Without the profits being generated from service and parts, where would your dealership be? The time has come for the spotlight to shine on the back-end of the business.

In fact, the average technician generates as much gross profit a month for the dealership as the typical 10-unit a month salesperson. Do the math; the average sales gross minus F&I equals between $1,300 and $1,500 per unit, while a technician generates an average of $130 gross per repair order, which produces about the same gross in only 10 or 11 ROs.
With so much at stake, no service or parts department can afford to send a single customer to the competition, whatever the reason. Today, the importance of taking every opportunity to deliver service excellence at every point you engage with your customers cannot be overstated.
“Given today’s market conditions, where dealers are finding it extremely difficult to achieve profitability, it is vital that they not overlook the importance of ensuring their service customers are satisfied,” notes a recent J.D. Power and Associates report.

“Not only does meeting and exceeding the expectations of customers through after-sales service result in an increased likelihood that those customers will return for service, but it also results in increased likelihood that those customers will stay loyal to the brand when they are next in the market for a vehicle.”

Increasing profits in your service and parts departments is largely the result of three practices:
1.    Increasing customer retention
2.    Selling maintenance
3.    Mandatory, on-rack vehicle inspections

We will focus on these basics because when they’re part of the back-end culture, profits will grow.
“For instance, General Motors believes the average dealership can increase its fixed gross profits by 10 to 15 percent by retaining one more of [every] 10 service customers—plus increase [the] opportunity for additional vehicle sales,” explains Melody Schuette, director of digital marketing and customer retention for GM’s service and parts operations.
“It might be saying the same thing, but a five percent increase in service customer retention will increase the profitability of a dealership by 25 percent,” continues Ronald A.J. Fortt, vice president of dealer development for OneCommand, a relationship marketing company.  “This is absolutely huge,” he says.
So shine the spotlight on the guys and gals in the back end. “Perhaps it’s time, as you celebrate a good month for the sales department, that you also shake the hands of your technicians who’re making as much money for you as your sales staff,” asserts Randy Johnson, president of Car People Marketing, a customer and service retention marketing company.


“Never has the time been better to focus on the service department as the way to get customers into your store,” he continues. “It’s time for general managers and principals, many who do not understand service, to trust their service directors to aggressively sell and market the service department.”

Retain more business.

Let’s start that selling with our internal audience, the staff. Listen carefully to how your salespeople, cashiers, and service writers meet and greet your customers. Shop other area retailers and pay attention to how they interact with you. Does anyone bother to thank you for your business anymore? Is the courtesy and respect they show you no more than a casual “Yup?” Ever want to slap them awake?

No customer wants to be made to feel that he or she is not valued or is a frustration to an employee; “disrespected” is what I’m after here. When was the last time you coached all of your staff to converse with customers with the utmost respect? I was raised in the South, where you addressed any man older than you as “sir” and all women as “ma’am.” I have yet to insult anyone by addressing them with such formality; I doubt your staff would either if you instituted such a policy.
Why is such informality and sloppiness tolerated in ourselves and in those who work for us? Customers, even those who are informal and sloppy themselves, deserve respect when they’re doing business with you.


Which brings me to retention; a high customer retention rate is comprised of more than respectful dialogue and overall courtesy—though I believe it starts there—it’s also earned through:

•    Communication via email, phone, or letter that is personalized, considerate, and designed to engage customers with your dealership.
•    Convenience in scheduling appointments, interacting with the service lane, and in the hours you’re open to handle customers’ business.
•    Confidence earned by fixing customers’ vehicles right the first time as well as by identifying vehicle needs not yet evident, which if ignored could leave the customer stranded later.
•    Commitment to improving retention by instituting procedures and policies that are proven to generate the desired results and by fostering a culture that establishes your service department above all others, including independents.

“These [are] things you can change to make the customer choose you,” Johnson says. “Don’t encourage customers to find a better deal elsewhere…reel them in.”
First, he asks: Why not coach the advisor staff to sell services rather than take orders? “The service sales manager is a motivator, coach, and trainer,” Johnson explains, “who helps his staff learn how to handle objections and work harder for the business rather than taking a ‘no’ at face value.”
“Second, get convenient. Why is the dealership service department closed on Saturday? We’ve been conditioned to believe there’s no business on Saturday, yet why is Saturday the busiest day for independent repair shops?” Johnson asks.

