the fielder Congress and session cover today is natural case study of a social media strategy used by one of our own tier 10 marketing dealer clients this particular case the example I used is for virtual onda which is located in miami and although we do most of what you’re going to see for many of our dealers what we found is that we we like to tailor our social media strategy to suit the particular needs in the specific market of each dealer that we serve and if you’re going to approach this and do it yourself in your dealership we would suggest that you want to go ahead and research what other dealers have done to this point was work really tailor it and customize it to the specifics of your dealership so couple of things our objectives here we want to start off with identifying what are the objectives of ripple honda project this in this case what purple honda the client told us is they would like to generate traffic and leads now that’s not always necessarily going to be the prime objective social media marketing in this case that’s what broke lahontan requested we wanted to make sure that we were converting social media leads into sales because if those leads were characterized by never being able to close the deal but the sales people with dead state will don’t give me any more of those social media leads so these were some of the objectives are laid out welcome to our session thank you come the directors communicate with thousands of customers for free this one makes me wince a little bit because what this goes back to is many dealers will say to us I would like to use social media to deliver marketing asian messages to more people without paying the fee to do so without buying media to do and I will caution you that that could be an unintended positive outcome of your social media strategy but in my opinion if you approach it is strictly a push of data information out to customers that they’re going to recompose reject those channels that you push them as being inappropriate for that type of job in general so you really have to look at this these can be objectives but the strategies you use to deliver these objectives are going to need to be inclusive of the environment and the fact that people don’t look at social media as the right place for us to always be pitching our products you’re going to have to give them more than simply an advertising the commercial message the fourth bullet point is build a high quality customer database this right here we have found to be one of the primary benefits of a good solid social media strategies that you acquire very high quality customer data as far as who they are where they live where they work what their interests are really a lot more information that we’re used to getting from say internet sales leads reinforce the brand through the throb of social media community this being the brand being your dealership not necessarily to make random or franchise and vehicles you’re selling but the dealership brand this is probably the objective that’s best served through social media marketing strategy it’s a great way to increase the positive reputation deposit branding OSHA in the air in the market area within your customer base it’s a great place to showcase all the community outreach efforts your dealership does so the dealership supports charitable events to sponsor the Little League if you’re buying pages in the high school yearbook all the things that so many American car dealers do social media is it is a not only great place but it’s a proper place to showcase your dealerships charitable activities community outreach activities improve natural search engine results this is another one that is absolutely a home run a properly structured social media marketing program for dealership is going to dramatically increase your social medium or excuse me your search engine profile the number of listings that show up on what we call the SERP their search engine results pages because in many cases the individual accounts and profiles that you create for your dealership result in an independent listing the kids indexed by the search engines so that when somebody searches for for example in your case of BMW dealership in irvine you have many more listings that are showing up since those listings are relevant to anybody looking for a BMW dealership and Irma so it might be in the SEL benefits are one of the most tangible measurable and visible positive ROI results of a good social media strategy I strengthen your online reputation this really gets into having customers say good things to report their experiences in your dealership and it’s not just the formal review sites it’s great to get a tweet from a customer or a Facebook comment saying thank you for the you know the great deal i got on my chevy tahoe or whatever the case may be so reputation management although focused on actual review and reading sites as it should be can be sustained he has through them through other social media channels as well promote community involvement support where the gods is already dressed an increased customer employee satisfaction and retention one of the real interesting things that I’ve noticed and I’ll unfortunate part of my background is I helped develop 480p the other services their social media program program 600 dealerships and one of the things we didn’t anticipate going in was the positive impact it had on her on the employees of the dealerships because our approach was not to limit social media involvement to a handful of designated employees but to encourage as many employees as possible to participate through the channels that we built for employee participation and we found that not only does that work a lot better as far as communicating with the public and projecting a very genuine image and overall impression of your dealership as being a whole bunch of people that live in your community that also work at your dealership but it also seemed to transfer to a very positive morale intact on