Retail Blogging - Car Dealers
If Business Blogging is going to work, local blog consultants like Durbin Media Group have to bring their knowledge of online communities to local retail businesses. Local retailers use a comprehensive multichannel marketing strategy refined over decades to bring customers in to local storefronts to make on-the-spot decisions.
Get them to sign on the line that is dotted. That is the nature of retail sales. Salesman on the floor are taught to close today, right now, or the customer leaves your store to purchase elsewhere.
Of this fierce breed, car dealers are the best. Car dealers are the best natural marketers on the planet, and when then start using blogs to bring in customers, every marketer is going to follow suit.
Car Dealers spend thousands of dollars each week in a mix of media communications from radio, television, newspaper, trade publications, and now, the internet. Consumers are researching prices and options online, but when it comes to car purchases, there's almost always a middleman in the form of a dealership or a broker.
So how would a car dealer go about using a blog to connect to customers? Can the owner start writing about best deals/best prices/best cars/crazy savings?
No. The exisiting mediums already provide that avenue of "branding." What is needed is a dealer blog that builds a community of readership around their product.
Something like this, like BMW has done. Or perhaps the same treatment Infiniti is running in the Wall Street Journal. Luxury car brands are certainly a good market, because luxury car owners love to write about their cars. But what about a dealer? Dealers sell many brands, and many types of vehicles. They need something more than a flashy picture and a few lines of comment.
So here you go. My top three ideas for car dealers to use blogs to market their cars:
1) Showcase your people. Dealers can help their images by putting stories up about long-time employees on blog sites. Blogs put a human side of the face on companies, and dealers who have the employees to feature will have an advantage in the marketplace over dealers who just show pictures of cars. New technologies like webcams allow you to post videos, snapshots, audiocasts and a whole slew of other cool tools that let the public know your dealership is staffed by real people with families, lives, and a sense of humor.
2) Give secrets on the proper way to buy cars. No, that doesn't mean expose your entire selling process to the public and your competitors, but some of the most egregious abuses that customers are warned about are things you should talk about. If your dealership doesn't do it, you ought to be offering this up to the public. People search the internet for information on how to get the best deal. They aren't afraid of spending money, but no one wants to get taken advantage of. if you're honest and forthright about the biggest mistakes that your customers make, you're building a reputation for honesty that will mushroom.
3) Used Car Reverse Auction: When a dealer purchases a used car, they fix it up and put it on the lot. Every day that car sits on the lot costs the dealer money - say, $75 a day. Every car dealer knows exactly how much it costs them to have that car out there. The price on these cars is changed, usually once a week, dropping until the car is sold or until the dealer tries to wholesale the car to recoup some investment.
So why not take the car that has been on the lot the longest, put it on a blog, and create a reverse clock that counts down how much the car will cost if purchased? No gimmicks, no tricks, just a way to have one car that will probably never sell on its own counting down until someone buys it, maybe for as low as a $1.
A competition like this would cost too much to put out on the television or radio, and explaining it in newspaper would cost too much. But how about a blog? If a dealer had an audience reading the blog, this promotion would be one of a kind in driving traffic to the dealership - and getting customers on the lot is Job One.
Overall, you need to be as transparent and honest as possible. A car dealer without comments on their site is going to get a lot of negative publicity. Leaving comments on gives you the opportunity to respond to complaints, which will at least give you the opportunity to respond.
And the point is bloggers are already out there talking about your dealerships. Some of them have large readerships and can trash your name in the search engines with relatively little hassle. By building a relationship with the online community now, dealers can give themself a voice in internet world. In doing so, they will give themselves the opportunity to sell more cars.
Get them to sign on the line that is dotted. That is the nature of retail sales. Salesman on the floor are taught to close today, right now, or the customer leaves your store to purchase elsewhere.
Of this fierce breed, car dealers are the best. Car dealers are the best natural marketers on the planet, and when then start using blogs to bring in customers, every marketer is going to follow suit.
Car Dealers spend thousands of dollars each week in a mix of media communications from radio, television, newspaper, trade publications, and now, the internet. Consumers are researching prices and options online, but when it comes to car purchases, there's almost always a middleman in the form of a dealership or a broker.
So how would a car dealer go about using a blog to connect to customers? Can the owner start writing about best deals/best prices/best cars/crazy savings?
No. The exisiting mediums already provide that avenue of "branding." What is needed is a dealer blog that builds a community of readership around their product.
Something like this, like BMW has done. Or perhaps the same treatment Infiniti is running in the Wall Street Journal. Luxury car brands are certainly a good market, because luxury car owners love to write about their cars. But what about a dealer? Dealers sell many brands, and many types of vehicles. They need something more than a flashy picture and a few lines of comment.
So here you go. My top three ideas for car dealers to use blogs to market their cars:
1) Showcase your people. Dealers can help their images by putting stories up about long-time employees on blog sites. Blogs put a human side of the face on companies, and dealers who have the employees to feature will have an advantage in the marketplace over dealers who just show pictures of cars. New technologies like webcams allow you to post videos, snapshots, audiocasts and a whole slew of other cool tools that let the public know your dealership is staffed by real people with families, lives, and a sense of humor.
2) Give secrets on the proper way to buy cars. No, that doesn't mean expose your entire selling process to the public and your competitors, but some of the most egregious abuses that customers are warned about are things you should talk about. If your dealership doesn't do it, you ought to be offering this up to the public. People search the internet for information on how to get the best deal. They aren't afraid of spending money, but no one wants to get taken advantage of. if you're honest and forthright about the biggest mistakes that your customers make, you're building a reputation for honesty that will mushroom.
3) Used Car Reverse Auction: When a dealer purchases a used car, they fix it up and put it on the lot. Every day that car sits on the lot costs the dealer money - say, $75 a day. Every car dealer knows exactly how much it costs them to have that car out there. The price on these cars is changed, usually once a week, dropping until the car is sold or until the dealer tries to wholesale the car to recoup some investment.
So why not take the car that has been on the lot the longest, put it on a blog, and create a reverse clock that counts down how much the car will cost if purchased? No gimmicks, no tricks, just a way to have one car that will probably never sell on its own counting down until someone buys it, maybe for as low as a $1.
A competition like this would cost too much to put out on the television or radio, and explaining it in newspaper would cost too much. But how about a blog? If a dealer had an audience reading the blog, this promotion would be one of a kind in driving traffic to the dealership - and getting customers on the lot is Job One.
Overall, you need to be as transparent and honest as possible. A car dealer without comments on their site is going to get a lot of negative publicity. Leaving comments on gives you the opportunity to respond to complaints, which will at least give you the opportunity to respond.
And the point is bloggers are already out there talking about your dealerships. Some of them have large readerships and can trash your name in the search engines with relatively little hassle. By building a relationship with the online community now, dealers can give themself a voice in internet world. In doing so, they will give themselves the opportunity to sell more cars.
posted by franki durbin @ 10:51 AM PERMALINK
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