Being convenient applies to the many ways the customer touches the dealerships.

Johnson says a study recently conducted by Car People Marketing was eye opening.

•    74 out of 150 test calls to dealerships were not answered within five rings or were put on hold for two minutes.
•    Of the calls answered, 85 percent did not ask for the caller’s name and simply quoted a price for a service.
•    97 percent never asked for the appointment.

“Dealers should not spend a dime in advertising to increase their RO count if they can’t answer the phone right away,” Johnson advises.
Johnson also admonishes dealers to get competitive. Here is one way dealers can get competitive immediately: Charge $17.95 per lube, oil, and filter (LOF). He says an LOF price below $17.95 is perceived with suspicion by consumers and anything higher prices the dealer out of the market.

Sell more maintenance.

One might conclude that with consumers so concerned about high fuel costs, the dollars for vehicle maintenance just aren’t there. Perhaps, but doesn’t that mean now is the time to aggressively market fuel-saving maintenance services?


“Service consultants need to focus on every single customer; we’re losing customers daily by not meeting their service needs,” remarks David Brown of Brown and Associates, fixed operations trainers and consultants.

“Sell them on fuel-saving maintenance items; the following,” he says, “are proven to help customers get more miles per gallon from their vehicles:”

1.    Proper tire inflation
2.    Regular fuel and air filter replacement
3.    Use of OEM-recommended grades of motor oil
4.    Reducing the number of errand trips
5.    Eliminating quick starts, stops, and high speeds
6.    Removing weight often carried in trunks

Insist every vehicle that comes in for service gets a walk-around. “A good walk-around should take about three minutes,” Brown continues. “Always ask the customer permission to do this, which accomplishes two goals—it alerts the customer that you’ll be looking for additional needed services and that the customer might receive a call later in the day about that and second, the walk-around helps identify existing dings and dents that, if not brought to the owner’s attention at this point, might come back as a costly accusation later.”
Brown also believes that recommending that owners install replacement wiper blades, hoses, and belts, where needed, can add half of an hour to every repair order. Over the course of a year, the dollars added to the bottom line can be significant.
Inspect every vehicle.

Some inspections just can’t be done while the vehicle sits in the service lane. Only on a lift can brakes, driveline, and chassis be thoroughly inspected. Many advocates insist that on-rack inspections should be made of every vehicle in the shop.
“It presents the biggest opportunity to provide an impact for the dealer,” advises David Boyle, president and COO of Mobile Productivity Inc., (MPi) a company that markets technology to help service departments conduct structured, process-driven vehicle inspections.
“We believe the real opportunity for dealers to control their service revenue stream is by selling more services to the customers they already have, which is done through the vehicle inspection process. Much data suggests that for most dealerships this is often a poorly performed process,” Boyle notes.
Too many inspection processes, if done at all, are paper-based, without structure and consistency, so measuring and reporting are difficult.
MPi’s world class inspection product, Edge, is a structured, computerized inspection process that delivers a more thorough, consistent inspection of every vehicle every time, the company says.

“Of the dealers enrolled in our program, the average up-sell per inspection across those dealers is $123 per inspection—an increase of $88 parts and labor per RO, which is substantial once you factor in the number of opportunities or ROs a month,” Boyle explains.

Increase parts profits.


Every labor dollar should generate 50cents in parts sales, which is why programs like walk-arounds and on-rack inspections help service grosses grow. The relationship is so significant that some OEMs have contacted MPi about its inspection program to learn more about how it might be leveraged to help their dealers sell more parts, i.e. increase parts revenues for the OEM.

