It's great that your clients' blogs are ranking well. What is that doing for them selling cars or getting traffic to their site?
Let me try to explain the best I can how this sells cars and drives traffic. Other than the fact it can cast a larger net and measure explicitly how people use information and make informed purchase decisions, which then reveal the key indicators of how consumers act in the "browse - shop - buy" stages of a deciding on a car.
Lets consider one is using a blog as a form of communication since that is why they exist.
They don't exist because people needed something strong for SEO, they exist because they are
powerful communication tools.
Communication Preferences Are Changing - Mobile - Social - Real Time - Sharing And Inviting others into the conversation
When someone calls a dealership it would be absurd to run their credit before inviting them to the store. But if they show up and aren't pre-qualified are you risking the chance of losing someone who walks through the door that is?
So instead of insulting their financial status, perhaps
there is a way to attract these types of people who can afford it.
Lets consider then, the fact that selling someone a car means 99.9% of the time they have to go into the dealership.
So if that's the case, and you rely on people coming into your dealership then
how do you find these people? Is that the marketing departments responsibility? Is it the dealers problem because they stopped buying leads? What I'm getting at is, unless you've got a solid referral and lead source that works for you then you are at the mercy of those who provide you with customers.
Marketing is now a significant part of your daily work
Most realize marketing strategies are changing faster than companies with even the deepest pockets can manage to keep up with.(this is good news for dealers BTW).
Big companies led by old leadership
insist on controlling the brand at the highest levels of the organization. This is changing now that companies like Ford have invested and can show the ROI on social media.
My evaluation of measuring the dealer website visitors and their behavior is that two major groups exist,
those who already know who you are and
those that don't. An indication of someone who already knows you in your reporting is that they use search terms that include your brand name.
This represents a huge percentage of overall traffic to a dealers website, branded keywords in the search terms used.
Now, if we
first look at the ones who
already know you, lets divide those into people who either send you referrals and those who don't. If you were to apply some sophisticated mathematical formula to those who send referrals you could make a fairly confident assumption that there is a linear relationship between the number of those who refer business to you and the overall number of people who know you.
The more people who know you, the more referral type customers you can stand to gain, the more word of mouth business, the more money you make.
And considering that someone has recommended you, and lets say
they know you always say "make an appointment", then odds are they will do so in having faith from the referral source. These people are being prepped without you having to do anything.
Now lets say in order to do this you must
put the relationship before the deal, if that's not likely than a blog is probably not going to produce for you.
Personally, all I care about is selling cars to make money for my family. If a blog isn't going to do that for me, then there is no need to do it.[/blog]
This tells me that you have not yet identified your ideal customer. Because you don't start a conversation with "Bob, you must be calling because you finally decided you are buying a car and want me to prequalify you".
Instead you have more than one conversation, expressing interest in what matters to them, and out of this relationship you know what line of work they're in, whether they like Starbucks coffee every morning, and most importantly how many ways you can help them be more successful by following them on Twitter, and ideally reading their blog(because your ideal customer has one and thats how you met) where they would be ecstatic to get comments from you that lead others to comment.
So, are you telling me that just because my blog is a subdirectory of my site, that I won't get links back? Even if my content is of the same high quality? That doesn't make sense. Every blog out there is sacked full of advertisements. My blog has zero, it just happens to be affiliated with my store.
Are you sure? It reads very much like an advertisement to me.
It just seems weird to me to spend a ton of time on a blog that isn't doing anything for your store. If you are going to do that - blog about something where you can at least reap some affiliate dollars or something.
If you have a new blog then you probably don't have an audience. If you don't know who your audience is, or what they respond to then yes I would say it isn't going to go far.
And, don't tell me it is building high funnel prospects and working towards branding - because I don't care about anyone buying a car unless they are within a 90 mile radius of my dealership. The guy in Kansas or California reading my blog doesn't matter to me, if it isn't at least giving me the ability to get deep links to my site.
Ok, so what I'm hearing is that your ideal customer lives within a 90 mile radius of your dealership.
What else do you know about this customer?
What are you willing to learn about them that doesn't involve them buying a car?
