Internet or inbound marketing… SEO…social media…relevant content… You have probably all heard these buzz words, but what do they mean and how important are they really to your marketing strategy? Do you need to jump on the bandwagon to get your customers’ attention? YES!
Today’s terminology for internet or online marketing is “inbound marketing.” Simply put, it is the idea or concept that ties together SEO, relevant content and social media. Before I define the concept, I want to discuss why it is vital for dealerships to embrace and implement an inbound marketing strategy. I believe if you don’t get it, you may not survive. In the business community it is often thought that if we just had better sales people or a better sales software system, we will be able to grow customers. When that doesn’t happen and we determine what the problem is, we discover we can’t get in front of prospects as we used to. That process is a definition of insanity: keep doing what you’ve been doing and expect a different result.
Ten years ago as an MPS dealer, my experience was that a sales representative could set up 4 visits to prospects a day. During those ten years I saw a precipitous drop in the number of appointments made by sales people. These were sales people good at getting appointments in the past, but now their cold call efforts were not generating the same results as before. So what the heck was happening?
What has happened is that our customers, driven by the relentless changes in technology, have changed how they make purchases. Consider this: Gartner says that over 70% of consumers search online for information before making a buying decision. If you consider the dealers’ target market as a subset of this 70%, I submit that our marker, the IT professional, researched 99% of the time. In fact, if you can make a cold call visit today, that is probably not going to be a customer you can convert. They are price shoppers for the most part. So what does our prospect look like?
l They are an IT professional (not “C” level, as “C” level people have no pain)
l They are online all the time
l They are demanding and knowledgeable
l They have little or no time for sales people
l They validate services by reading blogs and using social media
l They do extensive research on the internet before engaging with a vendor
The challenges facing the dealer community are many:
l First and foremost, our customer has changed
l MPS awareness and adoption is increasing
l Declining copier margins and placements are the new norm
l High sales turnover is increasing
l Commoditization has been caused by the big box stores
Wow, if this is really the new market landscape what does a marketer need to do in order to be successful? It seems that a strategy using the internet is not only necessary but required if you want to get in front of more prospects. So here is the definition of inbound marketing from an expert, Rick Burnes from HubSpot: “Inbound marketing is marketing focused on getting found on the internet by customers.” Traditional marketing or outbound marketing focus is on finding customers and then interrupting them with some message. Technology has made this technique less effective as consumers can block you from getting to them, and when and if you do, the prospect is often annoyed with the interruption. Inbound marketing turns this old model upside down. Inbound marketing done right will attract highly qualified customers to your business that can be measured by ROI. Inbound marketers create engaging content in blogs that prospects subscribe to and want to read. Instead of cold calling internet marketers create content that is meaningful to the target audience. So we need to educate and inform using the business’s internet tools.
To enable your dealership to successfully move into this marketing avenue you will need to begin with a review of your website. According to Martin Perry at in2communications, an expert on using SEO and social media to attract prospects, there are six items website must have:
SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Google determines ranking (where you show up on a search) by two things – trust and content. Trust is determined by off page authority, on line content and how visitors use your site.
l Is your website readable?
l Is there an MPS focus ( get rid of hardware as a main theme)
l Offers and landing pages for lead capture
l Verticals served
l Content that informs and educates, which builds trust and authority for your dealership
l eBooks and blogs
l Use of “key words,” meta tags and meta descriptions
Creating and publishing content on your site: you will need to be able to write or find someone or some company that can do this for you. It involves the creation of relative content that educates and informs your customer utilizing eBooks, articles, white papers and blogs.
l Develop a message strategy
l Focus on what your customer needs
l Use key words in your content
l Calls to action (CTA): use buttons to get prospects to act on your offer (eBook, article, etc).
l What your business is
l Next steps
l Who is the offer for
Landing pages: this is where you capture and measure activity from your CTA.
l CTA leads prospects to the next steps, i.e.: get a free eBook on how to get rich tomorrow
l CTA can be generated by email, social media, your website, and your blog
l The landing page collects prospect information and should then move the contact into a nurturing place holder
l The contacts attracted from this method are organic and more likely to let you in to see them (some day)
Company blog: blogging is an art and a science. Warning- if you are subscribing to a blogging service you may be doing harm to your placement by search engines. The reason is the search engines are looking for a few items from your website and content than you probably know:
l Blogs must be relevant to MPS or similar offerings – they must be from you
l Blogs must be engaging and informative – news feeds are not good
l Blogs must use key words that link back to content on your website
l Blogs must have key word(s) linking to an external site
l Blogs must be posted on a regular basis
l Companies that blog get 55% more traffic than those that do not
Social media: this includes but is not limited to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube.
All the social media options need to be explored but there are four you need to incorporate into your overall inbound strategy:
l LinkedIn and LinkedIn groups – update your profile, use key words, create and post content to groups. Content can be an alert to your blog, using a catchy headline or better yet ask a question for comments. If this is confusing to you, you will need to get up to speed as the LinkedIn groups are a powerful messaging option
l Twitter: send out daily or weekly at least. Tweets should link back to a landing page for lead capture
l YouTube: create a 30 second video inviting prospects to get to know you. Place button on website for video – adds to your digital footprint
l Facebook: create a company Facebook page and place your blogs and other activities
Using an inbound marketing software platform is a great aid to facilitating social media, blogs, eBooks
The customer and ourselves have been moved by technology advances to behave differently than before. Yes, the customer has changed, and we need to change with them. It’s not too late as most dealers are only thinking about marketing. Your customer is not only thinking about it, they are using it and you need to get on board to be successful in the future.
Let’s take the NPRN website as one example of how an inbound marketing strategy can help build your business. One year ago, the NPRN website was optimized for searches (SEO), and I began publishing
eBooks, posting blogs, and employing social media such as Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook. Here are some results from the first quarter of 2013:
eBooks and Blogs
Top 10 Printer Problems and Solutions
Visit 464
Submission 149
Conversion Rate 32%
NPRN Annual Meeting at ITEX 2013
Visit 130
Submission 42
Conversion Rate 32%
7 Indicators of the Successful MPS Dealer
Visit 60
Submission 16
Conversion Rate 27%
These results were generated organically and garnered 4 new customers so far for 2013. Yes, it takes 6 months to a year to build, but it’s so worth it. Stay tuned for my next article where I will define a dealer strategy and the steps necessary to build a strong inbound marketing plan.