The opportunity to make more parts dollars also exists in your special order parts (SOP) department simply by making sure SOP orders are actually converted to cash.
If SOP customers fail to return to pick up their part or if they fail to bring the vehicle back in for the part to be installed, SOPs get quite expensive for you. For instance, an hour of labor revenue is lost when a window repair can’t be made on the first visit. If the customer can’t be brought back into the department when the SOP does arrive, another hour of labor revenue is lost. In addition to labor costs, when the SOP isn’t installed, it becomes cash tied up in the parts bin, cash that could have been used for more productive purposes.
Today, technology makes keeping in touch with customers, wherever they touch the dealership, fast and easy. This hands-off reminder approach relieves parts staff of having to telephone or address post card reminders to keep SOP customers informed and to close the service loop. Too often SOPs are looked upon from service’s perspective as “not my job.” So, whether your parts department takes an active stance about communicating SOP arrivals with customers or not, technology can simplify this administrative function and ensure that this communication is indeed done. “Even if your process is to mail a post card when SOPs arrive in your store, an automated customer communications system that notifies the customer via phone, email, text, or letter can ensure no customer and his or her related SOP and labor revenue are lost or neglected,” remarks OneCommand’s Fortt.

This communication should not only notify the customer the part is in but, if service is involved, the message should also invite the customer to call your service department to schedule the work. Some systems even enable the customer to schedule an appointment simply by pressing a button on their phone.

Communicating with customers

Speaking of communications, one key to increasing service business is better, more frequent, more personalized communications with customers, active and not. Most dealership computer systems feature modules for generating customer mailers; at a minimum, use these regularly; customize them and make them personal to engage customers and motivate them to do more business with you.

J.D. Powers’ recent dealer services satisfaction survey finds some interesting points about customer communications:


•    Communicating with customers after service work has been completed has a notably strong impact on satisfaction, particularly through increasing customer perceptions of fairness of charges and the value of service received.
•    For customers receiving an explanation of work performed or an explanation of charges, satisfaction is approximately 100 points higher, on average, than if no explanations were provided.
•    Approximately 82 percent of customers report that they received explanations of the work performed on their vehicle, while 58 percent say they received an explanation of charges, when necessary.


“Many times, it is the quality of communication provided by service personnel that makes the difference between a satisfied customer and a true advocate,” stresses David Sargent, vice president of automotive research at J.D. Power. “When customers are provided with clear explanations as to why the work performed on their vehicle was necessary, as well as the reasoning behind the charges, it improves satisfaction with the value of the work performed, as well as perceptions of the fairness and honesty of the dealer.”
“Consistently following these relatively simple steps helps to foster trust among customers, which is critical to building loyalty for future service work as well as future sales. For example, 78 percent of customers who rate the fairness of charges as ‘outstanding’ say that they will return to the dealership for routine maintenance after the warranty expires, while only 49 percent of customers who provide ‘average’ fairness ratings say the same,” he continues.

The study also finds the following key patterns:

-    While five percent of customers say that they would prefer to schedule their service visit with the dealer via the Internet, only one percent of customers actually do so. The vast majority of customers—74 percent—call the dealership to schedule an appointment, while 25 percent of customers just drop in.

-    When vehicles are returned to the customer cleaner than they were when received by the dealer, satisfaction scores average 48 points higher than scores provided by customers whose vehicles showed no difference in cleanliness. There is a particularly large decline in satisfaction, 202 points on average, however, if vehicles are returned less clean than when they were received.

-    Among customers who report speaking to a service advisor immediately upon arriving at the dealership, satisfaction scores average 927—224 points higher than among customers who say they waited more than five minutes to speak to a service advisor.
Online appointment scheduling

Several sources for this article disagree with J.D. Power’s findings about the use of online appointment setting. OneCommand’s Fortt, believes that making online service appointment scheduling available gives customers control of the appointment setting process and helps them avoid going through the dealership switchboard.
“The reason some dealers don’t use online appointment setting is they don’t believe how difficult it can be to get through to their own service departments by phone,” Fortt contends. “Dealers are trying to increase their service penetration, but their processes cause the customer to jump through hoops to set an appointment. Why not eliminate those obstacles and set up an online appointment scheduling system?”

