Category: Opinion

You’ve had time to immerse yourself in social media and test its various tools; now it’s time to make them work for you.

As business owners, marketing geniuses and salespeople, we all want to tell you about ourselves.  We want you to visit our website, read our blog, “friend” us on facebook and follow our Twitter feeds on your iPhone.  I think we all know that the marketing game has changed and social networking tools are here to stay.  Many of our dealers now have facebook pages and twitter accounts that we maintain for them as part of our “Attract” strategy and they can be very effective for connecting your store to a new audience.  But how to you get people to follow you or be your facebook “friend” or even know about your last blog post if you don’t tell them about it? 

There is a solution staring you in the face.  It’s been there all along and it’s plain, old, low tech, email.

We knew our traffic grew and grew every month, after all it’s part of our job to help dealer’s increase their overall traffic (not to mention we have the monthly bandwidth invoices to prove it) but a careful analysis of our overall traffic revealed that our customer get A LOT of traffic. It turns out that our customers, combined, are seeing more than 2,000,000 Page Views and over 300,000 Unique Visitors every month.

Before we can elaborate on this very important question, let's first define the word "prospect." A prospect is a suspect that has engaged with you in some way, whether it be an action taken on a web visit, a phone inquiry, etc. Your goal in this stage is to qualify this prospect to the point that you know the decision-maker and you have identified an interest level in your products and/or services. But it's more than that really.

A few years ago, many of our customers scoffed at those online RV wholesalers who sold “paper units” only on order, often shipping directly from the factory to the consumer at markups that made it very difficult to compete with on the open market.  Then, a couple of years ago, one of those dealers became the largest volume dealer for a major manufacturer.  Today with the continued tightening of floor plan financing, the evaporation of available used inventory and the public’s increasing comfort in ordering online – some of our customer are reconsidering the is this model or at least a hybrid version of it. Could this be the future of the RV dealership?

Everyone is doing it;  Celebrities, news anchors, athletes and teens.  And guess what – more and more of your customers are doing it too.  What are they doing?  Tweeting on Twitter of course!  Now you may have been living under a fifth wheel lately and you might not know what Twitter actually is, how it works and what it has to do (if anything) with selling units on your lot.  We’re here to help.  This is the first in a series of articles will explain what Twitter is, how it’s used and how some dealers are already using it to market their dealerships.  We’ll also include some real world examples along with some do’s and don’t to keep you on track.