Autospeak-Straight Talk contains articles covering digital and social media marketing social communities and events marketing

CMO Council releases auto report indicating lack of social media leverage

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(Posted on Mar 11, 2014 at 12:43PM )
The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council has released a report indicating that the auto industry ecosystem should do more to leverage social media as a platform for driving business leads into sales pipelines.
Social media is stimulating extensive auto-related conversations and content that create major opportunities to identify likely buyers and engage them based on their preferences and purchase intent, according to the report, which is entitled 'Turning Social Feeds Into Business Leads'. 


Developed in partnership with hoojook, a Silicon Valley social media intelligence company focused on the auto sector, the new report finds auto industry marketers are in various stages of adopting social marketing strategies and practices. Most see social as a potentially powerful medium for understanding and engaging consumers, but they are early in the development of marketing and business metrics, as well as processes that integrate social media data more effectively in the sales funnel.

"Social represents an important marketing frontier for the automotive industry," said Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council. "Senior marketers recognise its capacity to deliver actionable, real-time insights that can help drive overall marketing effectiveness. They also see its value as a dynamic channel for influencing brand preference and purchase. Now they need to take the next step by integrating social more directly into the sales funnel and using it as a new platform for delivering qualified leads." 

Social media evidence

There is plenty of evidence demonstrating the potential of social as a marketing channel across manufacturing brands, dealerships and aftermarket products and services. For example:


• 38% of consumers say they will consult social media in making their next car purchase 
• 23% of car buyers say they use social media to communicate their purchase experience
• 84% of automotive shoppers are on Facebook and 24% of them have used Facebook as a resource for making their vehicle purchases
• 40% of new car purchases over the next 10 years will be made by Millennials
• 94% of millennial car buyers gather information online
• Clicks on Facebook auto ads climbed from 16% to 39% between October 2012 and April 2013



Based on interviews with senior marketers and executives from auto manufacturers, dealer networks, aftermarket service providers and B2B automotive solutions companies such as Autonation, Costco Auto Program, Nissan, Cadillac, Car MD, KIA, Aspen, Express Oil Change, Mazda, Snap-on, Dealertrack, DME Automotive, the report finds that senior marketers are highly interested in developing and using new systems and processes to leverage social more effectively for lead acquisition and acceleration. However, most say they are only in the very early stages of the process and often express caution about possible brand reputation issues when overtly marketing to individuals on social.

Potential for an effective medium

Nonetheless, the report argues that the use of social in combination with natural language processing and big data analytics, along with social's ability to deliver meaningful content and commentary in context, has the potential to make it a highly effective medium for identifying, segmenting and engaging consumers based on preferences and where they are in the purchase cycle.

"The technology now exists to process and analyse social streams. Not only to understand broader consumer attitudes and reputational issues but also to identify, segment and profile individual consumers based on where they are in the purchase cycle, their preferences and needs and psychographic characteristics that influence how they want to engage with brands and service providers," said Shauli Chaudhuri, CEO of hoojook. 

Other report insights


• Campaigns focused on cars generate much higher consumer engagement and interest than other social media initiatives, such as charitable causes
• Reputation management is seen as potentially the most critical aspect of social marketing, with consumer-generated content and commentary having a huge influence on purchasing decisions
• Marketers view social as most effective when integrated with other channels and marketing approaches; many view social analytics as an invaluable source of insight for other digital and offline marketing efforts
• Facebook is widely regarded as the most powerful social channel for automotive, but marketers say other channels can be more effective, depending on the need and strategy


BIZCOMMUNITY.COM Daily Industry News

Your Brand: You, Your Customers and Employees

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(Posted on Mar 6, 2014 at 03:49PM )
Picture Taking care of the people that take care of you can reap big rewards when showing your customers and employees that you care for and appreciate them. There is no better or more economical way to accomplish this than with an onsite social community that can be successfully accomplished in any organization.