Tom Henderson of General Motors adds, “The J.D. Power survey indicates that while five percent of owners report they would like to make appointments online, only one percent actually do. I wonder why that is? My guess is that since this is a relatively new area of business for fixed operations, not many dealers have jumped on board, industry-wide.”
“If you were a customer and tried to make an appointment online, you might get frustrated and pick up the phone and just call the place or worse, go somewhere else. Remember, Internet sales leads took a few years to take root with most dealerships. Now they are an important element in their marketing plans. We think this is an important area of future growth for dealers and have made it a high priority here at GM” Henderson continues.
Even though the percentage of customers who currently contact dealerships online for service appointments is relatively low, some believe that will change. According to Yahoo! alone, more than 50 million consumers search for service or parts online every month and that can translate into dealer business.
“Our dealer Website volume of service leads has quadrupled this year, compared to 2007,” contends GM’s Schuette. “Making sure that your dealership designates someone to respond to online leads can yield dividends.”
For example, GM reports, Classic Chevrolet in Texas manages a large OnStar portfolio that produces an average of 50 service leads per month. These are in addition to the over 65 service leads the dealership receives from its own Website each month.
“We’ve applied what we learned in dealing with online sales leads to online and OnStar service leads,” explains Donna Lawlis, Classic’s Internet leads director. “We look at these leads just as if the people were walking through our front door. It’s plus business for us and our customers appreciate the convenience.”

Communicate with customers more selectively.

Customer communications specialists like OneCommand promote a multi-channel communications strategy. This means reaching out to customers using email, text message, telephone, or letter, whichever way customers tell you they prefer. It should be part of the initial showroom up process and certainly part of the vehicle service check-in process, to confirm by which medium the customer prefers to hear from you.
“Note their preferences in whatever type of program you use to collect and update customer information and then be sure you stick to communicating [with] them using their preferred method,” advises Fortt. “If you do, you’ll realize an increase in your customer response rates.”
Nothing beats mining the dealership customer database for opportunities, however. Analyze it and segment it to identify lost opportunities and then create your communications to those opportunities.

For instance, segment owners for 30,000 or 60,000-mile service intervals for timing chain or belt inspection/replacement services or select those who have declined recommended services during a prior service visit and communicate to them why having the declined service is important to their safety and fuel economy.
Some typical communications your service department should send regularly include: service appointments (i.e. recommended services), service appointment reminders, maintenance service appointments, specials on tires, accessories or parts recall notifications, and business thank-yous and loyalty builder mailings.
Fortt suggests tracking customer visit frequency, labor, and parts gross per customer, heavy repair customers, routine maintenance customers, and other criteria to segment customers into groups that can be more easily targeted by selective mailings.

Fortt notes:

•    Customers are six times more likely to re-purchase from you if they have their vehicle serviced by you.
•    If you lose a customer, you lose a substantial lifetime revenue stream from that customer—money that goes to your competition.
•    Make it simple for customers to schedule service appointments.
•    Use call tracking to monitor customers trying to schedule appointments.
•    Use innovative marketing techniques and multi channel communications based on customer preferences to drive customers back to your dealership.

Some final ideas


Selling accessories and tires through the service and parts department is certainly proven, effective revenue generators for many dealerships. If one had to choose which one to implement first, the vote would unanimously go to tires. Establishing a tire business within your shop boosts customer-pay dollars faster than just about any other tool.

Car People Marketing’s Johnson advocates that you “get into the tire business and look, feel, and smell like you’re in the tire business.”

•    75 percent of customers buy new tires from the first business that suggests to them they might need new tires; be sure to check tire wear during every walk-around and certainly when the vehicle is on the lift.
•    Tire sales most often lead to additional lines on the RO; with the vehicle on the rack, brakes can be inspected thoroughly, shocks tested, springs checked, CV boots checked, brake lines examined, oil leaks identified, u-joints tested, steering components checked, and more.
•    Advertise your tire business aggressively. Independents advertise aggressively. In fact, they advertise three to four times more often than most dealership service departments. With the opportunity of 70 percent gross on service work, why let the independents out advertise you for this business?
•    Start the service relationship with the sale of the vehicle; set the customer’s first service appointment; speak to the customer about the importance of scheduled maintenance; introduce customers to the service and parts staff; and then when the customer becomes a service customer, get to know them, keep in touch and say “thank you.”

You say you don’t know how to put on the sales hat? “If the service manager isn’t adept at sales, he or she can visit the dealership’s sales department and drop in on a few sales meetings to start to learn how to do it,” Fortt says.
“You don’t want to do anything that might cause your customer to contact a competitor, especially when it comes to pricing; your customer might just meet a salesperson at the competition who reels them in.”

