Effective early adopters of social media marketing that have larger followings often achieve greater success. This comes as no surprise for businesses that commit resources to be proactive promoting their marketing strategy with a consistent message.  The businesses that are unhappy with their results tend to brush over the opportunity social media provides them to propel their brand into cyberspace. Once again, the harder you work at using social media tools, the greater value you provide your customers and the higher ROI you get from them.

Successful social marketing is not just a turn key operation where you set it and forget it. It requires a voice from your business that sets the tone for your brand. A simple social media set up with occasional postings and tweets ads value as a SEO tool, building one way links back to your main site, but it will not help you build a following. Achieving true business success will take time and patience. Since social media  is higher up in the search funnel, instant sales may or may not happen. With the proper long term social marketing plan in place, the payoffs are substantial with increased search visibility, brand loyalty and trust, and a bigger influence on frequent followers.

Don’t write off early results to disillusionment because sales didn’t just jump off the charts. Without a plan or social media strategy ion place, any tool can be a waste of time. A commitment to the execution of your social media strategy will deliver real value and a pay off that improves your influence over the competition. So the question is, what’s your social marketing plan?

Some of the ways you can influence your online performance is to promote your presence to Facebook and Twitter with your current customer base.

• Do you currently let your customers know they can find you on Twitter and Facebook?
• Do you include your Facebook and Twitter information in your offline advertising, in the service drive, on customer receipts, in customer waiting areas, and in your showroom?
• Are you actively building your Facebook fan base and Twitter followers by asking your customers to join?

Your social media presence needs to be subtle and engaging while building trust and interest in your dealership. The most effective promotions are once a week special time limited offers or discount coupons. When is the last time you updated your social media promotion on Facebook or Twitter?

Many dealers remain distant from adding social media marketing into the overall brand marketing strategy. These dealers mainly fall into two groups, those who think social media is a passing fad, and those who don’t even know where to begin. The Internet savvy dealers are fully engaging in social media marketing as an incremental strategy to build their business.   As an alternative to traditional advertising, social media is uniquely valuable to auto dealers.

Social Media Marketing is definitely not a fad.

There’s quite a bit of data that clearly shows the fantastic growth of this new communication medium. Compare these growth rates to reach 50 million users:

• Radio – 38 years
• TV – 13 years
• Internet – 4 years
• iPod – 3 years
• Facebook had 100 million users in just 9 months!

Social media is a unique venue to build a measure of trust between your dealership and customers. No longer restricted to the larger companies with vast budgets, social media is much more about brand strategy and the proper use of engagement than grandiose budgets. Social media marketing for auto dealers is a terrific tool to strengthen existing relationships with customers, while strategically building your online presence as well as generating traffic and leads. The key to success is in your messaging, if you are only out pitching “the deal of the day”, you’re not really listening. Many new car shoppers demand a more engaging shopping experience when it comes to researching new and used vehicles. These same new car buyers want to review other customer purchase experiences when determining the best dealer to do business with, and social media marketing can have an immense impact on your online reputation. Just like in real life, first impressions online are important too!

Not convinced that your dealership should integrate social media into your overall marketing strategy?

Here are a few more eye opening things to consider:

• Social networking sites have overtaken porn as the Internet’s #1 activity.
• Twitter has seen an increase of almost 1500% over the last year.
• 2 out of 3 people on the PLANET visit social networks.
• Time spent on social networks is growing at three times the overall Internet rate.
• 100 Million YouTube videos are watched every day and every minute 20 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.
• More than 5 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day and more than 1.5 million pieces of content are shared on Facebook daily.
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria.
• If YouTube were a country, it would be the third most-populated place in the world.
• 7.8 billion tweets and counting.
• 68% of Internet users have used social networks, while only 65.1% have used email.

These are some of the social media statistics that astonish many people. So don’t wait for the fad to pass, set up some online profiles in your favorite social networking application.  Many of the top social media sites are becoming their vertical portals recognized by the search engines. Most of the search engines even show relevant social media results within the search results page.  If that isn’t convincing enough to get started, then what will move you to take action today?

While many auto dealers are looking for immediate sales, any internet marketing related to social media generally takes place higher up in the sales funnel. That said, many companies do find success with special offers, one off vehicle selections, and service coupons. Many social sites include features where companies can create profiles where users can interact with the company and review products, promotions, and services.  Social media marketing as an online marketing strategy, is about building a reputation that you can grow that supports your other marketing efforts. Social media marketing is also a great way to build long term sustainable, natural growth website traffic and improved search engine rankings.

To enjoy the maximum benefits of social media marketing as part of your online marketing strategy, you need to understand how it works best for your dealership. More importantly, understanding how and when to use social media correctly will produce the highest yields for your online marketing strategy. This takes time, and is a key issue for many auto dealers who may assign social media to the Internet manager, who most likely is not a professional marketer or content writer. Without a clear understanding of social media marketing, the results often fall below dealer expectations.