For example Lululemon produces sports apparel for women that is fashionable, environmentally friendly, and as technically advanced as sports apparel for men. The company spends virtually nothing on advertising. Instead, they build product awareness and forge ties with local communities through the community portal on their website.

They are encouraged to apply to become Lululemon ambassadors, “unique individuals … who embody the Lululemon lifestyle and live our culture.” The company now has over 200 stores, and sales soared from US $40 million to US $1.37 billion in eight years. In the US alone, sales grew 40 percent in 2012.

The following article by Michelle Killebrew, Are You Ignoring Your Best Brand Advocates?,  tells us what empowering your employees can accomplish for your organization and the growing need to recognize all the things that they do and can do for your organization.

One reason this is such a powerful strategy is that it provides you with a way to leverage your entire customer and employee base. One of the most powerful ways to spread your message on social networks is to get customers to share news of their purchase from you. The message may be delivered on the social network, but it originates on your site. Community provides an effective mechanism on your site to encourage purchase-sharing and by showing your customer and employee centric culture.

If you limit your social strategy to the social networks, you are missing the chance to leverage Social when it will help you most. You know that many of your shoppers are also going to your competitors’ sites. Why wouldn’t you give yourself the advantage of showing those shoppers that their friends, friends of friends and neighbors shop with you?

An onsite community strategy is all about connecting you with the social networks to improve the shopping experience for your customers and the bottom line for you. To fully deliver on the value promise of social networks, the information needs to be able to flow in both directions.

William Cosgrove
Bill Cosgrove Straight Talk

4 strategies for getting ROI from Facebook Ads

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(Posted on Mar 3, 2014 at 12:31PM )
Are you caught up with the most recent online marketing changes, updates and theories? Wishpond’s James Scherer, in this four-part series, will examine the most influential changes that have happened in the past six months, and how those changes affect you and your business on a daily basis.

In this final installment, Scherer will discuss four strategies for getting a solid return on investment from Facebook Ads. In Part 1, Scherer looked at the rise of social media optimization. Part 2 covered Content Shock — what it is and why it matters. Part 3 examined what Facebook’s Edgerank changes mean for marketers.


Facebook Ads often get a bad rap, but they’ve been steadily improving. The average click-thru rate for Facebook Ads has jumped 275% since 2012. ROI has increased 152% in the past 18 months.

There are countless ways you can dive a little deeper into Facebook Advertising to find an ROI that works for your business. Learning the strategies below requires a bit more time and effort, but it can also open up a whole new platform for generating brand awareness, promoting your products, and even generating leads.

Here are four (somewhat advanced) strategies to get a workable ROI out of Facebook Ads:

1. Facebook Ads can be used for way more than just promotion of a sale. You can create an ad used to generate Facebook likes for your page (say, with a like-gated contest or promotion) and set the payment plan to Cost-Per-Like — meaning you pay based on how the ad performs for your brand. (Well-designed, optimized ads can have a CPL of only 30 cents!) That’s pretty cool given that Syncapse found that a Facebook like was worth, on average, $174 to brands.

2. They’re awesome for lead generation. You can target Facebook Ads so specifically that only people who have stated (in no uncertain terms) that they’re interested in your field or sector will see them and traffic through to a lead-generating landing page. My favorite way to generate leads with Facebook Ads is to promote an e-mail-gated ebook to people who have stated they are interested in that ebook’s subject. Target the ad as specifically as possible and then connect it to an optimized landing page, which discusses how the ebook can benefit its reader and provides an e-mail-gated download button.

3. Targeting by custom audience. Using this method, in which you import your business’ e-mail list into your Facebook Ad tool and find the corresponding Facebook user, means you can re-target those lapsed customers who haven’t bought from you in a few months, or reward your loyal customers with a Facebook-exclusive offer. Before you import your contact list, be sure you’ve segmented it intelligently based on your ad goals. Consider importing only your most recent merchants (past 6 months) and targeting them with an ad with copy such as “How are you liking [Your Business]? Click to get our exclusive 50% off coupon available only to loyal customers!”