Source : www.dealermarketingmagazine.com

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Everyone would agree that usability is an important aspect of Web design. Whether you’re working on a portfolio website, online store or Web app, making your pages easy and enjoyable for your visitors to use is key. Many studies have been done over the years on various aspects of Web and interface design, and the findings are valuable in helping us improve our work. Here are 2 useful usability findings that may help you improve the user experience on your websites.

QUALITY OF DESIGN IS AN INDICATOR OF CREDIBILITY

Various studies have been conducted to find out just what influences people’s perception of a website’s credibility:

• Stanford-Makovsy Web Credibility Study 2002: Investigating What Makes Web Sites Credible Today
• What Makes A Web Site Credible? A Report on a Large Quantitative Study
• The Elements of Computer Credibility
• Elements that Affect Web Credibility: Early Results from a Self-Report Study (Proceedings of ACM CHI 2000 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, v.2, New York: ACM Press)

We don’t know if Fever app is any good, but the sleek user interface and website make a great first impression.

One interesting finding of these studies is that users really do judge a book by its cover… or rather, a website by its design. Elements such as layout, consistency, typography, color and style all affect how users perceive your website and what kind of image you project. Your website should project not only a good image but also the right one for your audience.

Other factors that influence credibility are: the quality of the website’s content, amount of errors, rate of updates, ease of use and trustworthiness of authors.

ABOVE THE FOLD. MOST USERS DO NOT SCROLL

Jakob Nielsen’s study on how much users scroll (in Prioritizing Web Usability) revealed that only 23% of visitors scroll on their first visit to a website. This means that 77% of visitors won’t scroll; they’ll just view the content above the fold (i.e. the area of the page that is visible on the screen without scrolling down). What’s more, the percentage of users who scroll decreases with subsequent visits, with only 16% scrolling on their second visit. This data highlights just how important it is to place your key content on a prominent position, especially on landing pages.

This doesn’t mean you should cram everything in the upper area of the page, just that you should make the best use of that area. Crowding it with content will just make the content inaccessible; when the user sees too much information, they don’t know where to begin looking.

Basecamp makes great use of space. Above the fold (768 pixels high), it shows a large screenshot, tagline, value proposition, call to action, client list, videos and short feature list with images.

This is most important for the home page, where most new visitors will land. So provide the core essentials there:

1. Name of the website,
2. Value proposition of the website (i.e. what benefit users will get from using it),
3. Navigation for the main sections of the website that are relevant to the user.

However, users’ habits have significantly changed since then. Recent studies prove that users are quite comfortable with scrolling and in some situations they are willing to scroll to the bottom of the page. Many users are more comfortable with scrolling than with a pagination, and for many users the most important information of the page isn’t necessarily placed “above the fold” (which is because of the variety of available display resolutions a quite outdated, deprecated term). So it is a good idea to divide your layout into sections for easy scanning, separating them with a lot of white space.

For further information please take a look at the articles Unfolding the fold (Clicktale), Paging VS Scrolling (Wichita University – SURL), Blasting the Myth of the Fold (Boxes and Arrows). (thanks, Fred Leuck).

Source : smashingmagazine.com

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Small selection of web design, usability, and accessibility related results of research, most of them derived from Human Factors International (newsletter). Fortunately, some of them are relatively popular, while others will surely enrich professional self-conception:

1. Design is a key determinant to building online trust with consumers. For motivated users of an information site, bad design (busy layout, small print, too much text) hurts more than good design helps. – Sillence, Briggs, Fishwick, and Harris, 2004.

   Also see Stanford University’s “Guidelines for Web Credibility”.

