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I was intrigued by a blog post written by Brian Carter entitled “SHOCKER: 3% To 7.5% Of Fans See Your Page’s Posts” and I recommend that you read the entire article as well as consider Brian’s tips to increase engagement.

With everyone’s obsession about collecting high number of Facebook Fans these stats remind me that high quality engagement and building the right fan community are so important. The stats above were collected from Facebook Pages that had a combined 400 million fans.

More Fans Equals Less Engagement

The chart shows that as the fans “increase” the visibility of your posts drops. Could this be a wake-up call for business owners that are pushing for numbers and not quality? You’ve heard the phrase “Junk In = Junk Out” so maybe this is the social media version of that warning.

Now aside from arguing these numbers if your page has higher stats, it’s still a reminder about the potential direct impact of any one Facebook post or short term campaign.

Heck, in fact these numbers are less than the visibility you get with an email campaign which have open rates around 10-15% on non-segmented lists. I’m not thrashing Facebook, I use it regularly. These stats just show that it can’t be the holy grail to solve all your consumer marketing needs.

Building Segmented Communities On Different Marketing Channels

My takeaway from this article is that building focused, segmented marketing strategies is the way to approach the diverse base of consumers looking for your goods and services. Business owners need to have engagement with consumers using multiple digital channels:

• Chat
• Texting Campaigns
• Facebook/Social Media
• Email
• LinkedIn/Digital Networking
• ReTargeting/PPC
• Mobile Websites/Apps

I have been amazed with the jump in leads when a dealer adds chat to these website. Dealer eProcess shared a great chart at a recent PCG Pit Stop that showed all age groups are using chat. See chart below:

Are You Using Opt-In Text Campaigns?

I have also “seen the light” on texting campaigns since most people under 40 prefer to receive a text than an email or phone call. It’s amazing how fast a business can build a text marketing campaign. When you consider that most people don’t change our cell phone number often and that the phone is always with us, even in the bathroom, text marketing has an amazing delivery rate.

If you have ever watched the attrition on your email lists, you know how often people change their email. 15% of the US population moves every year and add to that how often people change jobs. Keeping email contacts up to date is laborious. Now consider how little attrition you will have on your text campaign database if you don’t abuse it.

Offer and Management Multiple Engagement Channels

To me fair, I have also seen great engagement on Facebook. Anyone who has tested different posting techniques knows that some posts start a fire of comments and others die on the vine. Facebook is another channel, but it’s value should not be inflated to greater than the data shows.

Business owners need to establish a multi-channel communication strategy for their market. If you ignore any one of the methods listed above, you are missing an important part of your market.

Now that PCG has added these channels to our consulting services, I could not be more excited for dealers who want to invest and engage in digital marketing. For me, there are many efficient and profitable ways to connect with consumers and that gives dealers more choice.

The future looks bright!  If you need assistance setting up a comprehensive digital communication strategy, give us a call at 732.450.8200.

Today is November 1 and for car dealers this means that the monthly clock has been reset and new sales goals will be made for the next 30 days.  For readers that are responsible for car sales, it’s time to make a November 1 resolution to apply what you may have learned at recent conferences or what has been shared on automotive communities.

Stu Mittleman Inspired Me

I had the opportunity to spend the weekend with World Record Holding Ultra Marathoner Stu Mittleman who has World and National records in ultra marathon races (6 days) and won a very special 1,000 mile race as part of his hall of fame accomplishments.  We ran 10 miles together, which was the longest I have run since re-starting my training back in April.

Stu told me a story about how he was hired to train 27 employees of a New York hotel for the New York City Marathon in 9 weeks.  The farthest distance 26 of these 27 people ever ran was 3.1 miles, which is a 5K race.  Some would have thought this would be impossible but all 26 “newbies” completed the race.  The one experienced runner did not make it.

He succeeded by training the runners to look at the race as a New York City street fair with 26 stands, which corresponds to the 26 aide stations that are along the course for water.  By looking at the race as 26 one-mile runs, he was able to achieve the goal of getting these runners to finish the race.  The details of this story and Stu’s philosophy on running can be found in his book “Slow Burn,” a recommended read for anyone who wants to understand how to best utilize the power of your body.

Many car dealers came back from Vegas conferences trying to figure out how they are going to implement the 26+ things that they learned and if they do that, they will fail.  So, let’s look at all the digital marketing opportunities for your dealership and execute them one at a time so we can move forward and not stay fixated at the starting line.

My suggestion is that you start small and make THREE RESOLUTIONS for Digital Marketing today.

