How Car Sales Professionals Can Use Social Media
Due to the nature of luxury car sales, targeting online is a completely different process to everyday cars. In this simple blog, I will show you how luxury car professionals can use Social Media to make more sales.s
Who Is Your Target Audience?
Market Research is a vital part of the marketing mix. If you don’t know who your target market is how do you expect to get paying customers? To develop a rich customer profile, you must research the behaviours, demographics, psychographics and geographics of your market. I recommend writing out a couple of customer profiles as below so you can keep them in mind when creating marketing materials. It’s a good idea to create up to 5 and use your previous customers as inspiration.
Who are they? What jobs do they work? What areas do they live? Where do they spend their time online? Not everyone can afford a luxury car so you must keep this in mind.
Behaviours: – attitude, loyalty and buying patterns
Demographics: – Age, Ethnicity, Gender, Education
Psychographics: – Personality, lifestyles, social status
Geographics: – City, Region, Country
Potential Customer For Luxury Car Brand
Name: Amy
Age: 38
Occupation: Branch Manager of Estate Agent
Income: £30,000 + commission
Lives: Kings Lynn
Online: Facebook, LinkedIn & Pinterest
Offline: Business networking, corporate events
Ideal car: (Here you would put which of your cars that a typical “Amy” would be interested in)
Meet Amy, our fictional customer for the purpose of this blog. You can go more in depth about whether she had children or not, it’s up to you how targeted you get. Use the customer profiles you create to create (and curate) the content that they want to see.
How Can We Reach Out To Your Customers?
As a car sales professional, you should make it a habit to visit car groups and communities on Social Networks like Facebook.
Establish your account and personal brand by connecting with people and having a conversation with them. Answer any questions that you can about the cars. If you’re a franchise of a bigger brand, you could also go onto the brands’ main pages and answer questions for yourself. This can be great as you know that they are interested in the car and you barely had to look!
Once you’ve built yourself a personal brand in these groups you can start to share your own useful and relevant content. If you’re not writing a blog or creating videos for your business, you should start now! Direct people to a useful article on your website and spark up a conversation about it.
You should also focus on building up your company profile. Whether you do this with paid adverts or organically, that is up to you. I will be creating guides for this in the next few weeks so stay tuned. Post out relevant and useful content for your audience, including any videos that you have. Videos are a great way to increase your reach on Facebook.
Install the Facebook Pixel on your website (a small snippet of code that goes on your website and allows you to track customers) so you can then retarget them at a later date. If you are unsure on how to do this, contact your web developer.
LinkedIn is a fantastic way of reaching corporate clients. Fill out your LinkedIn profile fully and professionally and get a good profile headshot done. This can make the difference between someone adding you or deleting you, I can’t stress this enough.
Join local groups on LinkedIn and connect with people in your area. Don’t just add and ignore, start a conversation with them. Personalize the invitation message to each person, read through their profile and ask them a question about what they do. Make a connection with people and make yourself known, build a network.
Post pictures of your new in cars, images of luxury cars can sometimes go viral. Sometimes you will get a message saying “this doesn’t belong on LinkedIn” but it does – it’s your business! It can greatly increase reach and you will soon get customers coming to you.
If you are blogging on your company website, post the article onto your LinkedIn Pulse. Every time you do this, every single one of your connections gets notified. Company news can work great too if you’re the CEO or manager.
I use LinkedIn Pulse a lot and even if the views aren’t in the 100’s, I often get leads from each one. If the heading is attention-grabbing and relevant to your audience, they are likely to read it. Don’t forget, your audience on LinkedIn is different to those on Facebook.
Twitter is better to reach out to corporate clients compared to B2C, not to say it can’t work for B2C though!
Have a look to see what other businesses in your field are doing, see what makes them successful online. Take notes of the hashtags they use, how often they post and what sort of content they post and see which ones are most popular. Consider using some aspects in your campaign, just don’t flat out copy them! Put your own twist on it.
Participate in your local Twitter Hour’s each week, we have #KentHour here on Tuesdays, and interact with people. Don’t just schedule tweets to go out in the hour, genuinely connect with people there and have a conversation. This isn’t a one-off thing, you need to be consistent with your attendance or people will forget you. These Twitter hours are a great way to build an engaged audience.
Post out relevant and informational content about the automotive industry, focusing on the luxury car brands that you provide. Maybe there’s company news or cars that are new in, let us all know! Consider creating short videos to post on Twitter to grab attention, these can work really well.