the employees of the dealership so this next slide what we’re showing you here is really it served the basic structure of our strategy so what we wanted to approach was integrating social media with all the other marketing and we were doing one not to live completely separately not to have a separate look and feel to our other marketing messages but to be fully integrated in terms of book filled content messaging obviously there’s some messaging and social media channels that are more than just an extension of your advertising but still reflect the overall marketing of the dealership so for example email online display advertising search engine tising the internet works blogs forums SEO impact social networks these are all fact all tactical factors that we considered as we approach the strategy so looking at another way what we wanted to create was using all the assets that we could acquire for that dealer in the social media world and really has sort of even the hub in other words taken all of these components around the circle here kind of mix it all together and really unifying the approach so a couple things along the way one of the things that we realized in this particular case that I’m going to focus on vertical Honda but we’ve seen this around the country is social media has some very subtle changes to the way the customers are going to interact with your dealership so for example in the past we use they have very common for us to say we can give you this great price quote if you’ll just go ahead and give us all your information on lead form so the reward the consumer was we’re going to give you this information you want to give us the information we want serve a prisoner exchange of information they wanted the best price we want to know who they were and the right information so that we could market to a particular consumer and against the social media what’s happened is it’s been a disruption social media is disrupted that model so now we’ve got we’ve got consumers who expect to get all the information that they desire in one through social media channels with no obligation for anything in exchange so it’s very common for us to see things like on facebook page for dealer a comment that says I’m so upset that i missed the 0 % APR which ended temper 30th if I can still get 0 % APR i buy i buy a new Chevy new for eww stuff like that we see and so we in turn will respond you know here you can contact us and I think we can make arrangements and it’s it’s a little less likely to work what we’re finding is you almost have to give them more information back and you have this exchange of comments back and forth several times or messages before you can earn the right to ask these consumers for their information now here’s the trade-off that looks like a lot more work and who’s got time to do it but we’re noticing that when we do have these engagements these conversation threads which current number of different ways Facebook Twitter blog post most social medias characterized by the ability to accept commentary from visitors that page and the ability to respond to that commentary whenever we see these discussion threads they eat the percentage that results in a sale is dramatically higher than what we ever saw but conventional sales things we’re seeing 4050 sometimes sixty percent in some cases conversion to their service customer sales customer they are fewer in quantity but higher and positive results so couple couple tools that we learn along the way number one the greatest channels to dealers effectively implementing social media strategies time management if you really want to do this right it can be a dramatic drain on your time and it can be very resource intensive so we look for ways to create shortcuts one of the things we did is we went ahead in build a social media dashboard what this is sort of this is a screenshot in that dashboard and by the way you don’t have to be a tier 10 marketing client to do this you’ll see we have some resources listed online you can get the retail we have a private label version of this but there’s a till version that you can purchase as a one-off your dealership what this does is as we create profiles and accounts these icons represent the profiles have been secured with the name brickell on this column right here is its state feet of any mentions of birth lehanga across thousands hundreds of thousands of websites it’s basically uh think of it as Google alerts on steroids it’s a little more powerful than Google Alerts index as many more sites so it’s a totally used to see if anything is being mentioned then down below here’s a graph that we we ran out of room and shows the volume of mentions of triple honda over time so as we create new accounts this accumulating is bigger and these are links to other assets within the doctor one of the other things we did is early on we said we look back at the evolution of the use of the internet by car dealers and was anybody here selling cars in the 90s give me that he looked too young really more 16 years old some cars entering remember when we first started getting dealer websites and if you observe us a lot of challenges one day what do we put on these websites what’s the most effective content so many of us at tier 10 have been you know I’ve been around using the internet to sell cars before the World Wide Web existed so I said what if we took a similar approach why not build our own social network for dealership what we experimented with that in many cases it was sort of dud a couple of things we found along the way if you go ahead in and pay a monthly licensing fee for a good social network platform and your subtle out there and then you populate it and use it properly it becomes a hug you actually have a the network the dealership loans and what we recommend although you don’t have to do it this way is for example here at BMW dealer in Southern California brand the social network has the BMW owners network or the BMW enthusiasts network sponsored