Automotive Digital Marketing Organic Social

Foreward

Most How-To-Guides Guides seem to copy and paste content from various sources. These different sources usually specialize in one of the different advertising tactics (e.g., search, social, display, e-mail, etc) and are a bit disjointed. We decided to write these Ultimate Automotive Digital Marketing guides differently. We will start with a solid foundation in marketing and then add on specific tactics that can help support your overall marketing strategy. This specific Guide will focus on Organic Social Advertising

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Organic Social Media for the Automotive Dealer

Organic Social Media makes use of free platform tools like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. On these platforms, automotive dealerships create content (photos, comments, videos, memes, etc.) that is then shared and circulated with other followers on their feeds.

You can expect content to be viewed by people that follow your dealership’s social pages, your followers’ followers, and anyone following any of the hashtags you use. The important thing to note here is that there is absolutely no media spend associated with organic social media. These are all considered owned media impressions (in other words, free).

Why It Is Important and How It Can Help Your Dealership

Organic Social Media benefits your dealership by increasing your brand awareness. You’re able to support your current customers and have the potential to convert new customers by showing them what you’re all about. Plus they are free impressions.

1. Save Time

Worried you’ll have to spend all day posting on all the various social media platforms? Don’t be. There are a number tools available that allow you to schedule and deploy your posts from one organized central location. Companies like Hootsuite, Sendible or Agorapulse are just a small handful of examples that give you a way to organize, schedule and deploy your posts across multiple social media feeds. You’ll be amazed at how much time you can save by scheduling posts in advance, rather than burdening yourself with remembering to post at peak hours during the day.

2. Increase Authority

Your social media presence can affect a customer’s perception of your dealership’s credibility. It’s important to be personable while still posting content that demonstrates your expertise. Since these platforms exist to create human connections, you’ll also want to be encouraging conversation. Leaving comments unanswered is a very quick way to damage your brand’s credibility. Your customers should perceive you to be honest, transparent, and reliable - trusting you above all your competitors.

3. Understand Your Audience

In-depth analytics that explain who is following you, where they're coming from, and what they want from your business. Analytics are a valuable tool to measure the effectiveness of your social media strategy. These numbers provide insight to help you make better strategic decisions and respond to trends in a timely manner. It’s a good idea to look closely at an overview of your platforms over time to determine if the content you’re putting out there is effectively engaging your current and potential customers.

4. Improve Customer Support

Social media is a great way to create a simple pathway for customers to inquire about your company and make it easy for you to respond. This ease of accessibility and social engagement bolsters your brand throughout multiple channels.

5. Take Control of Your Dealership's Reputation

You should be monitoring comments and feedback and responding as quickly as possible. Engaging with your customers in a timely matter demonstrates that you not only monitor what’s being posted but that you care about what’s being said. This interaction is crucial to maintaining or even better, increasing your followers.

6. Foster Innovation

Social media has the ability to encourage creative collaboration across new platforms. Your company can see positive results by exposing itself to an audience you might otherwise not interact with thus allowing you to see things differently and possibly coming up with innovative ideas and solutions.

Key Elements of Social Media Management

Social Media Hologram

Manage Multiple Accounts

One challenge is keeping up with all the different accounts. Between Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, the sheer number of accounts you have to manage can be overwhelming. With social media management tools, all those accounts get narrowed down to a single platform. You'll be able to post on every single one in an instant, saving you hours of time on a daily basis.

Schedule Posts in Advance

Perhaps one of the unfortunate facts about social media is that the best times to post rarely line up with when you're actually online. This means that you have to disrupt your day and post content during random times without a lot of cohesion.
Social media management software fixes all of that. It allows you to schedule posts in advance to go live at whatever time you see fit, regardless of what time it is at the moment. You'll even be able to schedule multiple posts days, weeks, and even months in advance, so you can knock out your whole social media strategy for the year in just a few hours if you have the time.

Best Times to Post for Your Dealership

The past couple of years have seen a rapid transformation of the digital landscape causing some noteworthy shifts in data relating to the frequency and time of day people are most active on social media. According to research done by Sprout Social, the best times (listed in US Central time) to post are as follows:

Facebook

Best times: Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday 9 a.m.–1 p.m.
Best days: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday
Worst day: Saturday

Facebook is the most widely used Social media platform in the world and witnessed near around-the-clock engagement in 2020

Instagram

Best times: Tuesday 11 a.m.–2 p.m., Monday through Friday 11 a.m.
Best day: Tuesday
Worst day: Sunday

Instagram has done a good job staying current by regularly rolling out new features. It’s also a great place for Social Listening, observing what trends other brands are utilizing to attract and encourage engagement.

Twitter:

Best times: Wednesday 9 a.m.– 3 p.m., Tuesday through Thursday 9–11 a.m.
Best day: Wednesday
Worst day: Saturday

Twitter frequently excels at being users’ first source of information on hot-topic stories. In 2020 this included the Covid-19 Pandemic and the US Presidential election.

LinkedIn:

Best times: Tuesday through Thursday 9 a.m.–noon
Best days: Tuesday and Wednesday
Worst day: Sunday

It’s no surprise that LinkedIn engagement is most consistent during the standard workweek. This platform is geared toward professional networking and career growth, but it’s also home to an ever-expanding range of content.

Social media contains a set of micro metrics (likes, shares, comments, social traffic, impressions, etc.) from which you can choose what makes sense to track for your company.

Some businesses will choose not to intentionally track any of these metrics and put social media on the back burner. For some, social metrics will be a large part of their overall marketing strategy.

Which social channels businesses focus on will also largely depend on the company.

A highly visual brand may be more concerned with Instagram engagements, while an enterprise consultancy might want to look more into LinkedIn engagements.

Key Components of a Perfect Social Media Account

The components can be broken into four different buckets: Social Listening, Social Influencing, Social Networking, and Social Selling. Here they are summarized:

	Objectives	Metrics
Social Listening	Identify topics that spike interest in your followers Conduct customer research Track your brand growth Perform competitive research Track the influence of the industry to the people Increase customer acquisition	Content gaps identified Refund rate Retention rate Product gaps identified
Social Influencing	Boost engagement with your content and products Start conversations relating to your business Increase website traffic Increase your product awareness Grow your retargeting List	Site engagement rates Retargeting list Growth Traffic by channel Offer Awareness
Social Networking	Distribute content to fill the gaps left by your content Create a good relationship with the competitors Maximize the relationship to develop profitable partnerships Build a stronger brand	The number of inbound links Description of earned media mention Explanation of gained calculated partnerships
Social Selling	Allows to build relationships Keeps clients engaged in social buying Create leads Gain new customers and upsell existing customers	The number of visitors Buyer frequency

Summary

We hope that you found the Automotive Digital Marketing Complete Guide to be helpful.

Advertising is likely one of your biggest expenses at the dealership level and you have to figure out how best to allocate your monthly spend so that you can hit your advertising cost per vehicle. There’s an infinite number of choices out there and it’s your job to best allocate that advertising spend. Here are a few tactics or techniques that you can use.

Here’s a list of digital marketing tactics (or techniques) that is by no means exhaustive. Seems like there are new tactics entering the marketplace every day. But these are the individual tactics that should support your overall marketing strategy. If the tactic is linked then it will send you to our Guide for that linked tactic. Let us know if you would like to see a Guide written for one of the tactics that isn't linked. We'd be happy to write one for you.

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