Where is your Automotive Industry blog?
Why are dealers and vendors that serve them not heating up the blogosphere?
Some Numbers -
- Around 175,000 blogs are created EACH DAY.
- Technorati claimed that on July 31, 2006 that they started tracking their 50 Millionth blog.
It is tough to claim your space in the blogoshpere but not impossible. The reason you see so many blogs being created daily is because most are just pure marketing pieces not designed to build a brand or encourage dialog. They are aberrations of the logical purpose for creating blogs.
Automation is not the key. That is splogging and does nothing to really build a brand. People want to be able to connect with you and a blog is probably the easiest way to do it. It allows you to get your message across in a non confrontational way and give individuals a connection with you and your brand.
Technology has enabled customers to dramatically change their attitude towards marketing. As a result, they are tuning out in increasing numbers and talking back. Customers are shifting massively their entertainment and information consumption away from traditional media to the new web space.
Marketers are responding by shifting their advertising to web properties, but online advertising is struggling to gain trust. According to a recent Forrester survey of US households, only 6% trust search engine ads and 2% online banner ads. Customers trust themselves and each other in influencing their perception of a brand. Yet few marketers have embraced blogging, although it supposedly enables a more personal and two-way interaction with the brand. Logic+Emotion
Traditional media is dying. Our one sided messages are being ignored and those that take the time to differentiate themselves will capture more of the shrinking market share. Blogs can be uses as PR tools, to influence, advertise, build conversations and expand your creativity.
Personal and corporate blogs can widen your reach and tap into other online conversations, that is how you build a brand. If you can establish yourself as a hub for information to those that you are wanting to attract to your business then you have tapped into the power of blogging as a marketing tool.
You can build calls to action in your message and here is mine.
Get your feet wet with blogging!!
I am responsible for recruiting bloggers at DrivingSales.com. We are in need of people who wish to blog about their experiences as dealership employees, online automotive marketing, current industry news, new products, training or anything else auto industry related.
This will give you the opportunity to expand your reach in the industry and connect with people at different levels. You can then transfer that experience to building you own brand and applying what you learn directly to your business. We are working on a FREE training for auto industry bloggers that will help you embrace this digital medium and build their brand.
If you wish to get in the game leave a comment below or send me an email at paulr@drivingsales.com or call 912-266-1629
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2 Comments
Paul Rushing on August 27th, 2008
Thanks for your comment Chad. Social Media marketing is not going to be about automation in my opinion. It will be superficial and consumers will see through it.
It is about engagement not delivering content with pitches. Sure automation makes it easy. The right mix would probably taking current assets and developing multiple layers of content spread across various mediums to build a story that is believable.
Automation in social engagement is like internal process that cause the customer to wait an hour to enter the F&I office. It will cause alienation of your brand in the eyes of the consumer, if that is what they remember about you.
Chad Polk on August 27th, 2008
Paul -
Until there is an industry specific blogging platform dealers will not adopt. Why? They would not put effort into something extra. If a service provider (AutoRevo.com) built a blogging platform the generated posts through their existing internet marketing application the adoption rate would be high in my opinion.
So what could be automatically posted? Post sale testimonials that are sent to a customer via email with a link to provide this content (dealers would obviously approve before publishing), model line-ups, promotions, specials, photo upload tool within the app to display on blog, etc. There are many other “auto-post” items that could be built into an existing internet marketing app.
The other alternative is a marketing service provider building the integration to popular blog platforms that are configured out of the box for auto dealers. This is probably the better choice.
Thanks,
Chad Polk
http://www.AutoRevo.com