by the dealership so the dealership becomes the sponsor enabling this network for people that are interested in your products in the case of multi rooftop groups for example we’ve got in San Antonio in seara community to college there’s nine brands represented it’s active as trials been around for three years out Riverside California there’s moss brothers auto group their community is called hot axle and for three years they refused to tell me what hot axle means they laugh giggle every time I ask but they’ve got over over a thousand active members of this community many of which of their employees so one approach would be in this case we said we’re going to create the social network and we’re going to primarily invite our employees and customers want to join that’s great but what it was it’s a place for employees to post and publish and upload photographs and upload their videos and publish blogs and everything that they published their was then located to push a button and syndicated out to Facebook Twitter and all the real popular might call real social networks so part of the strategy was getting control of social media marketing has used by our employees mentioned where they work or the things that they were interested in that work in different dealerships depending on your policies towards employee participation it may take on a different look flavor in the case of brickell they’re very involved with the local community they do a lot of benefits for children they do things around the holidays with a given way toys they’re just very involved in the community so this became a really ideal way for them to feature their involvement in the community so this social network the state-created is called urls my miami honda com if you ever want to go check it out joining become a member and experiencing there’s there’s about 2,000 dealers in the United States right now that own their own social networks so this is definitely not something that’s a total aberration some people criticize them and say why should dealers repeat with Facebook other people recommend them and it’s a matter of fact outside of the auto industry community managers that’s being known as an online community is one of the fastest-growing job categories of America so it is one approach and it gives us a hub for that hub-and-spoke strategy so in this particular case that hub-and-spoke strategy leads to our traditional e-commerce site this is the way it works so we created my miami honda com for brooklyn and it’s really about honda it’s about brick mohandas involvement in the local community and all the content bets off that goes into the site automatically propagate support we call it syndication distributes to all these other social media accounts that were created in the dealerships name what this does most amongst other things it makes the content much more physical it’s indexed more time by the search engines and again it creates all those google search engine listings for many more of these independent websites but they’re all about purple honda so in some ways you could say it’s it’s sort of flooding the web tional sites where their content can be filed so with this these arrows indicate is the content going out to the appropriate one thing the appropriate social media site one thing when I emphasizes you don’t want all content going everywhere you want to have some thought into this obviously videos are going to go places like YouTube and other places logs in the lab to a wordpress blog shorter messages blogs and Twitter photographs little flicker all the pages are the appropriate ages you select will be favored favorited that sort of thing but the key here that we were going for was automation because if you tried to do this manually which would be great it would take a huge amount of time so as much as you can automate even when you get some redundancies it’s still better to save as much time as possible through the use of that automation so the traffic flow if you’ll notice the arrows reversed so once that content from them from the previous slide so here’s the content going out to the social media networks and then in this slide that content that’s now residing on social media networks all contains links going back to the appropriate and relevant content inside the dealer’s ecommerce sites so for example if it’s an article about the 2012 honda accord it has links in the article where it says 2012 on the court those links if you give the consumer clicks on it takes up to the 2012 aboard specials page inside the dealer’s ecommerce site so do you everybody get that we’re putting the content one place distributing out that the content contains links to the e-commerce site for those consumers who are interested now this is another part of the approach one of the things we’ve noticed is with social media we’ve been able to make a much greater impact on telephone volume and we’ve been able to they would say pure sales leads we mailed increase sales leads but less dramatically from phone line the phone body we’ve been able to generate is eight times three hundred percent the lead long we’ve been able to attribute to social media now lead at first we were kind of puzzled by this and then through the use of toll-free numbers we started figuring out what was going on one of them once we had discovered the use of something called universal business listings ubo org if you ever get a chance to check it out the only business therein is you fill out your business profile in one place ub8 them a fee and they take that business profile and they then populate hundreds of business directories on different websites but their direct reserve websites of their own kind so yellow pages online death is a directory google places in the directory the apple business listings directory big business list is a director on and on how its times again efficiency play here if you fill it out once in one place they then populate all these social media directories of which there’s hundreds