This year I have encountered a significant increase in the amount of companies fighting for the “new” advertising expense dollars of search engine optimization (seo) and search engine marketing (sem).
Two years ago, even a year …
Social media is a very hot topic and now it appears that every wannabe trainer and even a few well respected ones are jumping on the band wagon to teach dealers social networking and social media. It is an indisputable fact that social media marketing and social networking provides ways to help dealers or any business for that fact to increase brand loyalty and increase the number of inbound leads. I like to think that if it were not for those avenues my business would not be where it is today. My business has been built exclusively on social networking, content and referrals since leaving a dealership setting, we do ZERO outbound marketing.
Just today I received an email from a company that is competing with our upcoming social media and seo bootcamp prior to NADA and decided to do a little research. Other than the email not being can spam compliant a few other points drew my attention in the bad pitch.
“How to use Twitter to find local people to add to your network.”
I found the persons twitter account whose name was on the spam email that was sent out. They have 122 121 followers as of this post.
“The real ROI of social media and how to calculate it.”
How do you measure ROI on your phone line? Your really can’t and I am not trying to start a tracking number debate, tracking numbers measure ROI of ad sources not the communication vessel. Social media is a form of communication that has some quantifiable metrics that can be measured but other than traffic or direct inquiries can’t be measured on a ROI level.
“How to use LinkedIn to connect with the influencers in your market.”
91 Connections on Linkedin 4 Recomendations. Of the thousands of car people on linkedin you would think a linked in pro would be connected with a more than 100 people? Which also leads us to:
“How to get your customers to give you glowing testimonials that everybody in their OWN networks will see.”
Those 4 recommendations will surely sell out their workshop..
Just those four points in their pitch caused me really second guess what they could really deliver.
If a company or individual that you are considering hiring does not do the things well that they are going to teach you, how valuable is the training? Sounds like a cash grab to me.
Before you consider hiring a company or trainer that has the “Magic Bullet” check out their cred, and it is real easy to do when it comes to social media. Use Google to search for names and see how many entries there are in the search engines for their name and/or company name.
One thing that I have to remind my employees is everybody is watching us. Now that I have brought my next generation, my son, into my dealer services company I remind him it’s not what we say we can do it is what we deliver. Build your street cred and people will seek you out then you don’t have to rely on email spam to promote yourself.
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Dealers are being forced to compete not only with each other online but also lead generation sites, affiliate sites, Tier II Regional Marketing and Tier I OEM marketing. This creates a virtual battle field for them to navigate especially when they are forced to make decisions about things they do not understand such as search engine optimization.
