Social media for car dealerships becomes extremely valuable to the dealers. In the last two decades, this social media concept came out of nowhere and became the most important fixture in everyone’s online life. Do you want to know what Aunt Marie is cooking today? Just check her social media page and not only she tells what she is cooking, probably she gives you the recipe for it as well. Of course, social media’s role does not stop at what’s happening with friends and family. People who want to buy something, want to see what other people like themselves are buying when they are in the market. We call it the wisdom of crowds. More people do something or buy something, there must be a good reason. An overwhelming majority of people can not be wrong. For this reason, polls show that social media is essential to car buyers since it in a sense becomes their newsfeed for upcoming vehicles and features.
How Does This Affect Car Buyers
Car buying is not any different of course. If you are in the market for a new car and your cousin in Wisconsin or your college roommate in Washington posting the pictures of their shiny new cars, you can not help but look at those and probably contemplate going to a dealership and checking those cars out yourself too. It is human nature.
How Automotive Social Media Drives Dealer Sales
As a sales and marketing director of a car dealership, what does this mean to you? Social media for dealers is the new way of advertising. Do you remember those old days, every weekend you had to pay the local newspaper to buy pages and pages of ads on the paper, hoping that a portion of newspaper readers would look at them and be swayed to come to check your cars? Then some of them could be persuaded to drive away a new one.
A staggering 85% of the people said, they went to their social media pages when they first started shopping for a new car. 3 out of 4 people who were surveyed after buying a car answered they trusted the social media more than the dealerships’ own websites and almost the same percentage of people indicated their choice of service station for their vehicles were influenced by the social media.
How Do You Engage With the Customer on Social Media
Variety of ways exist for that. On Facebook for instance, a strategically targeted ad to near term car buyers or inviting them to come for a special sales event can be the start of this customer engagement.
On Instagram, you can reach out to the millennial generation by posting pictures and videos of the cars which just got delivered to your dealership. Or you can post pictures and even videos of the cars in desirable locations to entice this age segment, as they are more visually motivated. If they are in the market, they will come find you.
Youtube is the defacto standard place where people go to find instructional videos on car repair. Who can be a better customer than the guy, searching for a video about how to repair a car, burning oil, and billowing smoke. You can not target a buyer any better than that.
Twitter on the other hand is full of people who trust this medium for their news consumption. What is better than a strategic tweet from a local celebrity, ranting and raving about the service and attention he received at your dealership.
These are just a few examples of the possibilities social media presents for the dealerships. The only limit is your imagination.
Why is Social Media For Car Dealerships Important
Meeting your customers on social media and establishing the initial rapport with them on this platform is a better way to acquire a customer than waiting at the doorstep of the dealership to greet the people coming in , not knowing what they want. A buyer coming into your establishment informed, is not only one but two or three steps closer to buying that car.
Social media for dealers is a seismic shift in marketing strategy for car dealerships. Effectiveness of your ads’ reach to your desired target audience was anyone’s wild guess when you advertised on traditional media outlets. Those outlets are still good to get your dealership’s name out there and implant your name brand in people’s heads, but when it comes to the last stretch of sprinting for finalizing that sale, social media advertising is your best bet. Can your dealership afford not to use social media? This is the question and you know the answer to that.
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