and now in the phone rings much more often because now you’ve got the right phone numbers proper information your business listings including links including your logos including images some of them evening and accept videos the beauty here is you only fill it out once again I want to stress that social media management for car dealers should be very much focused on the efficiency and time management how do you leverage all these all this media without spending hundreds of hours a week and resources to do it so in this case one hour vested using this ebay service which is fairly inexpensive it’s a one-time fee it’s done and you’ve saved yourself several hundred hours of labor yeah be the package the leaders they got the more per package is 349 dollars what you know it’s what time you can redo it again a year later I don’t recommend any sooner than that that’s what they recommend but there is a business they’re not going to take these directories down so the only reason to redo it again would be as if the information changed the business directories are not even delete unless they have a reason to somebody says that you closed or the information is inaccurate so my recommendation is you pay for it once and then if the information changes phone numbers sometimes URLs change you know then go back and pay for 350 one more time we haven’t read it ok but no need to do it more than once so will we end up creating here in effect is we have this cloud indicates these berries directories these social network my my anaconda and now we’re focused on is once that built out is let’s fill this out with articles news anything we can come up with and if truth you know the biggest challenge once your strategy is for Indy is built out is the daily creation of content because the bottom line is do stories sell as I’ve never been able to sell a car without telling stories and I’ve sold about ecology so I’ve sold that total lot of stories social media is about telling stories so let’s leverage it use it to tell all the interesting stories that are relevant to our dealership but they don’t always have to be about the dealership I’m give me a couple of examples of making this world and syrah Nissan San Antonio Texas they had something heavy rains there involve all day and a stray dog came up there right by the one of the rivers and stray dog came up got underneath defense and sought shelter underneath the customer’s car and storage lankan service department the dog was practically feral when people with the service tax were blocking in the back all the materials are when they got near the card that the dog was sleeping member make a long story short they were alerted by the security cams it turns out this dog was chasing the way raccoons and it traditionally done damage to the cars so the general manager says call the vet let’s get this dog shots make sure it’s it’s it’s okay that’s licensed it and let him live back there because it was a storage lot so it made a decision to do that I happen to hear about it so I said let’s take some pictures of the dog and tell a story so the first block the rope was canine safe dealer from Francona tax because these raccoons would do damage to the soft parts of people’s cars they bite off bout stands and they scratch the you know South urethane bumper and caps things like that so it’s kind of interesting blog at the very end of it we suggested we haven’t named this dog do you think the dog deserves a name the next thing we know we got bunch of responses from people in San Antonio we have context to give out an award for the person who big name suggested name to be selected well the name is a very imaginative but it’s appropriate the dog was named Hal Heiner any button sells any songs and understand what you meant so this dog Pathfinder for calendar year 2010 is the sign of the dealership it was the number one salesperson of the year pilcher more people came in bought new Nissans asking for that dollar dog pathfinder than any individual sales groups people drove from hundreds of miles away to buy movies on from concern nissan because of these series of articles when I say series of articles every month and wrote a story about half life one month one of the employees brought in a male dog and finders still wasn’t very friendly and they go on and we took pictures and we said hey Mary romance blooms at Siragusa very popular are eventually male got one away pathfinders still there and she still one of the most popular employees of the dealership people come in all the time and say I want to buy a car from Pathfinder now that’s going to be cute story but he talked to the general manager Rhonda and he’s here Lisa she’ll tell you is one of the best promotional things they ever stumbled across in another case sunset share links under Washington we just happen to find out they won their sales person was retired PR a rodeo champion he’d had enough you know metal parts installing had a retired rhodium wrote some articles about it we found out people had driven from very great distances divine Chevy trucks in this particular sales person so I asked them can i get some phone numbers of these customs one cousin are called out Chuck’s gonna love this I said I asked him I said so why did you drive 300 miles to buy a truck comes back because really who takes care of you do exactly what the customers over so again you all have these dealership these stories in your dealership and these stories sell your dealership they sell your people and really anybody in sold cars reading length of time what creates more gross profit that the customer lets you make relationship or vehicle futures in my opinion I would have been successful building relationships and social media allows you to build relationships and scheme that process too many more people than you can do one at a time of your dealership so this is what this chart indicates this is actually a worksheet that we use now we’ve changed it to format on the screen but what we do is let’s