More Reasons For Auto Dealers To Have Blogs
I had a writer ask me to come up with some reasons that automotive dealers should be using blogs to market their vehicles. These are the easy ones. Ask BlogProAutomotive - Web 2.0 is going to be big for dealers.
A. Blogs are great ways to attract attention to your website.
Twice as many people go to your website as read your advertisement in the newspaper, but where do your advertising dollars go? It’s not enough to have a site. You have to market the site, spend money on Search Engine Optimization, and provide useful information to consumers, and you have to do it quickly. A blog is quite simply the best tool available to improve the search engine ranking of your website, and it’s cheaper than paying SEO consultants to improve your site. What is the importance of Search Engines? What is the importance of having someone search for a “new blue 2007 Accord with leather interior in Dallas?” That search could take the customer to a competitor’s website or your own.
Blogs also build regular traffic to your site. A well-written blog builds a community of readers who are naturally loyal to your dealership. These are the people who are currently considering purchasing a car. Would you prefer they search on Edmunds, Ebay, or at your site? A blog emphasizes the local nature of your dealership, which helps prevent the siphoning off of your customers to auction sites.
B. A Blog is Personal:
Websites are carefully crafted to pitch a message. Today’s customers simply don’t trust what it written on a website, primarily because there is no accountability. Are you really the lowest price in town, or did you pay someone to write that? With a blog, the impression that a human being is behind the writing creates trust between the customer and the dealership. What the blogger writes, the customer can verify, either by asking questions or typing comments or sending an e-mail. Providing a human contact to the website helps the customer build a relationship prior to setting foot on your lot. If you poll your customers, one of their biggest fears is being assaulted by a bad salesperson when they come to your dealership. Giving them the option of connecting with someone prior to showing up in person prepares them to buy and makes them more comfortable, more collaborative, and less combative. Any salesperson who has seen a customer walk on the lot with a series of web printouts knows that building a relationship before you discuss price is important in gaining trust. Why not gain their trust before they ever get to your lot?
C. Blogs Improve Your Reputation
Blogging is often described as being about transparency. This doesn’t mean that you have to share your profit margins, but it does require you to open up and explain why it makes sense for customers to purchase cars from you instead of your competitors. There is an element of risk involved – namely, if your competitors are better than you are, it will show. But is that a bad thing? Blogs help you pitch your strengths and they help you identify and improve your weaknesses. They do so by forcing you to look at your dealership through the eyes of your readers. There’s no hiding your flaws, but customers don’t want you to hide you flaws. They want information, and if they don’t get it from you, they’re going to get it from someone else.
D. Your Customers Are Already Blogging About You
There are 15 million US bloggers, and they cover all ages, races, and genders. These 15 million people reach some 40% of the population regularly, talking about their lives, their customer experiences, and their purchasing behavior. If you have not already been written about in a local blog, you soon will be. What that means is you don’t have a choice in hiding information about your dealership. The names of your salespeople, your finance managers, your sales process, even the quality of the coffee in your breakroom is coming under scrutiny, and will soon be readily available to all of your customers through Google. Having a blog gives you a voice in the conversation. Having no blog usually means you don’t know what is being said about you until the customer has gone to another dealer and purchased a car.
E. This is a CopyCat Industry
If one dealer is successful with blogs, everyone else will pile on, but there is a big advantage to being an early adopter. Those who start first will reap the biggest benefits. So take $15,000 out of your marketing budget, and plow it into a blog/social media strategy. Your current agency won’t know what to do with it, so make sure you find people with examples of their work. First ones in the pool win (which means the early adopter has a huge advantage over latercomers).
If you are a automotive dealer and want to start a blog, but no one can tell you how to make money with it - contact me at info@durbinmedia.com
A. Blogs are great ways to attract attention to your website.
Twice as many people go to your website as read your advertisement in the newspaper, but where do your advertising dollars go? It’s not enough to have a site. You have to market the site, spend money on Search Engine Optimization, and provide useful information to consumers, and you have to do it quickly. A blog is quite simply the best tool available to improve the search engine ranking of your website, and it’s cheaper than paying SEO consultants to improve your site. What is the importance of Search Engines? What is the importance of having someone search for a “new blue 2007 Accord with leather interior in Dallas?” That search could take the customer to a competitor’s website or your own.
