Automotive Marketing | Automotive SEO | CliqScout Search Marketing

Are you satisfied with your social media efforts?

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?

The Impact Of Real Time Search Results In Automotive Social Media Marketing
Real time search results now featured in Google and Bing increases the significance of your social media initiatives in Twitter and Facebook. Now that the top search engines incorporate relevant tweets and posts in search results, it is increasingly crucial for you to participate in these online conversations by adding value for your fans and followers. Actively being involved in social media marketing expands your influence with potential customers to engage with your dealership now and in the future.

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?

IDENTIFYING A WEBSITE’S TARGET MARKET

Whether you’re launching a simple website or a large e-commerce website, identifying a website’s target market from the start is an important step in business planning. Successful websites put their effort into reaching a very specific target market, sometimes without even realizing it. A webmaster can increase their chances of success by identifying their website’s target market before jumping into any marketing tactics or online advertising to increase traffic and monetize their websites.

What is a Target Market?

A target market is the main audience or group of visitors (or buyers) that a webmaster or online business owner wants to visit their website. A target market can, and should, be identified and described in detail before launching a website. This is to help tailor the site’s Internet marketing plan and marketing tactics around that target group to maximize the return on investment (ROI), which basically means getting the most for your time and money.

A target market is described by its demographic and or psychographic profile. Demographics and psychographics include many personal and social details, such as:

1. Age groups
2. Genders
3. Nationalities or ethnicities
4. Income levels
5. Marital status
6. Education levels
7. Location
8. Whether or not they have children
9. Social or professional groupings (job, industry, social class, etc.)
10. Interests (could be a hobby, musical preference, favorite sport, etc.)

When choosing or identifying a website’s target market, there are a few things to keep in mind:

1. The size of the target market.
2. Whether the target market is growing or shrinking.
3. Whether or not there’s a demand for the website or online business in the particular target market.
4. Whether or not is would be easy to monetize the target market. (For example, you wouldn’t sell high-end electronics to a low-income target market, and you wouldn’t run a content site exclusively on ad revenues if your target market is traditionally “ad blind.”)
5. Things that influence members of the target market. (For example, would they be more responsive to paid advertising on other websites, or would they be influenced more by a referral from a friend, whereas a focus on viral marketing would be best?)

After identifying a website’s target market, specific marketing tactics can be modeled around their influences and behaviors, saving time and money when marketing a website or online business.

On-page optimization play an extremely important role in a website’s success. Thoughtful business web site design and well written content provide better website ROI and increased website traffic. Your websites’ objectives needs to serve your business. Your website is an extension of your business and must support your business objectives.

Evaluate a good business web site design by looking at:

* How do they make their money?
* Who is their target audience?
* What do they want the website to accomplish?
* How can the web be used to help automate their business?

Anybody looking to develop better website roi with a business web site design needs to look at this. Too many business sites are very poorly thought out and under-utilized. A good website is a lot more than good design. A good design and some content means only that a website is acting as a glorified brochure. However, beyond design, you can look at how the site will achieve increased website traffic an better website ROI.

If the majority of your business is web-based, it is much more important to identify the website objectives and how great business web site design relates to the overall business. A web-based business is going to want to be well-designed so that it does not confuse people and attracts the customers’ eyes to a clear “call-to-action” which make the business  money.

These “calls to action” become critically important to the design and to website conversions. A successful business web site design can be monitored and measured for increased website traffic.

A well crafted business web site design includes website metrics that support the core metrics of the overall business.
We’re also going to want to discuss how the web can be used to promote. A business which is not web-based would want to consider what they can provide on the web to extend their business.
Traditional brick-and-mortar businesses may have a storefront or may need to deal with clients in person, but what can they do on the web to extend their reach?

After identifying a website’s target design objectives, specific business web site design can be created around user behaviors, saving time and money when marketing a website or online business.

How To Use Twitter In The Quick Service Lane
A Honda dealership was having trouble notifying customers about the quick service lane wait times. Sometimes the quick service lane was completely open and other times it would back up rather quickly. The dealer thought about using email to notify the customers with appointments, but that would not be as responsive of a solution as using the real time capabilities of social media.
The recommendation was to use their Twitter account to post current wait times in the quick service lane. A couple of times a day the service manager tweets the wait status. This was also another way for the dealership to grow their customer base that was following them on Twitter. Another concern from the dealer was how to handle notifications to those service customers without social media access. The solution was to add a Twitter widget to the dealer website home page and the Twitter feed into the dealership’s Facebook account. This greatly increases the reach of their message while making it more accessible.
A side bonus to this arrangement was to generate business when the quick service lane slowed down. The dealer now is able to post service specials from their Twitter account that offer unique specials such as $19.95 oil changes from 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM for one day only.