We All Engage in Social Media

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We All Engage in Social Media

In this week’s post, guest blogger Mets Kramer shares that we all engage in social media and this blog is just one example. Other platforms include Facebook, LinkedIn, and of course, the large number of websites we all visit for information.  

As the digital world grows, we understand it is necessary to have a social media presence for our dealerships. We want people to see us and whatever online presence we create, we want it to have a positive impact on our business.  In my last article, we looked at how to use metrics for your website, with a specific focus on using the information collected to understand your customers’ and visitors’ engagement with your digital dealership.  Our goal for investing time and money into our online presence is to increase the engagement we have with our audience.

I’d like to look more closely at social media strategies. Each platform has its strengths and can contribute to your website traffic and engagement.  There are 3 main things to consider when building your strategy: who is your Intended Audience, what kind of Content do you want to post, and lastly, a call to Action, or in other words, how do you want them to respond?

Your audience consists of both active and prospective customers, in addition to a large number of people who many have no need for your services.  When developing your strategy, it’s important to consider who will see your social media posts on each platform and understand the demographics of these audiences. For example, joining small contractor groups on Facebook may get you a large audience of owner/operators who love equipment and are busy each day on site.  LinkedIn has a more professional and corporate audience, with larger business decision-makers or influencers.  It’s important to understand who the audience is when determining what kind of content, you want to show them. We all can appreciate the effort in personalized messages, on a card or in an email greeting; this is no different for social media, be personal.

The second aspect to consider is content, which can include product images (equipment for sale), application content (showing the product at work), general information to educate your audience or pure branding content so the audience becomes familiar with your company’s “face”.  Remember social media is social. This means that all the content you post, needs to also focus on you or celebrating people in your business. When you can associate a person with your online content, it helps your audience build a social connection with your business. In your digital marketing strategy, the goal is to build a virtual experience between your dealership, you and your audience; both active and prospective customers. All this to say, if you’re only posting images of your inventory with no links to your website, you are not successfully building a social connection within your online presence.

This brings us to the final aspect of engaging in social media: the call to action. What is the action you want your audience member to take after seeing your content? This is where the strategizing comes in. It is imperative to create content that motivates potential clients to move away from “doomscrolling” and drive them to your website. Doomscrolling can be defined as mindlessly scrolling through news articles, social media posts, or other content on sharing platforms.

So, what is your call to action?

Decide if you want your viewer to click on the content and be redirected to your website so you can further engage with them, or do you want a direct response? An example of a direct response is posting an image of a machine you have for sale, with pricing details and contact information. Here, the call to action is “Call me to buy this machine”. This type of strategy has been shown to be very effective on platforms like Facebook where you have groups of contractors, but it’s generally frowned upon on LinkedIn. A more strategic approach on a platform like LinkedIn, would be to have the viewer click on your post, directing them to your website. Now, you have the opportunity to present your dealership fully, presenting all the aspects of your business and focusing the user to think about how your dealership can meet their needs.

In conclusion, the main objective for any strategy should be a call to action. We invest time and money in social media platforms to redirect our audience members to the right place: generally, your website. If you can construct each post with the knowledge of the kind of audience you are marketing and a clear expectation of what you want their response to be, it will help you determine the kind of content you should post.  If your audience is full of buyers, show them something to buy. If your audience is full of influencers, build a connection, build your brand and drive traffic to your website so they get the full picture.

One last note.  Find a social media management app to execute your strategy.  Check out Hootesuite, Social Pilot, Buffer, Sendible and others.

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Metrics For Your Website

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Metrics For Your Website

Metrics For Your Website

Today’s guest blog is from Mets Kramer, sharing knowledge about the metrics you need for your website, and understanding your digital traffic to better engage your audience.

You use metrics for every other part of your business, so it’s time to learn more about them for your digital marketing, specifically your website.  This is a continuation of my previous blog on Engagement Digital Marketing.

Growing up and working in the equipment business, we are all familiar with metrics.  My first experience with them was the measurement of invoice days, or rather days between last labour and invoice date.  As service supervisor, I learned it was a good indication of one aspect of our operational efficiency.  Later, I would learn invoice days was one of several metrics which would provide a complete picture of the efficiency of the operation.  For example, I found receivables days was a complement to invoice days, and if we invoiced too fast, with poor quality, receivables lingered.

Your digital marketing work is no different from your other business operations.  Metrics, or measurements, help you understand what is happening with you digital marketing efforts.  What each of us need to do, is understand what the metrics mean, how they relate, and how you can affect them.  It is also important to pick a set of metrics that drive to something valuable for your business, not just target numbers that seem good.

In this blog I would like to look at a few common metrics for your dealership website.  They are Visitors, Bounce Rate, Average time per page/session and Conversions.

Visitors are great!  Of course, we want traffic to our websites, if no one visits, does it really exist? But what does it mean?  Think of Visitor traffic as the top of your funnel (or crusher if you prefer).  It tells us how many people have visited the website and had a look at the pages they landed on.  Visitors can enter the site through the main page, or directly to specific pages using links on other sites.  Either way, it is the starting measurement.  Having high traffic levels sounds great, and is certainly better than very low, but the other metrics will tell us more about what happened when those visitors viewed the site.

Bounce rate: this is a very common metric used by internet people, partially because it sounds fun.  Bounce rate measures the number of people who landed on your site and then left without looking at any other pages.  This means bounce rate, on its own, is not a great measure of success, or of a good website.  A very high bounce rate is generally an indication that people have low engagement with your site, and so warrants investigation.  However, if you are bringing people directly to your site, targeting specific pages, a high bounce rate needs to be viewed alongside a metric such as Average time on page to understand what it means.   For now, consider bounce rate a measure of “are people clicking to other pages on my site before they leave”

So that’s the first two, we have people coming to the site, and we know if they are clicking around or not.

