As far as SEO content on your website, the holidays aren’t any different than any other time of the year. Regardless of the time, you still want your site to rank high on Google so that it is among the first results as your prospective consumers perform a search query.
During the holidays, though, dealership’s tend to focus on customer reviews. As good customer reviews are likely to bring in new customers, there isn’t a better time to buy a new car than Christmas? As the Lexus commercials advertise, ‘Making this a Christmas to remember’. Everyone recalls commercials every year about someone getting a brand-new Lexus for Christmas.
Some of the best ways to maximize your holiday sales marketing strategies are to focus on the digital reviews of customers. Below are some the best ways that you can do that.
- When responding to a customer review, do not use a generic template. This might appear cold and insincere to your consumer. Take the time to send out personalized responses to customers, regardless if they are negative or positive reviews. This lets the customers know that you take their reviews seriously and hope to do all you can to make their next experience at your dealership a pleasant one.
- On the rare occasion that your dealership receives a negative review, you want to get it out of the public eye as quickly as possible. This does not mean deleting it, simply because it doesn’t bode well with your rankings. Instead, you can send the reviewer a personalized email asking what you can do to make things right. By doing everything in your power to de-escalate the negative review, many times customers will go in and retract the negative review and replace it with something positive.
- Use customer reviews as a way to improve the way the dealership operates. If business has been slow, check online reviews to find out what is going on with your consumers and if there is anything that you can do to help.
- As always, check the content on your website to maintain your ranking on Google. Is content getting stale? It might be time to enlist the assistance of a professional content writer to enable better rankings for your website.
How Social Media Can Help Your Marketing Strategy
The use of Facebook or any other social media sites to market your dealership is an excellent way to showcase your inventory. By sending a very compelling message of your marketing strategy, Facebook can target customers, who have already shown an interest in your dealership.
The use of energetic advertising techniques is certain to promote your current inventory. With the use of a ‘carousel ad unit’ which significantly displays ads in the news feed on each Facebook user’s page, linking them directly to your vehicle inventory page and your website.
It might also be worthwhile to look into video advertisements within the various social media networks. These ads give a tremendous boost to the visibility of older models you are trying to move out and replace with newer models. By showcasing these video ads on social media, viewers might find vehicles that they are interested in, that they otherwise might not have known about.
Social media and Facebook have a way of increasing the conquest of competitive efforts. You can create a “Lookalike Audience” to target shoppers and increase your reach to spread your marketing message to those who have visited your site before and are now looking to buy in a new competitive market.
You can also use the carousel ad unit and image ads to promote your company’s fixed operational and incentive programs that are made available to your customers.
You can customize a Facebook marketing strategy for the holidays as well as other custom events throughout the year. Facebook will give your advertising and marketing campaigns a fresh boost of newly energized and interesting visibility to all the customers, old and new, who visit your website.
Five Ways Digital Retailing Can Future-Proof Your Business
New technologies such as digital retailing are changing the process of buying, selling and ownership of vehicles.
Regardless of whether your dealership is a large auto group, a single-point franchise, or an independently-owned used car business, the auto industry is quickly growing into an industry in which it can connect to modern technologies and operating philosophies it represents. Now is the time to update your marketing strategies in order to be ahead of the digital retailing ‘game’.
The time is now, for you to ensure all marketing strategies are out there, ahead of others and prepared for the changes in the market. Here are ways you can be prepared:
- Work on deals, not leads. Many customers prefer to do their research online, prior to arriving at the dealership. With their research in hand, they’re ready to make their deals. If you offer incentives to come in the store to do their research and show ways to elevate and save time during the car buying experience,
- Move past ‘desking’ to meet guests where they are, when they are in the process of buying a new car. Have you ever watched your clients in the showroom as one of your sales agents leaves them alone to go back to their desk? They immediately start texting to a friend or relative, who is giving them advice about ‘someone they know’ who can check out the information your sales rep just gave them. It creates an element of doubt in the client’s mind when the salesperson leaves them, for any length of time. Make the car buying experience more connected, by allowing the person to ‘self-pencil’ and make their own decisions.
- Seamlessly introduce shoppers to protection products. Have the customer view videos and take surveys regarding the protection products that are available to them. By doing this, you are making the customer less tense during their long wait in the showroom, and you are learning what is important to your customers.
- Create an efficient operation. Digital retailing allows you to free up human capital to focus on what’s important – the building of relationships selling cars. Having an efficient operation is to have staff focus on what really makes money and that is the customers.
- Make your dealership a fun place to work. Digital retailing can have positive effects on both the customer and your team members. Empowering team members to work in an environment that is fun and rewarding will keep them at your dealership for years to come. What is more fun than the satisfaction one gets out of a successful deal and happy customer? With digital retailing, you will have both happy team members and customers.
Resources: Dealer.com
