185 percent increase in visits. 2010 Has definitely started well for Facebook. In comparison, Google has increased it’s visitor count aswell, but it has topped at only nine percent in the same time.

So where are we headed? It is clear that people have a profound need to comunicate. Today, Facebook enables them to do it better than any other networking site on the internet. And with an active user base growing near to half a billion, it is quite possible to find even your farthest relatives there. Today, nothing seems to stop Facebook from growing and it will quite probably keep it’s newly acquired position as the number one site in the US. With over 200 million people logging in to Facebook daily, it is definitely the place for your company to be seen. Our prediction that Facebook will reach 700 million this year seems more and more probable. Newspaper ads are history – the time to start communicating is now.

Chart hitwise.com.

Facebook to be worth over $40 billion dollars next year?

As WSJ reported, Facebook will probably go public in 2011, once it has reached a year of $1 billion behind it in sales. So a bunch of investors were polled about what they think the market capitalization would be – The results came to be between $35 and $40 billion dollars!

Although, some brave analysts have even suggested that the amount would be $59 billion in 2011 (a market cap over 2 times bigger than that of Google’s in 2004), and up to $100 billion dollars by 2015.

Priit suggests that the time of poster-boy Google may soon be over. Replaced by the poster-boy Facebook. Over everything else, people want to communicate. And right now, nothing enables us to do it better than Facebook.

What do you think? Would you buy Facebook shares?

What You Can Do With Social Media Now?

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.

Dunbar: People limited to 150 friends, despite Facebook

Dunbar’s number is a limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable relationships. Relationships where an individual knows who each person is, and how those people relate each other. There is no precise value for Dunbar’s number, but it’s usually set to 150 and our brains just can’t handle more.

The advent of social networking sites has raised a question, if this number could be higher due to support from technology. Seems like a fair hypothesis.

Professor Dunbar set out to check that. Initial result show that people whit lots of friends maintain close relationships with only a small fraction of those. The Sunday Times quoted Dunbar:

The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world.

Another result from the study shows that women network better than men.

There is a big sex difference though … girls are much better at maintaining relationships just by talking to each other. Boys need to do physical stuff together.

Well, I quess we already knew that, but this suggest that women have a competitive advantage in an environment where more and more business is being done through digital channels and social networking. Combining that with the fact that women rule the social web makes me wonder what’s left fof men?

When thinking about the current state of social technology I still wonder if it can be made more helpful for maintaining bigger or tighter networks. My phone helps me to remember hundreds of phone numbers and even with that information I am able to remember the connections between different people. What would happen if the developers of Facebook or other social networks would singlemindedly focus on helping to increase the Dunbar’s number in their network. Would we perceive that social networking site as better, friendlier?

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Image credit Sanja Gjenero.

Coke: Fans First In Social Media (Case Study)

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.

Social Media Weekend: TED Videos, News Readers, Evangelist, Career

5 Insightful TED Talks on Social Media. The best part of the TED conferences is that videos of the talks are archived and free to view right on the website. Mashable highlights a few recent and exceptional talks from TED’s past, with a focus on social media.

Facebook Largest News Reader? Last week, Google Reader accounted for .01% of upstream visits to News and Media websites, about the same level as a year ago. Google News accounted for 1.39% of visits and Facebook 3.52%.

Turn your employees into social media ambassadors. Develop a policy that outlines corporate guidelines for communicating in the online world. Encourage management to actively spread the message through social media.

Social Media Consulting vs Viral Advertising: Can All ‘Creatives’ Please Go Back to the 80s. Social Media consulting is not an opportunity to go wild with creative-led, viral-inspired, 60-second advertising. A virus is an illness – much like a Social Media plan without a stack of analytics to back it up and a deep understanding of how Social tools actually work and why people use them.

33 Signals Of An Alpha Social Media Evangelist. What are the key characteristics of all social media evangelists? What make them stand out from the crowd and march toward the “alpha” category?

4 Essential Traits for Social Media Success in Your Career. Want to know what it takes to start, and develop, a successful career path in the realm of social media?

Study: Spending On Email, Social And Search Rising. Email service provider ExactTarget released a study this week showing marketers plan to boost spending in email, social media and other non-traditional outreach channels this year.

Slidecast: B2B Lead Genration Using Social Media

Great presentation with audio. This slidecast is a brief summary of many B2B Social Media lead generation presentations from Kipp Bodnar. The slides are copy light as that is his presentation style.

The important takeaways are:

• Inbound B2B marketing is lead generation
• Leverage your own blog as a way to optimize calls to action
• Take Facebook Fan Pages to the next level with custom offers and lead generation opportunities.
• Social media can help improve tradeshow ROI

And remember you really have to sell stuff to make money!