Blogs also build regular traffic to your site. A well-written blog builds a community of readers who are naturally loyal to your dealership. These are the people who are currently considering purchasing a car. Would you prefer they search on Edmunds, Ebay, or at your site? A blog emphasizes the local nature of your dealership, which helps prevent the siphoning off of your customers to auction sites.
B. A Blog is Personal:
Websites are carefully crafted to pitch a message. Today’s customers simply don’t trust what it written on a website, primarily because there is no accountability. Are you really the lowest price in town, or did you pay someone to write that? With a blog, the impression that a human being is behind the writing creates trust between the customer and the dealership. What the blogger writes, the customer can verify, either by asking questions or typing comments or sending an e-mail. Providing a human contact to the website helps the customer build a relationship prior to setting foot on your lot. If you poll your customers, one of their biggest fears is being assaulted by a bad salesperson when they come to your dealership. Giving them the option of connecting with someone prior to showing up in person prepares them to buy and makes them more comfortable, more collaborative, and less combative. Any salesperson who has seen a customer walk on the lot with a series of web printouts knows that building a relationship before you discuss price is important in gaining trust. Why not gain their trust before they ever get to your lot?
C. Blogs Improve Your Reputation
Blogging is often described as being about transparency. This doesn’t mean that you have to share your profit margins, but it does require you to open up and explain why it makes sense for customers to purchase cars from you instead of your competitors. There is an element of risk involved – namely, if your competitors are better than you are, it will show. But is that a bad thing? Blogs help you pitch your strengths and they help you identify and improve your weaknesses. They do so by forcing you to look at your dealership through the eyes of your readers. There’s no hiding your flaws, but customers don’t want you to hide you flaws. They want information, and if they don’t get it from you, they’re going to get it from someone else.
D. Your Customers Are Already Blogging About You
There are 15 million US bloggers, and they cover all ages, races, and genders. These 15 million people reach some 40% of the population regularly, talking about their lives, their customer experiences, and their purchasing behavior. If you have not already been written about in a local blog, you soon will be. What that means is you don’t have a choice in hiding information about your dealership. The names of your salespeople, your finance managers, your sales process, even the quality of the coffee in your breakroom is coming under scrutiny, and will soon be readily available to all of your customers through Google. Having a blog gives you a voice in the conversation. Having no blog usually means you don’t know what is being said about you until the customer has gone to another dealer and purchased a car.
E. This is a CopyCat Industry
If one dealer is successful with blogs, everyone else will pile on, but there is a big advantage to being an early adopter. Those who start first will reap the biggest benefits. So take $15,000 out of your marketing budget, and plow it into a blog/social media strategy. Your current agency won’t know what to do with it, so make sure you find people with examples of their work. First ones in the pool win (which means the early adopter has a huge advantage over latercomers).
If you are a automotive dealer and want to start a blog, but no one can tell you how to make money with it - contact me at info@durbinmedia.com
Labels: automotiv dealer blogs
posted by James Durbin @ 10:52 AM PERMALINK
3 Comments:
I'd like to see a blog from a car dealer where they rate the driving experience of all of their cars, as they use them. That'd be cool, but requires too much honesty.
Good thought, Geoff!
Getting someone at the dealership to do this would be a stretch but offering this as a service might be more feasible. In fact, getting dealers to blog in general is a stretch at this point. This is why full-service blogs are more appropriate right now, I think.
There are fewer than 5 dealer blogs I personally know of, each run by the dealership and focused on relational and informational marketing. While this is one effective use for auto dealer blogs, I encourage them to be used more for RSS and search marketing purposes. With this approach, blog software can be utilized for the purpose of driving traffic to the dealer site which is a far more black and white and measurable means of blog marketing. This doesn't mean that a dealer blog should be limited to just this, but I do recommend this be the foundation of a dealer blog marketing strategy.
We are in the process of rolling our our full-service blog/RSS marketing solution for auto dealers. Setting up our first client now and working on a few others. I encourage anyone interested in learning more about this to check out our blog and start getting to know us more through there.
Great post, we need more of it.
-Ryan Gerardi
I agree completely with Ryan's post. Blogs can really help auto dealers bring in more traffic, especially through search marketing. I can also see auto dealers using blogs as a way of "breaking the ice" with potential customers so that when people do decide to visit the dealership in person, they may know a name, personality, etc.
Bottom Line- Blogs provide yet another way for dealerships to better connect with customers
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