2. Layout on a web page (whitespace and advanced layout of headers, indentation, and figures) may not measurably influence performance, but it does influence satisfaction. – Chaperro, Shaikh, and Baker, 2005.
3. Experience matters: Blue links are easier to click than black ones, even though black ones have higher visual contrast and are easier to see. – Van Schaik and Ling, 2003.
4. It’s important to consider the users when you have a choice of icons, links, or both. Initial performance is best with the link alone. Frequent users can use either equally effectively. Icons are not faster, relative to text links alone. – Wiedenbeck, 1999.
5. Rules of thumb for icons: Make them as large as feasible, place frequently used icons in a persistent task bar, and arrange them either in a square (first choice) or in a horizontal layout. – Grobelny, Karwowski, and Drury, 2005.
6. The acceptance and impact of animation is enhanced when users are warned to expect it and allowed to start it when they want. – Weiss, Knowlton, and Morrison, 2002.
7. Use of whitespace between paragraphs and in the left and right margins increases comprehension by almost 20 %. – Lin, 2004.
8. A format of 95 characters per line is read significantly faster than shorter line lengths; however, there are no significant differences in comprehension, preference, or overall satisfaction, regardless of line length. – Shaikh, 2005.
9. Applications vs. websites: In general, visual layout guidelines for GUIs also apply to the web, but there are differences to be aware of. For example, dense pages with lots of links take longer to scan for both GUI and web; however, alignment may not be as critical for web pages as previously thought. – Parush, Shwarts, Shtub, and Chandra, 2005.
10. Narrative presentation enhances comprehension and memory. Narrative advertisements produce more positive attitude about the brand and a higher incidence of intent to purchase. – Escalas, 2004.
11. On sites with clear labels and prominent navigation options, users tend to browse rather than search. Searching is no faster than browsing in this context. – Katz and Byrne, 2003.
12. Users will wait longer for better content. Users will wait between 8-10 seconds for information on the web, depending on the quality of the information. – Ryan and Valverde, 2003.
13. Consumer purchase behavior is driven by perceived security, privacy, quality of content and design, in that order. – Ranganathan and Ganapathy, 2002.
14. In 2001, Bernard found that prior user experience with websites dictated where they expected common web page elements to appear on a page. The same still holds true today: Users have clear expectations about where to find the things they want (search and back-to-home links) as well as the things they want to avoid (advertising). – Shaihk and Lenz, 2006.
15. When assessing web accessibility under four conditions (expert review, screenreader using JAWS, automated testing via “Bobby”, and remote testing by blind users) those using screenreaders find the most issues, while automated testing finds the least number of accessibility issues. – Mankoff, Fait, and Tran, 2005.

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Fluent, a new Razorfish report, examines the rise of Social Influence Marketing – the method of employing social media and social influencers to meet a company’s business and marketing objectives. The report features a new proprietary survey that explores how social media informs consumer purchase behavior, and introduces the SIM Score – a new benchmark Razorfish developed to measure a brand’s social influence and favorability relative to its competitors.

Razorfish surveyed 1,000 consumers who reported both social media and e-commerce activity, in an effort to discover how social media and different social influencers affect purchasing decisions.

Razorfish developed a new index, the SIM Score, to determine how a brand is being talked about online. Collaborating with partners TNS Cymfony and the Keller Fay Group, Razorfish measured two factors, “reach” and “likeability,” to establish a brand’s SIM Score relative to its competitors. Recognizing the obvious problem of discounting offline influence, Razorfish also factored in word-of-mouth data from the real world. This report determined a SIM Score of five to six companies within four industries - financial services, pharmaceuticals, media and auto.

View The Report Here

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Why bother exploring social media as a marketing channel for your website or dealership? After all, you could stick to link exchanges, search advertising or the purchase of banner and editorial ads on relevant sites.

Here are some reasons why you should consider using social media:

1. It’s natural. Not only do you get natural links without any discernible pattern, your website is exposed to large groups of people in a spontaneous fashion. This differs from paid advertising which has overt commercial overtones.

1. It’s defensible. Once successfully mastered, social communities can be a great source of web traffic on top of any traffic you are already receiving from search engines. While you can’t easily increase your search engine traffic, social media traffic can be very easily controlled through strategic marketing.

1. It’s low-cost/high returns. If done by yourself, costs are limited to only time and perhaps the expenses involved in hiring a freelance programmer/designer/agency. The benefits will often exceed the cost. It would take you thousands of dollars to buy many links; social media has the ability to give you that for free.