4. Targeting by lookalike audience. Available only with the Power Editor plugin, lookalike targeting finds Facebook users similar to your imported custom audience list. This means you can generate leads with all the characteristics of your existing customers – thereby dramatically increasing your ad click-through-rate. Lookalike audience targeting is effective not only based on a custom audience who have bought from you, but how about targeting Facebook users exactly like your custom audience of ebook subscribers? Your CTR can be awesome, but be aware you’ll need at least 10,000 people in your custom audience to find results!

James Scherer is a content marketer for Wishpond and author of the ebook The Complete Guide to Facebook Ads.Wishpond makes it easy to run Facebook Ads, create landing pages & contests, email automation campaigns & manage all of your business’ contacts.

Your W.I.T.T.S hold the keys to Social Success

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(Posted on Feb 28, 2014 at 01:35PM )
There is not a more cost effective way to leverage your W.I.T.T.s  than by including an Onsite Community as part of your social and digital marketing mix and the advantages are real and the reasons all around us.

Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people from the online community.

Crowdsourcing is best achieved at scale by first using your W.I.T.T.S to pull it all together into a social networking ecosystem that is managed, monitored and revolves around one central location-Your company website.

By now you are probably wondering “what is W.I.T.T.S?” W.I.T.T.S is the first step in forming a truly effective social networking ecosystem.

1.       First Identify the influencers Within your community and rank them in order of importance and

2.       Turn those Influencers within your community into advocates of the firm by

3.     Marketing To these influencers with special incentives to increase awareness of the firm within the community and finally

4.       Marketing Through your community using the influencers within your community to increase market awareness of your company amongst target markets.

Exactly what is included in Influencer Marketing depends on the context (B2C or B2B) and the medium of influence transmission (online or offline, or both). But it is increasingly accepted that companies should be identifying and engaging with influencers.

As marketing experts Keller and Berry note, " Business is working harder and paying more to pursue people who are trying to watch and listen less to its messages." Targeting influencers is seen as a means of amplifying marketing messages, in order to counteract the growing tendency of prospective customers to ignore marketing.

Onsite social communities and newsletters are an effective and low cost method in which to engage with and learn from influencers both in B2C and B2C.

Social Communities allow businesses not only to connect and follow and market to existing customers but also to engage with their employee base. This is a centralized way in which to communicate with, retain and turn your existing customers and employees into marketing influencers.

But a large part of the problem is that many companies view social technologies as yet another tool to be implemented rather than as an enabler of organizational and marketing transformation.

It is said that one in every 10 Americans is what they call an "influential." These people have a tremendous impact on the rest of society because their ideas and opinions are sought out by the friends, family and community members around them. The conversations they hold and the examples they set have the power to shape your community's and hence your social networking ecosystems behaviors and attitudes as a whole.

Based on this, how many untapped influential customers might already be in your database. And by finding and utilizing those existing untapped influencers and making them an advocate for your business is a treasure waiting to be utilized.

By using your W.I.T.T.S as a base from which to launch your crowdsourcing, you will have created a permanent infrastructure to form most effective social networking ecosystem that will live on and survive all the trending fads that are inconsistent and constantly being replaced.

Also read Online Community Benefits

William Cosgrove
Bill Cosgrove Straight Talk

10 Ways To Teach Your Customers to Buy From You

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(Posted on Feb 24, 2014 at 05:12PM )
Social media marketing has changed the approach to selling today and requires a new perspective on how to attract clients. If we listen to what is happening in the marketplace today across social media channels inbound marketing offers a higher probability of conversion than outbound marketing strategies.

This applies not only to the B2C sector but also to the B2B sectors where people’s expectations have shifted to being educated and informed first and engaging with a company in their own way in their own time.

