Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing & its Impact on Your Dealership

by with No Comment Digital MarketingSocial Media

Social Media Marketing + Your Dealership = <3

It seems there is always some new Social Media Trend or Controversy. Social Media dictates how a lot of people live their lives. We turn to it for attention, sympathy, support, advice, help and entertainment. We consume so much of it that we don’t event think twice about it. We use it in our personal lives as well as our professional lives. With over 3.78 Billion users worldwide, its safe to say that social media is here to stay.

If it is here to stay, then it begs the question, is it really important?

55% of consumers learn about new brands on social media! Social media has always been a place of discovery, and people are now using social media to learn about brands and companies just as much (or more) than TV or Radio Advertising. The average person spends 2 hours and 29 minutes each day on social media. That gives you lots of opportunity to get in front of the right audience.

In today’s age of streaming, we don’t need or want to watch or listen to ads anymore. We’re able to fast forward, change the channel or take our pick from infinite libraries of ad-free content. However, on social media, ads and brand content sits next to our social streams and looks like the content that we consume from our friends, family or other connections. So, Why is this important? Gen Z and Millennials are especially likely to use social media for brand discover. As the spending power of these generations increases, so will social media usage. Your brand should be ready to capitalize on these growing networks, or consumers will most likely discover your competitors first.

Social media users tend to treat social media like a feedback loop where they are able to report an issue with a product, leave a review, or privately message the company. If your consumers can’t engage with you, they may find another company who can. Engagement is the primary goal of many marketers and drives a positive influence on customers’ decisions to buy from a brand. Responsive brands that continuously react and engage in communication with consumers are better equipped to serve their customers’ needs, dial up personalization and humanize their content in a way that forges deeper connections with customers.

What can social media do for my business?

Besides the most obvious, getting your name and brand out to more people quickly and cheaply, there are many other benefits of utilizing social media marketing for your business.

  • Helps you engage with current and potential customers
  • You can find out what people are saying about your business
  • You can advertise your business and promotions
  • Social media can help your business attract customers
  • Allows you to gain and collect customer feedback
  • Helps to build customer loyalty to your business and brand

Who are the major Social Media Players?

  1. Facebook is the market leader when it comes to social media with over 68% of Adults in the US using it on a regular basis. 1.84 billion people use Facebook every day! More than 90 million small businesses have Facebook pages & 67% of marketers say Facebook is the most important Social Media platform in their strategies. With such whopping statistics, it’s no wonder Facebook generated $27.19 billion from ad revenue in Q4 of 2020 alone! With so many people regularly using (and buying) from Facebook, it should be a crucial part of your digital marketing strategy too!
  2. Instagram is owned by the same company as Facebook, Meta. The difference in the platforms is that Instagram only allows you to post visual content, while Facebook allows Text Only Posts. Boasting over 1.5 billion users a day and over 200 million businesses on Instagram, this platform is known for user engagement. Engagement rate on Instagram are approximately 6 times higher than those on Facebook (81% VS 8%).
  3. Twitter has long cemented itself as the hub of political discussions, memes and the prime place to go back and forth with brands. 436 million monthly users troll on twitter. Content strategy can be a little tricky on Twitter, but it’s an important pillar of a strong digital marketing strategy.
  4. TikTok has amassed 42.4% of the adult population in users and is the fastest growing social network with 105% user growth rate in the US over the past 2 years. TikTok is giving Instagram a run for its money when it comes to Influencers. TikTok is now more popular among the Gen Z population than Instagram.
  5. Pinterest has an impressive 400 million monthly user base and has a diverse, big-spending audience that are more dedicated and engaged than any other network. 7 out of 10 “pinners” say Pinterest is their go-to place to find products and services they can trust and their shopping carts are 85% larger than buyers on other platforms. With dedication like that from your consumers, why wouldn’t you be using this platform?

What should my business be doing on social media?

  • Have complete and correct profile information. Users want to be able to find your phone number, address and website when they need it so make sure that you have added the information and that all information is correct and up to date on your social profiles.
  • Post regularly. Businesses who post consistently show consistent organic growth. Just like you would nurture any other sales lead, nurture the audience you build through social media.
  • Set aside time each week to read and respond to all comments. With so many people using social media as a way to connect with brands, it is key that you respond to each and every comment consumers leave about you or your business. Respond to negative reviews professionally and compassionately.
  • Create content that enhances your target audience’s life. Consumers are accosted with so many advertisements each day, they don’t want to see gimmicky ads when they turn to social media. Your content should resemble other content on the platform and add value.
  • Humanize your company. Have a new office manager? Do you celebrate employees’ birthdays? Document and post “fun” activities, introductory posts and other ways to share who your company is at its core is a good way to promote your business on social media.

