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 It’s the end of the year, and this tends to be the time that most people reflect back on this past year and begin to make resolutions to do new things this upcoming year – or fix what they were doing.

My suggestion is to evaluate and tighten up your digital presence. 

When you boil it all down, your digital presence is made up of three major elements: your web site, social media presence, and online reputation. All three are important and play a huge part in your dealership’s success.

Your web site: This is your digital dealership. You want your brick and mortar dealership to be friendly, engaging, and easy to do business with – and your digital dealership should be the same. It should be responsive, so that it offers a pleasant experience regardless of the device it’s viewed on. It should have a clear, short, easy to follow path for visitors to let you know what they are interested in – becoming leads you can follow up on to convert to sales. It should basically be all business, with a few banner ads and meet the team page. 

Remember – the purpose of your web site is to identify visitors and generate leads. I suggest you head home after work one night this week, kick back on the couch with your favorite beverage of choice, and a device other than a computer. Go through every page and menu option on your site. Take note of how it looks and feels to visit. A site that is too ‘busy,’ confusing, or has no calls to action is nothing more than a digital brochure and might as well not exist. In many of our marketing boot camps, we assign dealers to browse their own web sites as homework and report their findings the next day. Many show back up pretty pissed.

Would a visitor/shopper be drawn in the direction of providing contact information in some way, turning them into a lead?

Your social media presence: And by social media, I pretty much mean Facebook. Why? 

A couple of reasons. 

First, the demographic for our industry primarily uses Facebook for social media. If you want to catch fish, you go to a lake, not a desert. Second, Facebook is a sort of ‘closed loop’ universe, where you log in and they know all about you and your interests – which we have found to make for some amazing marketing results. That said, Facebook is THE place for you to put all of those social events like bike washes, customer photos, Sharp Shooter Events, rides, or whatever else you do at the dealership to draw folks in, have fun, and make sales. Social media is the place prospects can go to see more about you so they begin to know, like, and trust you – and people buy from people they know, like, and trust.

Over time, an interesting timeline of all the fun stuff you do at your dealership grows sort of organically, and people get interested in your dealership. It’s how Vengeance Racing here in Atlanta has managed to ruin my retirement. It works.

After you’ve visited your web site, pop open another beverage and visit your Facebook page. Scroll down your timeline. Is it interesting? Are there a lot of fun pictures, maybe a cartoon or meme or two? If so, that’s a win. If it’s just ‘salesy’ post after post – fix it. Starting now, take an 80/20 non-sales post to sales post ratio -your engagement will improve, and your “know, like, and trust” factor will go way up.

The last big piece of the puzzle is online reputation. This means reviews. And more reviews. And more reviews.

After you’ve visited your Facebook page it’s time for what can arguably be the most terrifying and upsetting part of your digital presence audit.  Might want to grab at least one more of those beverages….

Go to Google and type your dealership’s name and the word ‘reviews.’ This can be super encouraging or really upset you. Start looking at your star ratings. Read all of the reviews you find there. If they’re great – that’s awesome news. If they aren’t, it’s time to take an honest look at what’s being said, and see if there’s truth that needs to be addressed. 

There’s nothing worse than spending money and energy to create a web site, and maybe spend money on a digital marketing campaign like Google AdWords, only to have people find you and find out that everyone thinks you’re a jerk. Not good.

Google says that 80+% of people research a business online before doing business with them. They also say that of those people, almost 90% of them give as much credibility to reviews as they do word of mouth reviews from people they know.

This makes reviews critical. Another Google study has shown that increasing your star rating by one star can impact a companies sales by as much as 10%. That’s big.

The caveat though, is that the AGE of a review is also a major deciding factor in how much it influences shoppers. Over 70% of people say that they don’t consider reviews over 90 days old in their decision making process. This means you have to have an effective way to continually harvest new legitimate reviews.

Now, once you’ve taken an honest, objective audit of your digital presence you may feel that it’s a good idea to make improving it a resolution this year. If that’s how you feel, we’d love to help. Take a minute to give us a call (877-242-4472) and let one of our folks walk you through the specific solutions we have for each of these components. We make it easy on you, and can make a significant impact on your bottom line this year.

Talk soon, 

Brad