Congratulations! You’ve realized the true power of harnessing digital media to drive awareness to your dealership! You’ve got a great number of social media followers who interact with your posts, you’ve got some good video content circling the web and your overall online presence is rather stellar. You should have noticed by now a nice increase in your website’s traffic and the number of leads coming in.
But what else can you do without spending any more (or much more) money to see even more gains? Why not take your existing marketing avenues and integrate them? But how? Well, the great thing about digital marketing is that while it’s all based on the internet, you have an opportunity to reach and interact with more people my using two platforms at once. For example; you’re already doing SEO and you’re posting videos to YouTube, but are you optimizing your videos to show up at the top of the search engines? Google owns YouTube, making it super easy to get a video to rank high on the first page for relevant search terms.
Not only can you get videos to rank high in Google by themselves, but you can also use it as content on your dealership’s blog and/ or share it on social media. This opens up your videos to a much larger potential audience. There’s so much more that can be done with video! Why not grab a few screenshots of some of your best online reviews and make them into a video to help increase your social proof online? One thing you’re likely already doing to cross integrate is by placing social media icons on your website and any of your print advertising. Ah yes, print advertising. While it may be a (slowly) dying form of advertising that is plagued with the inability to properly track it’s effectiveness, there IS a way to, at least, marginally track its effectiveness.
Well, two ways actually, but one will be far more effective than the other. First of all, you COULD add a QR code to the ad with a tracking link that’ll redirect the viewer to your mobile website so they can view your inventory on their phone. That’s one way of doing it. That way will allow you to see how many people scanned the code to be redirected. The problem is that most people are still unsure of what a QR code is, so they will likely do nothing with it. A more effective method would be to include a mobile call to action within the ad. For example, somewhere in the ad you can add a tagline such as “Text “BostonNissan” to 64545 to see our latest specials!” Not only will they text in to see your specials, but you now have the ability to send them notification about upcoming sales and specials (please make sure you are abiding by TCPA rules and regulations).
Speaking of text messaging; Each of your sales associates should be set up with a “virtual business card.” The customer texts the sales associate’s name to a number and receives a text message with the sales associate’s information to use at a later date if need be. BUT, what if an hour later, they received an automatic follow up text with a video from the sales associate thanking the customer for coming in and making sure that all of their questions were answered? Not only have you already started the follow up process, but it’s unlikely they have ever experienced this. Now your dealer is ahead of its competition!
There are many ways to cross integrate different content and marketing platforms. Get creative and spend some time testing some different strategies to find what works best for your dealership.