Social media is like one huge party where you can find people having a great time laughing, talking, and engaging in various fun activities. It is a place where people gossip, tag each other in different posts, and follow their favorite brands. You can also find individuals asking each other for advice regarding the best businesses in town for a particular product/service.
Best part of all: everyone’s invited to join the party, including YOU. So, if your dealership isn’t yet active on social media, you are missing out greatly on a fun party and loads of opportunities to attract prospects. Almost everyone uses social media nowadays. Even if you don’t have an account, chances are people are already talking about you.
This is what makes it imperative to have a prominent presence on social media. Recent studies have also revealed that SMM plays an important role in helping your website rank better on the local SERPs of Google. It is a crucial ranking factor, which enables you to receive positive/negative feedback on your business process.
Importance of SMM for Dealerships
Happening Marketing Tool
There’s no doubt that social media platforms have brought a significant change in how individuals are communicating online. Almost everyone uses social media and has at least one user account on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. For this reason, SMM proves to be an important tool for dealerships that want to gain recognition in the marketplace. You get to market your products/services to a huge audience in a friendly and engaging tone. This sets a good impression for your dealer, while allowing you to spread the word about new deals, discounts, and specials easily.
Builds Reputation
Automotive dealers gain the capability of improving their brand reputation by establishing a prominent presence on social platforms. By targeting vehicle buyers in your local area, you can help boost sales and conversions. Creating a personalized profile for your brand increases opportunities to interact with prospective customers. Anyone wanting to learn more about you can simply post on your wall. Car dealerships can even share promotional information like service details, offers, and photos to increase visibility, response, and interaction. All of this is crucial for ranking better on Google.
Two-Way Communication
Social media is the ultimate platform for communication that focuses on promoting engagement and interaction between different users and business pages. Information sharing is also a fundamental theme of social media. This enables dealers to communicate directly with customers and vice versa. Consumers can give reviews and dealers can respond instantly. Feedback received helps in improving a dealership business’ performance and service. This is purely a win-win situation for both: car dealerships and consumers. Existing customers can also help in spreading positive information regarding your brand, presenting you more conversion opportunities.
Promotes Your Content
Since the core of any effective digital marketing strategy is your content, social media presents to you a platform for distributing your posts. By sharing your content across various platforms, you can make sure it’s ready by the right people. This not only increases your credibility among the target audience, but it also enables you to attract new customers that are likely to connect with your content and visit your website to purchase a certain product/service. Key tips for promoting content via social media includes posting each piece twice within the first day of publishing, twice within the first week, and twice within the first month.
Reach New Audiences
As mentioned earlier, social media is like one huge party. As we all know, parties are a great place for meeting and connecting with new people. This is exactly what SMM can help you achieve. By sharing your content with a large audience, you can put your dealership out there and gain an increase in exposure and leads by reaching new people who have never interacted with your brand before. SMM even allows you to select the people who may want to see your ads. For instance, if you’re adding a new selection of Kia vehicles, you can craft a Facebook ad targeted towards people in your area planning to buy a new Kia ride.
How to Use Different SM Platforms for Dealership Marketing
Facebook Ads for Driving Website Traffic
Facebook is now offering businesses a new “ad” feature that enables them to display targeted advertisements to customers who may be interested in buying a certain product/ service. Use Facebook ads for driving large amounts of traffic to your website. One of the primary ways to do this is use carousel ads, which enable you to showcase three to five images (all with different landing page links) within a single advertisement. You can successful use this handy feature to: highlight a specific vehicle make/model, promote sales or service specials, promote an upcoming event, feature new vehicles for sale, and feature used vehicles for sale.
Report, Monitor and Schedule on Twitter Activity
You can use the marketing automation software, HubSpot for reporting, monitoring and publishing on tweets, all from one platform. This all-in-one service can save you loads of energy and time for monitoring your social media activity. The social monitoring tab enables you to create different streams for automatically pulling tweets based on your chosen criteria. There is a social publishing tab, which helps dealers to create targeted posts and schedule outreach efforts. From this one page, you can craft an engaging tweet, attach a blog post from your website, or add an image or video. This enables you to connect it to your marketing campaign.
Increase Engagement with Instagram
Instagram is probably one of the best social platforms for car dealerships to utilize in order to attract more customers and prospects. The platform enables people to share hundreds of engaging photos and videos. Dealers can easily use this to their advantage by posting attractive images from both the OEM website and the dealership lot. You can also highlight vehicle features using Instagram videos or consider displaying real-life pictures of events, service, and staff to give a personalized brand image.
So, if you want to rank better on the SERPs on Google and gain a boost in credibility and reputation, don’t hesitate on marketing your dealership on social media.
