DEALERSHIP BLOGS... WHO'S STILL DOING THEM?

[Ryan Thompson]

Here we go! - INTO THE BLOGOSPHERE I GO

 

[Alexander Lau]

It's too bad businesses are not using video, it creates proximity astonishingly fast.

I think making a few videos per year is the DPs job.

Dealer Principals have to be the top marketers of their dealership.

We see it at larger scale, CEOs that put on the marketing hat usually have much success.

Here's a sustainable and non time consuming test: 5 things I didn't expect from the new Ford Mustang Mach E.

Your dealership's top marketer goes on in a quick, 1 or 2 minute video about the SUV.

Most of you will discredit this idea telling me they don't have time.

While other that do take the time will create a piece of content good for years and unlimited use on email marketing, social media their website.


Or you can also take the "analysis paralysis" route & wait until you have a studio, a video guy or girl, a strategy, a content delivery system, SEO strategies.

I'm not really sure what you're talking about, as there are plenty of progressive dealerships that are utilizing video the right way for of vlogs, inventory and 3rd party website reasons.

 

[Gayle Rogers]

We have been posting on behalf of dealers for a long time and have a LOT of data. I believe when done correctly they can provide a lot of value.

The data below is from a dealer who has been a client for a long time, so there is a lot of history. This is a three month look back on organic traffic that visited the blog.

Here you can see the total visits and then I filtered down to US and the immediate states surrounding this store. While the numbers drop pretty significantly, it's still a decent number of people. @craigh mentioned session duration, and it is low, but you have to be careful using that metric because it always factors in a zero when calculating that average. You will also notice the bounce rate is terrible.


If you look page views, you can learn a little more. The bounce rate is high because the users are really only interested in whats on that page, you can see that the average time on page is telling us the content is actually being read by the users. I'm not advocating that Avg Time on Page is a perfect metric, but it gives better insight than Avg Session Duration.


Last thing to look at is content. You can see from above that vehicle based content does perform well, particularly comparisons within the brand. We've always felt like this was a great opportunity because someone has decided they want a particular make or model, just trying to pick which one. Also, there is a lot more search volume on older cars.

Below is showing you that local community content also performs pretty well. We try to write about local businesses, people, events, etc. and we share that on social. We also will email, @ mention and tag the local businesses and people we write about. This is not only a good thing to do as a community business, we sometimes can earn backlinks to the content.


So to echo what @Alex Snyder, @Alexander Lau and others have said, the relevancy of the content really matters, but you also have to make sure you are promoting and sometimes even updating old content. I also recommend creating custom retargeting audiences based on this traffic, being aware that you may want to even exclude some.

 

[kimberlyvo]

I can't say that I'm opposed to the idea of having a dealer blog.

On a consumer level, I'd love to see more Video-Blog (vlog) type videos by dealerships and their sales teams. Not only would vlogs give an up close and personal view of a dealers operations, it'll make the car buying experience with said dealer much less frightening/intimidating.

Nothing makes a person more comfortable than knowing MORE about the people you intent to do business with!

I completely agree with this. More and more people are viewing YouTube videos to compare vehicles, look at features, specs, and compare across different models between brands. I think it's more impressive when you see an actual dealership post videos on specific models and its features. There are a good number of people who still read, but the number of users on mobile devices researching new vehicles is doubling every year. I was just researching yesterday on a few models of a car on YouTube and only found maybe one per model that actually had a long (10+ minutes) video with a test drive and a detailed description. I think these videos give an opportunity for great exposure for dealerships!

 

[Alex.Lemoing]

Great discussion here!

Just want to add... blogging on your own site to no end is not nearly as impactful as having blog content on OTHER sites (with high domain authority) that link to your site. In a white-hat, clean, non-scummy way of course.

I'm by no means an SEO killer (although I worked in that space quite a bite) but links are still the biggest ranking factor.

I know link-building isn't quite on topic to the original question here, but I've seen this as a typical pitfall with SEO in general.

In other words, search engines love what you say about yourself (meta tags, onpage, blogging, etc). But search engines LOVE what others have to say about you (link building, blog posts, etc).

If you work with an SEO provider that talks blogging, on-page optimization, your site content, tweaking keywords.... and is shying away from the conversation of building a healthy backlink profile (because THAT is the hard work that actually gets big results)? Red flag!

Completely agree, and honestly, by building a solid blog and doing a little bit of keyword research, the links will come naturally. It will take time but links will come.

 

[Joe Friedrichsen]

Content is and will always be king... as long as it is relevant.

The delivery mechanism of that content is tertiary. If you have good content on the blog, great. If you have good content on model-specific pages, great. It is more about understanding the flow of how someone gets to that content:

#1 Create relevant content
#2 Have a path people want to take to get to that content
#3 Is the delivery mechanism fulfilling #1 and #2?

Great point Alex. I agree.

To address the OP's point, creating a blog that delivers helpful content and that links to other parts of your website to keep shoppers on your website can still have success - even if blogs aren't as effective as they once were.

If you do that, there will be people who read it. Use Google Analytics to analyze how people use your blog and how that contributes to the buyer's journey.