1. It complements other efforts. Social media optimization and marketing is usually community-specific. It doesn’t interfere with any other methods of getting traffic to your website. It can and will fit perfectly with an advertising campaign targeting other websites or search engines.

So How Does Social Media Help Me to Make Money?

It doesn’t. At least not directly. Every site or business that wants to expand and become profitable, needs a core group of supporters who will be willing to make purchases or recommend the site to others. Your site needs to perpetuate itself.

The more supporters you have, the faster word spreads about your site. Social media marketing is an excellent way to get people to come into your site to take a look at at what you have to offer. You will grow when there are a group of loyal visitors ready to always act upon what you have to offer.

Because social media websites can be leveraged for links and better search rankings, they can greatly increase your site’s income potential. For example, you will be able to price ads higher or generate revenue from any paid business models.

Sources: www.doshdosh.com

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Two way conversations
You must listen and respond to your customers. Social Media is not  like setting up a poll on your site.  Having conversations which flow in both directions help you understand the concerns of your customers, why they exist and what you can do to fix them.

The personal touch
Automated responses and standard letters are a great way to sabotage your Social media marketing campaign. Social Media is about equal conversations and recommendation. Just think, would you rather purchase a new camera from a friend who recommends it or an automated newsletter?

Be a part of the community
Acknowledge others in the community which offer value to your business. Take some time to really be a part of the community and share useful knowledge. Personality goes a long way. It’s a bit like making friends; you have give a little to receive. You never know, you may build useful networks that extend offline. If you begin your campaign pushing only your content and disregarding the community, you will be dead on arrival.

A successful Social Media campaign can prove to be one of the key catalysts in growth for a small to medium sized business. It can increase brand exposure and PR for a fraction of traditional advertising costs and effort, as well as provide large scale market research and product refinement ideas at no extra charge.

Soon,  SMM will join SEO as being important aspects of any site owner’s marketing strategy. The speed in which trends evolve on the internet is can often be daunting, but SMM by large companies can be emulated in whole or in part even by very small businesses. It’s not the money. It’s the content marketing mindset that separates success and failure.

Big ideas can beat big budgets.

Source from : socialmediatrader.com

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Social media marketing, which is quickly becoming known to be the modern Industrial Revolution,  is the process of promoting your site or business through social media channels such as Twitter, MySpace, FaceBook, Digg, StumbleUpon, Plurk, Etc.  It is undoubtedly one of the most powerful strategies that will get you links, attention and massive amounts of traffic.

There is no other low-cost promotional method out there that will easily expose your dealership brand online and potentially have customers visiting your website over and over.

When creating posts  of your specials, vehicles or dealer news throughout your Social Media networks, there will be two things to expect:

• Primary and Secondary Traffic. Primary traffic is the large amount of visitors who come directly from social media websites. Secondary traffic is referral traffic from websites which link to and send you visitors, after they come across your content through the social sites.

• High Quality Links. Becoming popular on social news websites like Digg or Reddit will get you a large number of links, some of which may be topically relevant, some not. A good story can realistically acquire a large number of high quality editorial links, most of which cannot be easily bought.

Now let’s translate this into tangible benefits for your dealer website:

1. Links = Better Search Engine Rankings.

When a website receives a large number of natural, permanent links from trusted domains, it develops authority. Search engines trust it. If you optimize your link posts and website structure properly, you can easily start ranking for competitive keywords, which will in turn bring in search engine visitors.

Do this often enough and your search traffic will undoubtedly increase. In a sense, you are obtaining these quality links through borrowed trust. Many online surfers think that if an article is posted by one of their friends or a notable website, then it’s probably worth checking out and referencing through a citation link.

A new website may find it difficult to gain links from a critical mass that is not familiar with it but a trusted social news resource makes it easier for links to come in, because the community and buzz has somewhat ‘certified‘ the value of the site. Note that the actual strength of the article is still of utmost importance for all.

2. Primary + Secondary Traffic = Community/Supporters.

Some people claim that social news websites only send useless traffic, visitors that will often just view a specific webpage and click away. Yes, that’s usually the case. Sites like Digg are notorious for their poor bounce rates: many visitors drop in for the article and then leave after reading it. StumbleUpon(www.StumbleUpon.Com) is much better in this aspect.