Resolution #1

Many people have written about the changes in Google Search results with Google Places taking a much larger portion of Page One Results.  (Read my latest post)  If you haven’t seen this for yourself, search for “Baltimore Honda Dealers” and see how different Page One looks.

Heritage Honda has 152 reviews, Norris Honda has 41 reviews and Brown’s Honda City has 14 reviews plus a rating of less than 2 stars.   Google Places and car dealer reviews are now front and center in Google search.  When presented with this page of results, whose dealership will most likely get an increase of clicks?

It is TIME to start your Reputation Management process in November – Make That Commitment.  You need to have a process by which customers can post their reviews on the 5-6 primary websites that are consolidated in Google Places.  Those sites vary from market to market, but a process is needed.  If you don’t have a high star count on Page One, your traditional advertising dollars will be assisting your competitors in attracting more in market shoppers.

Resolution #2

Invest in tracking phone numbers for your off-site content publishing, blogs, and social media engagement.  It’s time to stop making excuses that tracking numbers are expensive.  Actually the data that these numbers provide can shed light on where you are wasting money.  Tracking numbers can also prevent you from terminating services that are working very well.

At DrivingSales Executive Summit Matt Murray from Dealer.com showed that for every LEAD that was submitted on a dealer’s website from a Google Adwords campaign, the dealer received FIVE phone calls.  The point is that IF you are measuring the success of Google Adwords on lead form submissions alone, you would be missing the majority of consumer response generated by PPC.

This applies to so many other digital marketing strategies as well however I don’t have the calls to lead ratio.  By placing tracking numbers on microsites, PDF brochures, and social media profiles you can start to see what marketing channels are attracting consumer calls.  If Matt Murray’s data does not inspire you to start tracking your calls, you have bigger issues at hand.

Resolution #3

Many dealers are using Google Adwords (PPC) to generate traffic to their website and this is a good strategy as long as you are inspecting where these clicks are going and measuring what is happening when they land on those pages.  Secondly, we all can agree that designing the perfect landing page design is not a one time design task.

You’ll never know if you have a good design until you set-up A/B testing.

So I would like to encourage all dealers for their third November resolution to inspect their PPC landing pages and to start an A/B testing program to track and measure results based on different designs.  For example, dealers know that the model car a consumer calls about or discusses when they first walk into a dealership is not always the car they purchase.

In the same way, give your landing pages a design that provide alternatives to consumers.  If you design a 2010 Nissan Altima lease special page, you may want to provide button that also show your current Nissan Sentra lease specials or a button that shows used Nissan Altimas.  They key is to recognize that you have no idea what will work until you test different variations over time.

Many dealers are spending 3K, 5K, 10K and even 25K a month on Google Adwords yet they have never tested whether their landing pages are achieving the optimal results.  The testing processes takes time, but it is time well spent.  The knowledge that you will gain from the experiment will revolutionize your PPC strategies.

Start Your Digital Marketing Marathon

So will you start the process of your Digital Marketing Marathon this month?  Digital marketing is not a sprint.  Take it slow and get comfortable but you have to make the commitment to start.  If you need help with any of these three resolutions, please give us a call and we can go over our digital marketing services that can help you achieve greater success in 2011.

If you are not satisfied with how your automotive Google Adwords campaign is being managed, it is well worth your time to give us a call.  We do not markup or hide Google Adwords costs.  All bids and costs are placed in an account that you own and we manage.  Your corporate credit card gets billed each month for your budget so you know exactly how much is being spent.  We only bill you for the time we spend each month adjusting or editing your ads and landing pages.

Other companies charge a monthly fee which includes Adwords costs and management fees.  The line between fees and Adwords costs are often blurred. It has been our experience that a one price fits all Adwords strategy has too many inefficiencies to be the best solution for an auto dealer.

As part of our Google, Yahoo, and MSN advertising campaign management we include our expertise on creating effective landing pages for each ad.  We prefer that each car model specific ad be directed to its own unique landing page.  The landing page should make it easy for the consumer to understand the current offer on the car and then request a call or email quote.  An effective landing page design can make all the difference in a PPC campaign for car dealers.

Some dealer website platforms do not allow for unlimited pages to be created.  On other platforms, teh complexity of the landing pages are limited.  In both cases, PCG has a solution that can optimize your Adwords campaigns.  We can create optimized microsites which can include dealer editable pages with no limitations to the creativity you need included on the landing page.

These automotive SEO and SEM solutions are part of the unique set of services we offer car dealers.  If you want the very best automotive SEO specialists handling your Internet marketing campaigns, you should give us a call.  732-450-8200