It’s safe to say that social media is here to stay. Your customers are looking for you online. Give them what they want and make it easy for them to find you. Let Dealers Digital help you maximize your online exposure and boost your sales. Because we only work with outdoor power equipment and green industry professionals, we know what content to curate, what your customers want to hear and when they want to hear it. We also work with you to open up the lines of communication from your social channels to utilize them as sales lead funnels.

Contact Us now for more information about how we can help you and your business! Follow us on Facebook and Instagram to keep up with all of the latest news!

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Sell While You’re Sleeping Using Marketing Automation

by with No Comment Marketing Automation

This article originally appeared in the March edition of OPE Business

When we signed our very first OPE dealership as a client in 2014, the owner asked us to audit what they were spending online and analyze all of the tools they had bought into. So, we went through will all the awkward conversations to terminate deals with folks like the Yellow Pages and every side deal they had signed with multiple local media outlets.

Over the years I’ve met dozens of dealers who consistently tell me the same thing:

“I know I should be more proactive in promoting my business, but there just aren’t enough hours in the day and I don’t have time to learn how to use all of these new tools.”

Most dealers are inundated daily with sales reps and promises of new, flashy technology and how it’s going to change the way they do business. Except it hasn’t. Because technology is only as good as the people you have using it and the quality of the data you have to feed it. But this may finally be the year where technology and utility meet.

When email started to become prominent in the late 90s, it was supposed to kill the telephone (it didn’t) and when social media took off in the mid 2000’s, it was going to kill email (it didn’t) and when everyone got a website, it was going to kill newspapers (well, this one is basically true).

The point is, that instead of emerging technologies replacing each other, they’ve all become blended into a toolkit that work best when you use them together, rather than independently of one other. So, in the past where you just had newspaper, television, radio and billboards to deal with, now you have thousands of tools and channels to utilize for your business, each purporting to make your life easier, but only if you can figure out how to make them all live in harmony.

Enter marketing automation.

Marketing automation isn’t a new concept by any means. The idea has been around for many years with large software companies selling the dream of completely automated customer journeys that just churn out leads and close sales. The problem is that it took a lot of work to set up, even more to maintain and didn’t account for the nuances that every small business inherently had, not to mention that the price point of traditional enterprise software was a massive barrier to entry for small businesses. But as technology goes, tools have matured and in 2021 it’s much easier to make those pieces fit.

Here are the major components you’ll need in order to start putting those pieces together. You can expect to hear a lot more about the pieces that make up this marketing automation toolkit in 2021:

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Software: Most dealerships have a Dealership Management System that houses all of your key contacts, your inventory and more. All good business owners know that the cost of acquiring a new customer is much higher than maintaining an existing one. In fact, 50% of sales from existing customers when using marketing automation, vs. just 30% without. For example, setting up a program that sends a message to a customer at regular service intervals after they’ve purchased a new piece of a equipment is an easy, hands-off reminder to the customer that results in a consistent stream of booked service appointments. Does your DMS have a built in CRM? If not, it’s time to make this your first step.

Business Texting & Messaging: Business texting is one of the most quickly adopted technologies for small businesses in the last ten years. In fact, 78% of US consumers say that receiving a text message is the fastest way to reach them for important services updates and over 90% of text messages are read within the first three minutes. Texting also gives you hours of your day back by eliminating the need to call on customers for service reminders or parts inquiries. By combining marketing automation and business texting, you can notify a day’s worth of contacts with the click of a button and free your employees to get back to other tasks.

Chat Bots: Chat bots are expected to help reduce business costs by up to $8 billion by the year 2022. Why? Because with the power of artificial intelligence, chat bots can now answer the vast majority of the mundane questions you answer over and over again in your dealership. Plus, when added to your marketing automation plan, you can now interact with a potential customer in a meaningful way even without a live agent. For those customers that are searching for equipment at 2am, it gives you a way to collect some basic information in a conversational manner vs expecting the customer to complete an online form to get a quote because they know there is no immediate gratification for their query. In fact 64% of the public likes chatbots because they can deliver a 24-hour service, 7 days a week. When paired with marketing automation, you can collect the user’s information and automatically route that to the appropriate person in your dealership to handle their query so there are no more bottlenecks in your operation.

At a minimum, dealerships now have access to affordable tools to help maintain ongoing conversations with existing customers. But how can you take the next step and use automation technology to help you acquire new customers? For that, it’s important that you have an understanding of the marketing funnel to see where your customers are coming from and where they are in their buying journey. All of these tools are design to save you time and nurture customers down a conversion path that you simply can’t do manually.

With marketing automation we are finally seeing technology and affordability uniting to make your life easier, just a few years later than we were promised.

Dealers Digital owns and operates dealerAMP, an alternative to Kenect, Podium, Birdeye and DP360. If you’d like to learn more about how dealerAMP can help your business save time and money with an integrated business texting, reputation management and CRM platform, schedule a demo.