The next measure is average time per page or per session. How long are people spending on each page, and how long is each session.  For Bounce rate, a high rate is often considered bad, but if you are driving traffic directly to a page, like this blog, and the visitors are spending enough time on the page to read it, average time on page can be a measure of success, even if they bounce after reading.   Remember our Digital Marketing strategy is a strategy of engagement, so more time spent on your site means higher engagement, even if they only visit one page. For other visitors, look at how long they spend on the site or pages, it should match the content on the page to determine what a good metric target is.

Finally, Conversion Rate.  In the end, for equipment dealers, your websites should be more than just information sites.  Our sites should be designed for action.  This is often called a “call to action” when reading about website performance.  Just like we talk about a complete set of metrics for other business areas, Conversion Rate is important final goal for measuring website engagement.  Conversion Rate can be determined using a contact form, a button to call your dealership or generating a lead in your CRM.  Typically, an average conversion rate is 2%, but as with all these metrics, it depends on numerous other factors of your site.  It is important to see your engagement digital marketing efforts in relation to conversion rate, a tangible result.

Collecting these measurements can be done with numerous tools.   The most obvious is Google Analytics, but there are WordPress plugins that do the same, and other content systems have their own dashboards as well.  The important thing is to get them set up and use them.

Obviously, this topic is extensive, and I can not provide a comprehensive explanation in one blog.  I hope each of you understands a little more about what website metrics mean, how they relate and how they can guide your digital marketing efforts.  If your dealership has a website, and you are investing money in your digital marketing, it is important to understand the value you are getting for your investment.

All these metrics apply to all forms of traffic, including referrals, organic and paid.  In my next blog I will look at these topics from the perspective of paid traffic.

If you would like to learn more, or want to get some help with these topics, please contact me and I would be happy to explain or put your in touch with some trusted people that can help you execute.

For more information on our classes and assessments, please visit us at Learning Without Scars.

Dealer Websites

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Dealer Websites

This week, we have a new guest blog from Mets Kramer.

Dealer Websites

In my last article, I discussed the difference between Billboard Digital Marketing and Engagement Digital Marketing. With the world and our industry becoming more digital everyday, I wanted to expand on the topic of websites and why it’s worth building your own site to engage your customers.

Websites are the easiest way to present your dealership and explain to visitors who you are, what you do and what sets you apart from the industry. Additionally, a custom domain, with emails to match, is a simple way to gain better control over your brand and manage your team. (i.e. Company name: Strategic Evolutions, email: mets.kramer@strategicevolutions.ca).

However, for equipment dealers, it is a little harder to present your company, your team, services and products. This is because our products, or inventory, are always changing. Our products tend to be serialized construction equipment, so listing your inventory requires a more complex website and should include an easy, quick way to update your information.

While this is a challenge, it is possible! It will give you better control over your digital presence and, also, help you build your brand, developing stronger relationships with your customers.

Here are 4 reasons why you should build your own website:

  1. Present your dealership and team the way you want. Focus on the strengths and values that you feel are important. Add content that brings value to your clients, expand on the services you offer and present your inventory in the style you feel has the greatest impact. Just like you design your dealership lobby to focus on your customer’s experience, a website is a digital representation of your company’s “face” and its physical building.

When creating your website from scratch, focus on engaging the customer, drawing them in.  Then, present your value proposition or promotions.  Consider metrics like bounce rate, time on site and pages viewed as a measure of engagement.

 

  1. Add a blog, picture gallery and of course, VIDEOS. These features are great to post on social media using Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn. Each social media post links visitors back to your website. Increasing the links and traffic to your site helps you rise to the top of internet searches when people are looking for equipment or services. Additionally, this type of content improves your content score, also improving your search position.

To understand this better, assess your own online experience.  Do you use TikTok, Instagram, Twitter or Facebook?  What do you prefer to view?  Research shows visitors engage more often and longer with video content more than pictures.

 

  1. Present your inventory without directing customers to an external advertising site. Capturing customers and their engagement is the name of the game. Once you have people looking at your equipment, hold them there and answer their questions. Throughout this year, digital presence and selling has become that much more important. Current research suggests customers are doing 90% of their research PRIOR to contacting any dealers about a machine. Make sure your inventory is presented well and contains all the information your customers would initially ask for. You want to provide everything they need so picking up the phone is easy!

When you build your own site, present your inventory with video, images, detailed descriptions, links to specs and any support documentation you have to prove to visitors “This is the machine you want!”.

Building your own site prevents them from ending up on an advertising platform where other options are presented to them.  FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is a REAL thing! It has been shown to motivate people out of fear to keep clicking, if they weren’t satisfied by what they found.

  1. Analytics Systems. Take advantage of the market’s best analytics from either the website platform, Google or others. Understand who’s visiting your site, where they came from, what they saw, and how long they stayed. Understand how to improve your Bounce Rate (Users that leave without clicking anything on the site) and Conversion Rate (Users that act by clicking a contact button). Understanding this aspect of Digital Marketing helps you change and update your site to improve your visitor engagement.

A website visitor is the equivalent to a person visiting your dealership.   During an in-person visit, it’s communication and addressing their needs that closes the sale, so use the same approach for your website. Engage!

For more information on our training programs, please visit us at Learning Without Scars.

For more information about Mets Kramer, please visit his website at Strategic Evolutions.