But don’t mistake this with a lack of interest. Your subscriber figures will often take big jump up and then stabilize after a few days. If your entire site is relevant to the general interests of the social media website, there will always be a handful of social users who will start to track your site in order to submit future content.

Detractors also ignore the power of ultra targeted secondary traffic. General sites or blogs in the same niche will link to a story that’s popular on social sites, because it adds value for their readers or users. This is done naturally on a daily basis for many.

While primary traffic usually comes in a larger volume, I would argue that secondary traffic is more valuable. Why? Because links from other websites bring visitors who are very likely to be interested in your content. These citation links demonstrate recognition of your site in the eyes of others. It builds your brand.

Think of the social news site as a platform or a soapbox. As something that gives you a chance to be heard or read, even for a brief moment of a few hours. The people who are drawn to your message will visit your site and recommend it to others.

Source from www.doshdosh.com

Check out this interesting video on the statistics of Social Media.

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Cash for Clunkers

Unless you live under a rock, and maybe even then, you’ve probably heard about the Cash for Clunkers program in the last month. The program, which ran from June 22nd to August 24th, created a buzz that was hard to ignore. In fact, the government reports that their official Cash for Clunkers Web site had 16 million hit in that time alone. The endless news coverage and press only helped to add to the excitement.

In addition to grabbing headlines, Cash for Clunkers also brought significant business to auto dealerships. Customers flocked in, looking to trade their old cars and trucks for new ones, and maybe get a little incentive money in the process.

Now that the dust has settled, it is interesting to take a look at what the Cash for Clunkers program actually achieved. The official government Web site has a press release detailing the cars sold and traded in during the program.* Here are a few of the highlights:

• Around 700,000 cars were traded in as clunkers.
• 4% of the clunkers were trucks, and 59% of the people trading them in purchased passenger vehicles.
• Rebate applications were worth 2.877 Billion.
• The average fuel economy for the cars traded in was 15.8 MPG, the average fuel economy of their new car was 24.9 MPG.
• The Toyota Corolla was the most popular new vehicle with those taking advantage of the program.
• The Ford Explorer 4WD was the number one car traded in.

Whether or not you agree with the politics of the Cash for Clunkers program, there is no denying that it made a significant impact on the auto industry. It generated buzz and excitement for new vehicles and brought in consumers. According to the data above, it also appeared to achieve its goal of getting cars with poor fuel economy off the road. How the program’s impact lasts in the months to come remains to be seen.

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John Coyne

John Coyne joins our company in the role of Campaign Coordinator and will be working closely with Tiffany on all of our PPC campaigns. Most recently he was in a Marketing Operations role for a company called VUDU, where he ran their PPC campaigns as well as over saw the implementation of Google Analytics.

Martin Ozolins

Martin Ozolins is our new Network Engineer. Martin has 18 years of experience designing and implementing multi-platform Network Operation Centers, production facilities and LAN/WAN infrastructures worldwide. He will be helping us out on a temporary basis, working with the engineering team on a project for the next few months, and it’s possible we’ll find enough work to keep him on long-term!

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Around the first of August word began spreading about Google’s newest generation of search engine, tentatively named Caffeine. If you haven’t heard of Caffeine yet don’t feel bad. Google is still only in testing mode and has been keeping the whole thing pretty quiet.

But knowing Google it won’t be a secret for long. Caffeine is an attempt to keep the market share Bing and Yahoo have teamed up to take from them. It’s also Google’s attempt to build a fast, better, and more accurate Search Engine. According to Google’s official blog:

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.”*

So how does it stack up? Mashable, a popular Blog, did a detailed test of the new engine. They found that it was faster, and more accurate than the old version of Google. For instance, a search for the definition of dog brought back 359,000,000 results in .12 seconds on Caffeine. On the old it only brought 51,900,000 and took .25 seconds.

How Caffeine will affect the future of Search Engines remains to be seen, but the early reports seem to indicate that Google is raising the bar yet again. At the very least, we can all look forward to searches getting faster and more accurate, and no one would argue that’s a bad thing.

Curious about Caffeine? Try it yourself here.

*http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/08/help-test-some-next-generation.html

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