Marketing professionals share strategies for expanding their dealerships’ digital footprints.
Marketing is one of the most fraught line items on a company’s budget. How much to spend? Where to spend it? How much revenue will it bring in? While traditional advertising venues like print, radio, and television will always have their place, they’re increasingly expensive and hard to target in today’s fragmented media market. That’s why today’s dealerships are investing more in digital marketing than ever before.
Gone are the days when just having a website was enough to stake your company’s claim on the internet. Modern digital marketing is a multipronged approach that may include social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, paid search results, and content generation ranging from simple blog posts to YouTube videos and downloadable ebooks. We talked to marketing experts at several dealerships and organizations that support the dealer channel to get their insights into what’s working !in the ever-changing world of digital marketing.
Demonstrate Your Expertise
Google hit the scene in 2000, and within two years, it had supplanted Yahoo! as the top online search engine. In the 18 years since, Google has never vacated the top spot, meaning that if your company’s site doesn’t rank highly on Google’s search results, it might as well not exist. But Google doesn’t make it easy for you. The way it calculates page rank, or your site’s usefulness to the user searching Google for a particular keyword, changes all the time.
Scot Olson, director of marketing at Les Olson Company, reshaped his company’s content strategy to adapt to the latest way Google ranks pages.
“You always have to stay up on trends on what Google is doing,” he explained. “It used to be that you’d load your site with long-tail key phrases, but now Google wants you to be an authority. They’re really looking more at how much information you have on a particular subject, so that’s how we’re developing our site. We want to have downloadable white papers and videos that explain things so Google looks at us as an authority, and we can up our organic traffic that way.”
“If somebody goes into Google and types in ‘managed print services near me,’ we want to show up,” added Heather Trone, marketing manager at Fraser Advanced Information Systems. “We want them to find those answers on our website. Because if they can’t find it on our website, they’re going to find it on another website.”
Customize Your Content
While nearly everyone who uses social media these days has more than one account, they aren’t using it for the same content everywhere. Many companies we spoke to found LinkedIn to be the best platform for information-dense content. Human interest stories and other light content is better suited to more casual social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
And don’t forget about Instagram and YouTube. While photography and video production can be more resource-intensive, the visual format offers unique potential for grabbing an audience that will not only view your content but also share it with others. The key is to make valuable, informative content, and to be strategic with how you present it.
“What’s changed about our strategy is it’s not really just for our website anymore,” said Karlee Ricks, chief marketing officer of Impact Networking. “You really have to look at SEO [search engine optimization] across the board. How are you using those keywords not just on your website, but also on your YouTube channel with video, and across social media, and in searches, for example, on Google Business or Yelp? We’ve seen a ton of success implementing SEO in our video strategy. Our YouTube searches have gone up 71% from a month-to-month standpoint just from being specific and strategic in our video titles and content.”
The first step of a successful SEO strategy is choosing which keywords your company wants to take ownership of, like “managed print services [your location],” but remember that people don’t just use keywords on Google. Social media sites all have search boxes, and on YouTube, that’s actually one of the primary ways users find new content. Consistently using the same key phrases across all platforms will help your company’s content rise to the top.
A unified, multifaceted strategy is paramount. Brands that are successful in the digital marketing space put forward a consistent brand voice across all online platforms, as well as in their traditional advertising materials and face-to-face interactions. Aaron Dyck, senior vice president of marketing at Clover Imaging Group, oversees his own company’s digital marketing and those of Clover’s many clients.
“It’s not just about making a couple of posts,” he said. “It has to be an adoption from the top down within the organization to want to build on top of what we’re creating, to continually dig into their local networks and their customers, and share that on social with a relevant message to their customers that amplifies their brand.”
The more your company does online, the more you’ll see the efforts you make snowball. It’s easier to surface a piece of content for a user who has already enjoyed some of your previous content. And being on more platforms creates more opportunities for cross-promotion.
“The nice thing is if we’re going to write a blog article, why not have a social media component to that blog article?” said Olson. “All the pieces kind of start to fit together. What you do for one side of marketing tends to mesh well to other sides that you’re doing.”
Don’t Do it Alone
No one can master the complexities of digital marketing on their own, especially since it’s always changing. Help is out there for companies of every size and budget. Many of the companies we spoke to use social media consulting firms or hire freelance content writers to help them generate SEO-friendly blog posts and other media. There is also a wide variety of software solutions to assist with everything from content scheduling to analytics.
“From a global perspective, everything we do is SEO optimized,” said Dyck. “We run three or four different software stacks to ensure that what we’re putting out from a content perspective is going to get ranked on the first page of search. Then, we take every single piece of content—whether it’s a landing page, a web page, a blog, an article—and optimize all of the content for our partners.”
Fraser’s Trone swears by HubSpot, a software suite designed to automate blog and social media posts, as well as tracking views those posts get.
“What HubSpot does is, if somebody comes onto your website and fills out a form or contacts you, then when they place their information into your web contact form, they become a subscriber of your content,” said Trone. “Once they’re in HubSpot, if they visit your website, you know. You know what pages they’re on, you know what they’re looking for. Even if they don’t call you up and say ‘I’m looking for managed print,’ if you see that they’ve read six managed print blog posts, you can make the assumption that they’re looking for managed print services and get the ball rolling.”
Reap the Rewards
Ask anyone working in sales: Today’s customers are more informed than ever, no matter what they’re shopping for. Positioning your company online as a trusted source of information, where individuals can research industry trends and find solutions to problems, is better for building brand awareness than any billboard ad or television commercial.
“When people contact us through our website, 85% of the time they’re usually ready to buy,” said Trone. “It’s not really a sale at that point, it’s more, ‘What kind of machine are you looking for?’ They know. It’s a matter of generating a proposal and pricing. They close pretty fast.”
Digital communication is a two-way street, which means that when you post a call to action, asking a user to fill out a form or download an asset, you get instant feedback on who responded and what content prompted them to do it. This continuous feed of information makes for a marketing strategy that’s more agile and efficient.
“If we see things that are working for paid search, we’re working to make those changes instantly,” said Impact Networking’s Ricks. “Or maybe there are things that aren’t working, and people aren’t searching for those keywords, at least now we’re getting a little bit of data. We’re not just waiting twelve months to be like, ‘Oh, that keyword didn’t work!’”
The key is to make use of that agility and never stop watching trends and trying new things. Whatever makes the most sense for your company, whether that’s a weekly blog post or a multiplatform media campaign, the key is to know what questions your customers are asking and have the best answers to where they can find it. And once they’re listening, keep talking.
“It’s a moving target,” said Clover’s Dyck. “There are always new things you can do.”
Olson agrees, “Branding doesn’t stop… ever.”
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