say we come up with a story this cloud is blank we pencil in the story and then we decide where are we going to put that story what categories are we going to insert that article are we going to put it in the dealership sponsored social network are we going to post it to forums or is it a video maybe it’s a video so it needs to go to youtube dailymotion and the other social media video sites where we already have created accounts for the dealership so this is the worksheet we do and then we assign this that distributes a warm load distribution school we signed the public resource so how do you measure all this because a lot of people questioning those I gotta problem how do you practice how do you measure the ROI how you know you can say that about newspaper advertising or anything in this case we have a few more ways of doing it so in this particular case we do measure track how many social media accounts would create every month we try to have five to ten new accounts so this roster of Bobo’s increases what this tool does is we put in a URL the tool automatically assigns in popular logo that URL and then inserts it for the list so this in this particular case that glued up this portion of the chart shows we have 343 social media profiles but then you created for marijuana most of these are indexed by search engines so it’s additional SEO content they all contain links to valuable assets and resources for the dealership and again with this particular tool when you float your mouse over any of these icons it tells you the tool and pulls in an intelligent about a particular social media site so you can learn what they all do use better judgment for deciding where you’re going to push content so this is this is another obsession of the same tool where what it does is it sorts of the 15 categories there is blogging than 15 additional categories and it tells you where we claim the dealership me where we claim the dealership same so see how this is bloggers united / Jolanda see brickell Honda carbonmade com but virgo Honda is the blog com are being bold here was to secure the dealer’s name across all these different social media sites and then organize them in the categories that are the categories are sorted based on the type of content that goes into that social media site the other tool that is that is available through the same dashboard as it monitors each of these sites you click on the logo and then it tells you the relative importance of that social media site whether it’s worth the effort or not the published content to it so as this explains the social media management dashboard allows what comparisons and monitors 500 user-generated content sites allowing the brickell social team to determine where content placements will reach the most consumers here so impaired that previous 12 bibler we see fiddlers have fun higher rankings so as we create our workers who ordered what videos you know youtube is always number one and then it might be Midler or Vimeo and some of these other ones depending on how relevant it affected their one of the things I wanted to highlight keep my leap look at hundreds of these types of sites there’s a couple that in fact people on my team we debate oftentimes which ones we like the best one of my personal favorites of slides here slideshare.net this PowerPoint you’re seeing right here you can download it from slideshare.net uploaded it so does the sheriff but one thing interesting things about SlideShare for dealership is you can take all your PDF electronic closures and upload it and SlideShare will index that will turn that brochure all the content into an HTML page so it gets indexed by the search engines so again people are finding it customers can then go in and download it and you get 24 against $19 one for the for the professional package you get to create a lead for that if they want to download the PDF they fill out the legal so to show you this how effective this can be at brickell Honda we are really blow this up we generated 395 leads now this was over a two-month period so it costs us about forty dollars for 395 leaks which were primarily brochure PDF brochure downloads apartment brochures when I asked Mario jr.Mario Roboto jr. the owner’s son who manages the leads commitment villager he said these are some of the best leads that they get is that the people that take the time to download the brochures on the cars are very interested now the other thing that we’ve done is we’ve got we’ve started building actual PowerPoint presentations about what makes Burkle Honda a great place to buy a car or what makes Paragon Honda great place to buy a car we upload the powerpoints and we ask customers in a we were thinking why would anybody custom anybody download a sales presentation to them they get downloaded all the time people are downloading these powerpoints that the dealership has created what goes into these powerpoints oftentimes what we do is we have pictures of cars and pictures of the different sales people standing by each car and the PowerPoint slide is tied up the sales name and then we have a little story about that sales person along with an email link to their review and rating page where it shows what other customers have how they rated their sales experience weatherbeeta later or business rater impress or reviews where we’re using so it’s a very effective tool so let’s talk about a big Facebook the intercom gorilla in this case Africa Honda we you know we couple things your image for your page and a lot of people get confused between profiles engages profiles are four people pages and groups pages are for businesses but I also encourage you to create groups for specific problem fizzies so if you’re a BMW store I would recommend creating a facebook group for 3 series arms in Southern California and just can’t invite as many people as possible into that group get that interaction going on and everyone surround insert some messages about the great deals or the service specials