2014
Autospeak-Straight Talk contains articles covering digital and social media marketing social communities and events marketing
I have a confession to make. I abandon things. Online shopping carts, brands, stores, emails, entire email addresses. In a way, I am the consumer marketer’s worst nightmare. Not only do I abandon brands and companies, I also abandon my loyalties — even when I honestly prefer one brand over another. I use Safeway.com for groceries, and Amazon Prime for pretty much anything else, but in a pinch, I’ll just as easily use Instacart or Taskrabbit or Craigslist.
Wait, what was I saying? My Droid just alerted me of a new message from Facebook, and another tone just signaled to me on my phone and laptop (simultaneously) that I had a new work email, and now I can’t remember what I was saying to you…
The World is Getting Noisier
My point is that noise – whether it’s your competitor, or one of your audience’s many devices – is louder than ever these days. Brands push tons of information across channels, without any care to making the information relevant, and the net result is predictable: people tune out.
For example, every Saturday at 9am I get a coupon from a well-known large retail everything chain, highlighting their line of children’s clothing. I have no children, and have never bought children’s clothes from them before – I’m simply being batch and blasted. When I turn on the TV, drive down the street, lift the lid of my laptop, there is noise. So I know that I’m not the only one abandoning brands left and right – consumers all over are tuning out.
Your audience is drowned by an influx of messaging every single day. The average customer is exposed to at least 2,904 media messages. They will pay attention to 52 of those messages, and will positively remember only four of them.
So how will you make the final cut?
Conversations: The Abandonment Cure
Five years ago, I read every email that I received in my personal email. Gone are those days! Here’s what I listen to now: Social (what are my friends saying, what is hot, what do I trust?); text messages from friends and family; and conversations.
Conversations, you say? Yes, conversations. Meaningful, two-way dialogue with friends, family, and yes, brands. Whether they capture my attention in email, or through text, or on social, if the message is relevant to me (based on my persona, activity, and history) I’m most likely to pay attention. Gone are the days when “batch and blast email†programs actually worked. If I don’t feel that the brands emailing me understand my interests, I’m out.
And I’m not the only one. Consider me the representative of all of your customers. Creating these kinds of conversations is the only way marketers can get my attention, and it’s the only way you’ll get the attention of yours. The consumer marketer has to pay attention to me and my attributes, or I will abandon ship. (This actually applies to B2B marketers also – after all, the decision-makers at companies are individuals, too.)
Do you, as a consumer marketer, have visibility into your consumer’s needs? If you’re looking to create relevant conversations, here are some boxes you might want to check:
- Do you offer your audience relevant content, leveraging data to make the best recommendations?
- Are you sending targeted, segmented emails based on their demographics, behaviors, and buying histories?
- Are you personalizing your website to attract their attention?
By:Â Letty Ernst
3 Valuable Lessons I Learned About Automotive Social Media in 3 Days
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(Posted on Feb 4, 2014 at 12:32PM )
Last week, I started working for Wikimotive as a social media rep. It’s my job to maintain a dealer’s social media presence by creating great content that gets users interacting, and maintain that interaction in order to build a connection.
The automotive industry is new to me; my social media experience up to this point has been general content marketing, which is focused on generating page views and interactions, not necessarily business. The great thing about social media, though, is that my experience in content marketing easily relates to business, as the content I create and promote also generates page views and interactions — it’s simply fine-tuned for a local audience full of potential customers.
With that said, here are three valuable things I learned about automotive social media in 3 days:
1. Don’t Concern Yourself with Big Numbers
Coming from content marketing, bigger was always better. The goal is to drive as much traffic to a blog or piece of content as possible, as quick as possible, and move on.
With automotive marketing, the idea isn’t to necessarily stop worrying about stats and growth, but to realize that you’re not creating “viral†content that will appeal to millions of people all over the world. You’re focusing on an extremely niche market in which precise user targeting is everything. That doesn’t mean your content shouldn’t be appealing to millions, it simply means that ten views from local users is worth more than 10,000 from those living on the opposite side of the country.
If your marketing firm is posting big numbers from your various social media pages, ask them these questions:
- Where is the majority of that traffic coming from?
- Was the promoted content directly related to my business?
- Are users showing interest in my inventory?
Customer relations is the most important aspect of automotive marketing. Your sales people know this better than anyone. If they’re not there to greet a customer, they’ve lost a potential sale. And if they don’t make a connection with a customer, they’re less likely to follow through with a purchase.
Your social media team needs to know how to interact with users without overtly pushing a sale before the user shows interest. A good social media rep. knows when to begin asking questions about a user’s interest, and when to simply maintain positive interaction with the user.
You’ll find amazing things can happen when your team puts genuine effort into their interactions with your users. It’s what turns users into customers.
 3. Quality, Relevant Content is Gold
By taking the time to find and craft quality, relevant content, your social media team is paving the way for that crucial interaction. Through my experience in content marketing, I’ve learned about the power of great content, and its effect on users. It can elicit an emotional response, allowing your team to begin building a connection between them and your business.
The Automotive Industry is no exception. Great content will always catch a user’s eye, and that will give them a reason to begin interacting with you. From there, as long as the content is relevant to your business, you can swing the topic of discussion and potentially gain a customer.
By MARK FROST
Wikimotive