Another point to make is how important the relationship is after the sale.  In Gerry Morin’s article below he indirectly refers to a fact that I and others have been stressing for years,  “I have purchased over 10 cars in my lifetime and cannot remember any of the names, faces or other details of the people who sold them to me. However, I remember every car mechanic I’ve ever worked with. I remember each of them because we built a trusting relationship. They taught me and did not sell me. They showed me how to maintain my car and advised me on what to look for when buying a new car. They were my trusted advisor who helped me fix my current problem and frame my future purchase. Wow!”,

The sale takes but a fleeting moment to conclude compared to the relationship with the customer after the sale that will last for years if nurtured properly and pay you back many times over. See Focus on the Heart and Not Just The Wallet

William Cosgrove
Bill Cosgrove Straight Talk


 
10 Ways To Teach Your Customers to Buy From You
When it comes successful social selling and meeting your sales quota, being more like a car mechanic, instead of a car salesman, might be the key to your success. Huh? How are you going to meet your quota if you don’t act like the tenacious and famous car salesman, Cal Worthington?


 
I have purchased over 10 cars in my lifetime and cannot remember any of the names, faces or other details of the people who sold them to me. However, I remember every car mechanic I’ve ever worked with. I remember each of them because we built a trusting relationship. They taught me and did not sell me. They showed me how to maintain my car and advised me on what to look for when buying a new car. They were my trusted advisor who helped me fix my current problem and frame my future purchase. Wow!

Whether you are selling enterprise software solutions in the cloud or trading show shipping services you can position yourself as a teacher, like my car mechanics, and reap the rewards of being a top seller.

Social Selling Lessons | Be A Teacher Not A Seller1. Differentiate Yourself From The Sales Sharks. With InsideView reporting that 90% of CEO’s do not return cold emails or calls, becoming a trusted advisor and teacher to your customers makes sense. It’s the only way to break through to them. Don’t ‘look’ like the typical sales professional and you will separate yourself form the herd of sales sharks.

2. Don’t Be All About Making A Deal. Instead of focusing on a small amount of sales, build a large social network people modeled after your customers and their influencers. 75% of B2B decision makers use social media to learn. So, plug into this larger network, to bust your quota.

3. Pass On Valuable Information. Don’t use your social media and network channels to promote your solutions. Pass on valuable information, instead, to lead the conversation to you when the time is right to buy. You want to be known for handing out knowledge and not brochures.

4. Associate Yourself With Great 3rd-part Brands. You are the company you keep, so keep good company. Associate yourself with great knowledge brands, like Harvard Business Review, Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, to build your reputation and brand.

5. Think Outside The Trade-Show Booth. Cast the trade booth sales mentality away and spread your knowledge so people will eventually visit your trade booth when it’s time to buy; 73% of customers are willing to engage with you on social media, so get to it!

6. Use Social Media To Teach And Not Sell. Selling is best done face-to-face. However, Social Media Today reports B2B buyers look at an average of over 10 digital resources before ever making a purchase. Since customers need to learn before they buy, use this opportunity on social media to connect. Your customers are there whether or not you are.

7. Teach And Connect With Today’s Technology. Connect and get on the radar of your customers and potential networks by retweeting, sharing, commenting and favoriting others’ content. Intersecting with their learning tools is a great way to build a relationship instead of finding and phoning them from a LinkedIn search. LinkedIn reports 85% of IT Decision Makers use social networks for business, so your future customers are waiting for you to socially engage.

8. Develop Insights. Before you teach and connect with your customers, you need to listen to the customer and their customers. Listening is a great way to prepare for your connections and calls. SirisuDecisions reports 82% B2B decision makers think sales representatives are unprepared for meetings, so this insight-driven approach will help you build the best social selling lesson plan.

9. Tap Into The Ready-made Network. There is an entire social community on LinkedIn, Twitter and blogs, where customers are tapping to learn how to be smarter, more effective, more efficient to make more money. Determine how to tap into this potential, leverage the rules of engagement, and position yourself as a teacher; especially since the Sales Benchmark Index reports reps with 5000+ linked in connections have a 98% chance of attaining quota.