Benefits Of Social Media Marketing For Auto Dealers

However, according to a recent social media survey, when social media marketing for auto dealers is done correctly, many businesses have found that they have been able to:

• acquire more visibility for their organization,
• increase traffic to their website,
• develop new business partnerships.

What auto dealers need to do is embrace the benefits of social media as part of their overall online marketing strategy, while very carefully thinking through the goals of their marketing campaigns. Different goals will require different strategies.

While social media marketing for auto dealers is a great addition to any traditional search engine marketing campaigns don’t consider it as a sole substitute. Recognize that successful social media marketing is a process that promotes your website or dealership through social media channels.
This powerful online marketing strategy will add inbound links and increase “share of mind” with your customers resulting in additional web traffic. Social media marketing isn’t intended as a replacement for traditional marketing, but it is an important piece of the puzzle to your overall marketing strategy.

After carefully assessing whether or not social media might be the missing link in your overall marketing plans, take the next step an establish some modest goals to get started. There are plenty of resources available to savvy Internet dealers that are looking to expand their brands into the social media arena. Get started today, it’s a great investment in your online presence.

At CliqScout, search engine marketing is our specialty, with an emphasis on search engine optimization and paid search marketing. We provide many other online services that compliment a powerful web search engine optimization strategy including key metrics for web performance analysis, copywriting development, keyword development, and pay per click optimization.

Synergistic SEO isn’t easy. But in our opinion, it’s essential; your search engine marketing initiative should always integrate with your overall marketing mix. We do it every day for our clients and ourselves. We’d be happy to do it for you as well.

How would you like CliqScout to grow your business today?

• I want to convert my website traffic into more sales…
• I want more return on my pay per click investment(ROI)…
• I want search listings on the first page for my keywords…

Our Professional Search Marketing Services
Because your search engine marketing goals, experience, and needs will always vary from our other clients, our first step will be to understand your needs in greater detail. We employ several different tools to give us a holistic and detailed view of not just your traffic or website needs, but more importantly your overall marketing mix and how SEO or pay per click marketing can enhance it. Here are some proven successful examples that provide more information on improving your web performance.

Common Client Search Engine Marketing Strategies
1. Keyword Term Development and Analysis

CliqScout provides you with a thought provoking keyword development tool to start. Once you return this list of keyword terms back to us, we will do in depth market research to determine the hundreds-to-thousands of keyword terms your target audience searches to find companies like yours. We will analyze these terms to find those with the best ranking potential and traffic volume for your targeted niche. Once we’ve compiled our master list of recommended keyword terms to target, we will provide you the list so you can provide any feedback necessary. This often triggers more deep digging research on a few choice targeted keywords.

2. Competitive Analysis

Ever wonder how your website stacks up to your competition or the “big guys”? We can show you with our competitive web performance analysis. See your strengths and weaknesses through the eyes of search engines, and use the results to formulate a stronger search engine marketing strategy.

3. Content Optimization

Content is the primary key to any successful search engine marketing campaign. One of the primary content areas that we will target is existing website optimization, this includes visible content and source code. We will analyze your site code for errors that may prevent search engines from properly spidering your site. We will also analyze your site’s code-to-text ratio and other coding elements. Based on completed keyword development, we create optimized pages to support the keyword results. Lastly, we will review and edit your visible content for optimal keyword density while maintaining search engine optimization effectiveness.

4. Tracking and Analysis

You will receive detailed reports on your rankings across the major search engines, as well as site traffic and visitor behavior (we can only provide site and visitor data if you provide us access to your own statistics program). We can also provide web quality audits to ensure that your web performance is at the superior level you expect.

5. Pay Per Click Search Marketing Optimization

CliqScout knows that paid search can get wildly expensive quickly. Our goal is to optimize your existing accounts (or create new ones) based on ROI. The “set it and forget it” approach does not work well in the rapidly changing pay per click arena. We focus on the right keywords, the right markets, with the right ad messages to maximize your ROI.

CliqScout prices all search engine marketing services on a per-client basis. Pricing is based on the amount of hours you wish us to dedicate to your project each week, as well as which strategies you’d like us to implement. However, we are more than happy to work with your budget and can accommodate a variety of pricing models, including: hourly, per-project, weekly salary with a cap on hours, etc.

Our Guarantee: We cannot guarantee a certain number of rankings or that particular keywords will get ranked with particular search engines. There are simply too many variables and uncontrollable influences to consider, and anyone guaranteeing such should be avoided at all costs. However, we do guarantee the quality of our work.

The CliqScout focus is to generate quality converting traffic to your site. Choose from any variety of our services to create your recipe for success – or to learn more about how you can grow your business, contact us.