Turn shoppers into buyers
Having a social media strategy and active social platforms is a proven, essential way to reach your customers while gaining valuable insights and growing your brand through engagement. It can also serve to increase the trust factor for your business. It will create brand awareness opportunities that lead to attracting new customers, customer loyalty, drive traffic and sales, which can even effectively help you fill open positions within your organization.
Social media channels are a top of the funnel engagement tactic where you can collect insights about your target markets. While it seems the most prudent to continually serve consumers ads, instead try providing valuable content in a mix including education, information (think service tips), showcase vehicles, products, get them excited about your vehicles and the services your dealership provides. This is your opportunity to share quality content, promote visual content, answer general inquiries, build resources, take part in discussions, and become part of the social community.
If you are not utilizing social media channels for business, you may be missing opportunities for effective ways to reach prospective customers. Some of the primary benefits where you should set goals and objectives include increasing brand awareness, making your brand relatable, staying top of mind for customers and prospects alike, lead generation, targeted marketing, and more.
Choose the right platforms
Where you place your brand is very important. Consider your target audience, their demographics, how consumers use the platform, and select social media engagement that is aligned. This will ensure that you are reaching the right prospects with the right messages at the right time. The varied social platforms all have a wide range of customer demographics and engagement options to choose from. You do not have to be everywhere, one every platform, at once. You can test which platforms give you the best return and focus your efforts accordingly.
Facebook is still the largest social media platform. TikTok is the fastest growing social media channel (in 2022), followed by Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Hyper-targeted campaigns on social media can help you attract, convert, and retain more customers. Your dealership can become an influencer and advocate to advance your brand.
Setting social media goals
Think about what you want to achieve through the social media channels and set goals based on these metrics. Make them measurable goals. Set monthly key performance indicators (KPIs) for generating traffic to the website, inquiries, appointments, test drive requests, and automotive purchases.
Your goals starting out should focus on brand awareness, brand engagement, acquiring new customers, and retaining existing customers. Metrics to initially concentrate on include reach, engagement, and increased customer satisfaction.
Experiment with different content types
Social platforms have nuances for different types of content. For example, Instagram is highly visual so use great images; Tik-Tok is known for video; Facebook is informational with longer text, images, and video content. You will need to experiment with different types of content on these channels including service tips, vehicle performance information, contests, special deals, and your walk-around videos.
Always use appealing images, photographs, and video. Stay clear of content that is political, not politically correct, or disparaging to any prospective customers. A brand can be ruined by inappropriate posts.
Make use of social platforms’ unique features
Each social platform has its own features. Take advantage of these features and create content specific to each platform where possible. Repurposing content can be effective as well and incorporated into the mix. You want to drive conversions to buy, always include a link to get them there quickly whether it’s directed to sales or service. All the mainstream social platforms have powerful filtering tools that will let you leverage multiple variables to make sure you are reaching your target audience.
Get personal where possible
Build up your reviews and testimonials. Utilize user-generated content including reviews, testimonials, endorsements, customer pictures, customer videos. You can collect user-generated content by creating a designated hashtag where your customers can share their experiences, send pictures, videos after they have made a purchase. Then you can repurpose it across your channels to help build credibility, confidence, and stand out. If customers send you pictures or videos, if they have not implied consent to use them, ask them to sign a consent form.
Plan | Analyze | Benefit
Use a social media planning tool to coordinate your efforts. This will drive efficiencies regarding time and money, and track in real time the volume and performance of posts. Create a schedule. The best time to schedule posts is early morning on weekdays so that when your audience checks their channels after waking up your content is one of the top pieces of content that they will see. Post several times a week, at least three times per week, but no more than once per day. You do not have to post to all the channels on the same days, test different techniques. Keep your content positive and make sure your call to actions (CTAs) are clear and easy to access.
Analyze the data and measure the effectiveness of posts, track website visits, requests for information, appointments that have been earned, and sale conversions. Keep track of content that performs best and give your audience more of what they are likely to engage with. Collect your leads and add to your social strategy by using email. Remember to promote your social channels within email or print offers.
It’s time to get going!
Establish your business social media channels and then promote these pages to people you know, employees, vendors, customers. Start to collect content that you can leverage including videos, a catalog of images, library of informational material you can repost. Create original content and leverage OEM content that is licensed to you and applicable to each channel. Establish and use hashtags. Measure the effectiveness of posts and boost posts (paid media) that are high performing. You could opt for a paid versus organic social media strategy, but ads aren’t always the answer, and you may find it most advantageous to integrate both into your plan.
Connect with Brandie Linfante today at blinfante@sautomotive.com or on LinkedIn to learn more about how your dealership can improve its customer relationships through social media.