10. Be A Publisher. In addition to curating and passing on the great content to your network, create your own assets on a blog. Blogging is the social selling secret weapon. Hubspot reports that 92% of companies that blog multiple times per day have acquired a customer from their blog, so this strategy seems like a no-brainer!

Do you have another teaching tip to share? If so, please comment below. Or, contact me directly at MarketingThink.com, on LinkedIn, Twitter or Google+.

If you are looking to set yourself up as a social selling teacher, you might enjoy learning how to:


So, quit selling the sales sizzle to focus on educating your customer. If you are looking to make quota then a differentiating social selling approach, like an advising car mechanic, will place you in the driver’s seat to success! And if you have a recommendation for a new mechanic, let me know. Mine just retired!

By Gerry Moran


Image Source: BTSTire.com

The Dark Side of Social Media

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(Posted on Feb 18, 2014 at 02:52PM )
Picture I was inspired to write this by a couple of retired academics that I have been meeting with during my stays here in Colombia, SA to discuss the differences in our respective languages and to solve the world’s problems and also some articles I’ve recently read to which I have  linked to throughout this article.

It is sometimes it is important to break from the norm, take a broader view and point out that social media is not only an effective marketing tool but also a news dissemination tool that can often show the darker side of the human species and the suffering that it brings with it.

It is a sad fact that money and power are and always will be driving forces of the human condition and there are some that will stop at nothing to have it. This includes destroying whole countries in the process and inflicting mass suffering on its population.

Social Media can effectively get out the news of how greed and the quest for power will stop at nothing to maintain control at any cost which includes the most atrocious offenses against humanity. From our neighbors in the Middle East to Venezuela social media can be a powerful weapon against this oppression and we sometimes tend to unconsciously block it out in our own quest to get ahead to improve our own lives and even some that need to quench that thirst for money, prestige and power.

And is social media just another media form that further desensitizes us as the grave injustices we talk about today are forgotten to embrace the next news media headline tomorrow?

 And “Is there something else that happens in these times of crisis that reveals a dark side of the human condition. When something like the Boston bombing happens, we tend to turn into sheep. Yes, we need to discover critical information. Yes, we need to help each other grieve and overcome. But beyond that, we become sheep for the media. I don’t know about you, but having the media serve as our shepherds during times of crisis doesn’t comfort me one bit. Sure, the media might break important news – and sometimes may get it right – but trust me when I say that the media doesn’t really care about you. It doesn’t exist to inform you. The media (all media) exists to sell advertising. Period. Informing you is a byproduct of this main goal. So whether it’s a hurricane bearing down on the Gulf Coast, or a bomber hiding out in a neighborhood, when you’re glued to the television or computer to satisfy your need to consume this critical information – you’re giving the media exactly what they want. Eyeballs. I read a piece on Slate last night that offers an excellent alternative to becoming sheep during time of crisis. I highly recommend reading it so that the next time a crisis occurs (and it will definitely occur) you don’t become a mindless sheep that’s led around by an evil shepherd that profits from your human fallibility.” Jim Mitchem a writer on the human condition stated in an article.

None of us have all the answers and I for one would not attempt to give solutions to these afflictions that are part of the human makeup. It’s just a good thing once in a while to remind ourselves and to think about the things that are most important to us as a society and to give us some perspective in our daily lives and in how we see, deal with and treat others as people, employees; associates and neighbors and maybe be a little less concerned with power, prestige and money and more concerned with sharing, communicating and connecting.

William Cosgrove
Bill Cosgrove Straight Talk


Another relevant article you might like:

How Social Media Helps Keep People Oppressed

Crossing The Line-Who Decides?

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(Posted on Feb 10, 2014 at 12:50PM )
The first part of this discussion covers online product reviews and the second part touches on a subject that we don’t hear much about but is an important topic that by its very nature is controversial but never the less must be discussed  and certainly one that I and probably many of you have strong feelings about.

In the past if you criticized a person or business while talking with friends and colleagues, it went “no further than who was within ear shot of you.