going on at everybody and it’s easy and it works when if something is what we do check-in specials and then check it on Facebook page places and it’s not a comic r us to see 85 to 120 people a month getting coupons and using a new service drive we did we’re not real complicated either we put a ten dollar off coupon on any service purchase fifty dollars or more and just to keep it simple and seems to work but you’re free to experiment find out with doesn’t work so one of the things that we’re I find these and that more dealers going to do lot of dealers chase their pages and then sort of like for bragging rights I got a thousand fans I got two thousand fans what are you doing with those fans so one of the most important things to do is to use the big marketing resources in the app inception for your Facebook page and send out periodic updates update your fans what’s a nicole is were you going to build that okay you can just pull in a URL in this case we were promoting them to join my money behind the community this is one of the ways we got our customers invited them to the community now one thing I want to courage you to do if you build one of these social networks deals your sponsors do not invite customers until that you’ve got some content in there you’ve got your employees have joined it because it’s like showing up at a party and nobody’s there you know people don’t want to stay you’re not going to stick around so you need to have a certain amount of presence on your community before you start inviting people from your Facebook page but when we got there we want to had to invite it up using the update another thing we did so we made this promotion for the teacher appreciation program we went ahead and created a separate town your Facebook and we made that the default landing page the facebook very simple approach it’s easy to do all you do is take this image this is this is all 1 image that we dropped out of the PDF that we created as their ad agency the other thing we like using social media for is promotions of contents this particular case we’re giving away at 2012 on civic the drawing will be held during month december we started running this promotion back in july so we’ll get a good solid six months out of it and and what we’re doing is using social media to promote people entering the contest the first half year the contest we ran over 10,000 entries of course with those contest entries you get all the customers data your address or email as well as permission to market through them but we don’t share that information with in the outside part the other thing we ask is take a look do you have a youtube channel and take a look at how you gain your youtube channel so if I own Paglia BMW I might not necessarily name my youtube channel packed at BMW is if it’s located in irvine california i’m probably going to name the channel irvine MW so that it becomes more relevant or customers in irvine or interested in videos in dubs the other thing that we do a lot is we do paid advertising that only shows up on our own videos so we might spend fifty or one hundred dollars a month but every time somebody play’s one of our videos a banner ad appears above the video we started doing that because we noticed our competitors we’re showing ads on top of our video so we got to hold the people at Google and through their AdWords tool we find out that you can actually pick channels that or you bid to have your ads appear we have time okay you look like to look at your watch okay so I or do you have a question the greatest questions is small group don’t be afraid to interrupt in this particular case we had a several videos of what we what they’d like to do is take the managers in the dealership and make videos of them talking about issues that are important in their community not necessarily sales programs but actual comments gas prices going up or the tsunami resulting in a shortage of vehicles we actually turn this into sort of a news channel sponsored by the dealership so this content distribution hub getting back to this this Miami Honda community because it’s an important part of the strategy a couple things to think about when you’re selecting the actual platform to use and there’s about there’s at least a dozen the time about there in this case we use Ning Ning Network and ing com but there’s others there’s social go there’s LG LG G and things like joomla there’s many platforms honestly the reason why we pick me is it so easy very easy platforms work with and it does everything we needed to do so one of the things I wanted was application layer integration with the major networks we didn’t want to have to push a button we want to set it up so that if you’re logged in under the a balloon profile and you upload a video we wanted that video to automatically push out the dealer’s Facebook page just on and this allowed us to do it that’s called application layer English also we want to automate syndications use of RSS feeds RSS feeds are great you copy a URL and paste it in at the other end and every time you post content it appears every place that RSS feeds been published it’s old school but it works and it’s very prolific everybody accepts our assessments and then user tributes indication which is the typical button that you see you now share share this app this so you want to make sure you install those puppies so your everybody visiting the page they see something like they can click it push it to their own Facebook page or Facebook profile and then it’s being replacement there’s times when we will literally copy and paste articles once your published in the community post in total press blog or other sites as well so the thing a look at how this works this video is online i am behind the video is from Paula Paula and South Beach and she talks about why she bought her Honda Civic from brickell Honda I click Share select Facebook type in listen appalling South Asian she describes her experience and propellant leading with click publish
