Increasing Leads with an Online Audience for your Auto Dealership
The internet has become an essential part of our everyday shopping experiences. Consumers will research reviews about a product or business, information about the product itself, and where to purchase it. All of this takes place before they’ve become your customer.
What if your dealership could be the facilitator of all this information and steer them towards a sale?
Creating an online community around your business is, without a doubt, the best way to engage with your customers and control the narrative around your dealership. Has an exciting new car arrived on the lot? Share those wallpaper-worthy pictures with your followers and watch as the comments start flowing in. Even the smaller types of engagement (likes and comments) can generate leads for your dealership.
You want to be the most reliable source of information for all things about your dealership. Keeping your social media and online presence up to date will promote engagement from your virtual audience and, in turn, increase the number of leads you receive.
Bringing the Dealership to Your Audience
You cannot engage with your audience until you know where they reside on the internet. Spending your time and money building an online community on the wrong platform is not only frustrating but a waste of valuable resources. To avoid making this mistake, look at the information that you have on your customer base. What’s their gender/age? These two demographics questions reveal a lot about where your customers spend most of their time online. For example, according to SproutSocial, 56% of Facebook’s users are men; 26.3% of Facebook’s active users are between the ages of 25-34. If a majority of your customers are men in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties, then you need to start building your community on Facebook.
Making Yourself Visible – Online Presence Management
The internet and social media platforms can often feel like a bottomless pit of information. To generate the maximum yield of leads in a given month, you must ensure that your audience makes it to the correct landing pages and channels of information. Otherwise, you and your dealership’s voice risk getting lost in the void.
Your social media accounts need to have the same handles, hashtags, branding, and links. No matter where your customers find you, they should be able to navigate to any webpage or social media account that ties back to your dealership.
Another thing to consider is how you’re going to grow your audience. While it is possible to passively/organically grow an audience on social media platforms, paid advertising and marketing strategies tend to work better. Not only do these strategies speed up the process of gaining new followers and prospective customers, but they improve the quality of your leads. Purchasing promoted posts or targeted messaging makes sure that correct information is getting out to the intended audience.
Forming a Symbiotic Relationship with Your Audience
Now that we’ve established where to build an audience and how to do so, we need to discuss maintaining relationships with said audience.
To get reliable and effective leads, you need to make sure that you are a reliable source of information to your audience. Providing your audience the information that they need will be the catalyst for significant lead generation. Keep in mind, however, that this is a two-way street. For your dealership to reap the rewards of having an online community, you must commit to providing that community with quality content and interaction. Ultimately, this means taking time to interact with people commenting on your posts or asking questions in your direct messages. Making this a regular practice in your dealership’s social media department will generate more physical and online traffic and more than likely turn into sales.
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