Tips To Optimize Your Dealership’s Social Media Marketing Strategy

By Author: Nate Rodney
Total Articles: 499
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Social media platforms are now becoming an important avenue for auto dealerships to generate ROI and good-will. According to a report given by Wildfire Interactive in 2011, 88% of marketers agreed that social marketing increases brand awareness, 85% agreed that it will increase engagement and 58% agreed that it will increase sales/partnerships.

Social media marketing plays a crucial role in an auto dealer's digital marketing strategy. Therefore, auto dealers should optimize it in the right way to get better results. Here are a few tips that will help you optimize your dealership's social media marketing strategy.

Clear Strategy
Social media marketing can improve the performance of your business, provided that you have a well-structured strategy that aligns with your business objective. In order to create a clear strategy you must first define your goals and decide how you want to benefit from social media marketing. Do you want to increase your reputation, influence, credibility, sales, traffic/page views, etc.? This will help you select the right tactics to achieve your desired results.

Network ...
... of Relevant Audience
As an auto dealership, you have a niche audience potentially interested in your product. To leverage that audience you must know to whom your product appeals to and build a network around them. Post your ads in the social profiles of those whose interests match with that of your product/service, so that the chances those people will follow you are high. Customize your social networking page to the needs of your audience accordingly. The greater your reach is and the more relevant you are to your audience, the more influential you will be on social media sites.

Schedule your Posts and Content
Posting the right content at the right time is a very crucial aspect of social media marketing. That is why it is important to schedule your posts and content about offers, deals or new services when you believe users are more likely to interact with them – for example, posting content around seasonal discounts. By updating your profile regularly with the latest offers and discounts you can make it livelier. Also, you can track what offers your followers are turning into sales and what offers your followers are responding to the least.

Engaging Content and Attractive Pictures
The content on your business’ social network page should be significant. It should be able to engage the attention of your audience. The more you do so, the more it spreads on the Internet. Don't try to push commercial content on social media sites. Understand your audience and create content that compliments your business, while also concentrating on giving users a good experience. One way of doing this is by posting attractive pictures and videos of your auto brands, updating your content periodically and even posting personal content about your business – pictures of your team, corporate functions, etc.

Constantly Stay Active
The very motive of social networking is to build communication between you and your customers as much as possible. In order to build a rapport with your audience, you should be more participative. Engage in chatting live with your audience. Let them present their perspectives. Give instant replies for the queries/feedback posted by them – this makes your followers feel valued and thus, generates a positive impression on your business.

Interact More with Influencers
Not all of your followers are influencers of your business – many of them may like your business, but are less interested in promoting it to others. But influencers on the other hand can help you in viral promotion of your content, helping the message spread faster and further. This will also increase your reach to a wider audience.

Easily Shareable Content
As we pointed out earlier, content plays a significant role in social media marketing. It should be easy to share content with audiences on social networking websites as well as multiple networking sites. To do this you should use widgets and badges that make sharing content more effective. These buttons will help the user share information about your business on social networking sites, from any other site. This is an easy and fast way to promote your content.

Measure the Strategy
Finally, you should quantify the outcome of your social networking strategy. This involves measuring the percentage of your audience that shared your information, number of favorable responses, percentage of your followers converted into sales, percentage of viral promoters, increasing rate of followers, deals/offers getting promoted the most, etc.

Regularly measuring your strategy’s results can signify the strengths, weaknesses and concerns in the strategy. Using this information, you can then modify your strategy further.

Social media marketing, if not optimized properly, will not fetch you any kind of positive results. It is a full-time job to make the most of it and should have significant budget, resources and time allotted to it. If you lack these things, it is better to approach a reliable online marketing company for your social media marketing needs.

Search Optics, Inc. is a leader in digital marketing solutions for the automotive industry. Search Optics interactive marketing services include custom websites, search engine optimization, paid search and mobile solutions that generate leads which result in sales opportunities. Search Optics specializes in automotive digital marketing and automotive marketing services.