Now, if you post a comment or do a bad review your comments are available across the online digital spectrum for millions of people to read.

The first part of this discussion concerns lawsuits regarding online reviews and comments which have become more and more common. Many of these lawsuits are often referred to as Slapp Lawsuits (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation)

Slapp lawsuits refer to meritless defamation suits filed by businesses or government officials against citizens who speak out against them. The plaintiffs are not necessarily expecting to succeed and most do not but rather are intended to intimidate critics who are inclined to back down when faced with the prospect of a long, expensive court battle.

Jeremy Gin, CEO of SiteJabber a review site for online businesses stated that these types of lawsuits are dangerous because they interfere with free speech and lessen the value that online reviews provide to consumers when they are searching for service providers or businesses. His fear is that such lawsuits would lead to fewer authentic customer reviews thereby providing less value to consumers. 

If you plan to post reviews online, Gin offers three tips to make sure your reviews don't result in a lawsuit -- or, at least, a lawsuit that you'll lose.



1.       Tell the truth. "If you tell the truth and you're honest with your experience, you should not be held liable" said Gin.

2.       Write to help other consumers. Gin suggests that you write your review to help other customers avoid the same fate rather than posting an angry diatribe against the company.

3.       Cool off before you start typing. Finally, just like you should have a cooling off period before sending an angry email at work, walk around for 15 minutes and cool off before posting your review to make sure you don't let your anger cloud the facts surrounding your problem.

He goes on to say that if you're a business there are better ways to handle negative online complaints. Obviously, responding to the criticism online won't remove it, but for businesses that do care about their customers responses the response may be perceived as genuine and legitimate. And filing for a lawsuit to silence a critical review? Well, that can most definitely backfire. In fact, it generally results in more negative exposure.

The second part of this discussion is that aside from online product reviews there is the subject of just voicing ideas and opinions by posting comments and blogs. The big question here is if no law has been broken does anyone have the right to decide if your comment or blog is published just based on what they personally think is appropriate or not appropriate or should it be left up to the readers themselves to decide by just ignoring or leaving their personal comments to let their position be known. This question brings up what could be a very slippery slope with overtones of censorship a word that I am at total odds with.

 In your opinion, at what point has the line been crossed concerning 1. online reviews and 2. just voicing views and opinions and what should be done to resolve these situations?


William Cosgrove

Bill Cosgrove Straight Talk

Ted Stout on the Power of Social Casting

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(Posted on Feb 8, 2014 at 02:33PM )
Ted Stout on OneBigBroadcast’s award winning coverage of the 2013 Young Olympians has brought us a host of new clients for 2014 to continue our success through our integrated marketing platforms onsite social communities and real time events marketing.

 

Are You Failing Socially?

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(Posted on Feb 2, 2014 at 12:14PM )
These social experiments further cement the broad impact that social sites have and points out ways in which to utilize them to be the most effective. Undoubtedly Social channels must play a key role in any overall digital marketing plan in order to be effective in the online marketing space.

Any plan requires an investment and must be well thought out to produce the desired results to hit a company’s particular goals but there is a big advantage in that everything pointed out in this infographic by Neil Patel at Quick Sprout comes organically. This in itself can produce enormous saving over the long term if executed properly.

This also raises the argument for having an onsite community that when properly implemented can compliment any social initiative and combined, produce added benefits that cannot be achieved with any form of marketing.

William Cosgrove
Onebigbroadcast


Is Pinterest Proving that "Small is Beautiful"?

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(Posted on Jan 18, 2014 at 11:22AM )
I once read a great book in college by a brilliant British economist by the name of E.F. Shumacher entitled Small is Beautiful. The book, a study of economics as if people mattered, is among the 100 most influential books published since the 1940s.

Pinterest is small in comparison to the top social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn etc, but is turning in some impressive results when it comes to engaging and converting customers.

In this info graphic you will find not only some impressive statistics but also some helpful hints as to how to make your presence more effective on this site.

William Cosgrove