Casey Stewart, Offix
It’s a new world and the old rules don’t always apply anymore when it comes to reaching new customers and retaining old ones. Social media is complementing and in some instances replacing traditional marketing for reaching out to customers and prospects. For some dealerships these new marketing methods have proven effective. For others, it’s a waiting game with no quick and obvious payoffs, at least not yet.
Let’s look at how a few dealerships are mastering, or attempting to master, these new marketing strategies.
Casey Stewart, business development and marketing manager for Offix with offices in Gainesville, Norfolk and Richmond, VA, represents the young generation of marketing professionals working in dealerships across the country. She’s hip, she’s happening, and has been directing Offix’s entry into social media, including working closely with a Web designer to bring the dealership’s Website up to date.
She emphasizes that Offix’s use of social media is aimed primarily at boosting the dealership’s search engine rankings versus pumping up sales.
“I do at least three posts a week on each of the different social media platforms—Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+,” reports Stewart.
Asked if she thinks social media is overrated, she responds, “I do for our industry. I draw the line at Twitter and won’t go there.”
Why not?
“I feel the decision makers aren’t looking at Twitter.”
She’s not alone in viewing social media as overrated, but overrated or not, she’s still using it along with traditional marketing methods.
“Traditional marketing is still the most effective,” opines Stewart. “Our sales reps still like to have physical marketing materials to review with customers. We’ve tried iPads, but they prefer printed material. We’re trying to sell printing to the end user so it kind of makes sense.”
The new and improved Offix Website brings traditional marketing and new marketing together in one location with links to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+. It’s a big improvement over the previous website.
“It was out of date and there was an overwhelming amount of text; now it’s more interactive and easy to use,” states Stewart.
Hunter McCartey, RJ Young
RJ Young, a Nashville, TN-based office technology dealership is doing its part to stay ahead of the marketing curve and has been experimenting with all forms of social media in addition to its traditional marketing efforts—efforts that remain essential. Driving some of these changes are more educated customers.
“They do a lot of research on the Internet and many times you’ll go into a situation and they’ll know more than you do, which is not good for some of our reps,” acknowledges Hunter McCartey, COO.
For RJ Young, social media is essential for reaching out and engaging current customers and new prospects. The dealership also follows the metrics, monitoring hits on the Website and how long visitors stay on it.
“We can look at all the metrics, where years ago you never had those metrics,” states McCartey. “If you were doing TV or radio advertising, it was ratings. Now it’s more Internet based because that’s where everyone is getting their information. They’re not getting it off of television or radio broadcast unless it’s talk radio. We’re starting to move away from traditional methods of advertising because it’s not where the viewership or the listeners are anymore.”
He adds that if you’re trying to reach an IT person who’s responsible for making a decision on your products or services, traditional methods typically aren’t the way.
“They’re not watching the sports shows or golf tournaments, they’re doing something else. They might not even be watching television at all,” emphasizes McCartey.
RJ Young has updated its Website to reflect the changes of how people get information. The dealership also has an e-newsletter and encourages employees to contribute to it.
“We’re trying to build up the software/solutions side of our business and we’re getting more contributions from employees who sell those products and engaging them more in blogs,” says McCartey.
Recent newsletter content has focused on the dangers and risks of cyber crime and how to protect one’s information even when stored in the cloud.
“It’s much more traditional in terms of information transfer and knowledge, instead of trying to sell a product or a service,” adds McCartey. “It’s more of a White Paper or back door approach, ‘and by the way we provide the services or products that you need to solve an issue.’”
Julie Italiano, Modern Office Methods
Modern Office Methods (MOM) in Cincinnati, OH uses just about every social media outlet available—Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and Pinterest.
“Everything is used for different purposes,” explains Julie Italiano, marketing director. “We use Facebook for promoting our non-profit contests and for posting feel-good content.”
Focusing on non-profit partners and encouraging them to “Like” MOM and share these posts and contests with other non-profits has been beneficial, with more non-profits “Liking” MOM.
Twitter has been more effective for re-Tweeting Tweets from the vendors that MOM represents while LinkedIn’s emphasis is more business oriented; it’s also the social media platform where MOM has the most followers.
MOM’s social media marketing is more about branding than anything else.
“If people see our logo, our pictures, our employees, our communities, they get the feeling that MOM is a great company that I’d want to do business with,” explains Italiano. “[Maybe] they’ll think of MOM when their lease is up or if they’re not getting great service, or need new equipment.”
Since placing greater emphasis on social media and MOM’s Website for marketing, Italiano has learned to be cautious about posting too much information about clients.
“We used to profile clients on our Website and the first thing [competitors] did was try to purge our clients. You can’t trust anybody.”
Coordinated Business Systems in Burnsville, MN is all over social media. Its initial foray into the social media world was guided by a social media marketing firm; now Coordinated is doing it all themselves.
Kristie Kripotos, Coordinated Business Systems
Blogs represent a key element of Coordinated’s marketing efforts.
“We encourage all of our employees to blog,” says Kristie Kripotos, marketing strategist. “And they’re embracing it. They’re the best people to blog because they know their areas of expertise.”
Coordinated even offers Blogging 101 classes to teach employees how to blog more effectively. Blogs are often posted on the employee’s LinkedIn pages as well as the Coordinated Website. Recent topics include a simple explanation of three-tier color and toner pirates. IT-targeted blogs are also popular.
“We understand the importance of updating our Website and blogging is a good way to do that,” emphasizes Kripotos. “Marketing these days, it’s not one or two people, it’s the whole company that needs to be involved in it.”
She contends that social media represents an important prospecting tool and a tool that’s been embraced by millennials. “They don’t like to talk on the phone,” says Kripotos.
She’s also a huge fan of LinkedIn.
“You can get a lot of information from LinkedIn. You can learn all about the person you’re going to meet because everyone has a digital trail.”
Marketing in this day and age isn’t limited to promoting speeds and feeds or the latest and greatest from Coordinated’s manufacturers.
“We talk a lot about storytelling, not only having the Coordinated story down pat, but tying our employee’s story into the Coordinated story and bringing our customers into that story too,” says Kripotos. “Everyone loves a good story and everyone likes the story behind the story. Coordinated has a great story—we started in a garage and we didn’t get bought out by IKON because Jim (Owner Jim Oricchio) believed in his employees and his business so he bought his partners out.”
Coordinated initially enlisted the services of an outside social media firm because the dealership didn’t have the knowledge on staff to get its social media marketing efforts off the ground. Since then Kripotos has gone back to school to learn more about social media. While the social media firm was helpful in the beginning it eventually became clear that it didn’t understand Coordinated’s business or the industry.
“Posts would come out and I’d cringe,” recalls Kripotos. “Now that we’ve taken it over, we better understand our customers and we’re getting better engagement with them.”
Another benefit she’s found of using various social media tools is the analytics.
“More than ever we have a better understanding of who our customers are,” says Kripotos. “Who’s going to our Website, their age group, and who’s coming in on a digital device or desktop. You can get such great analytics and that helps us market better.”
As far as Twitter, she says that’s the hardest social media to learn, mostly because it’s all about finding the right balance and identifying the best times to Tweet.
“We’ve been playing with different times to see where we get more engagement,” states Kripotos. “Lunchtime seems to be good because people are often on their phone at lunch. Then the afternoon slump when people start getting fidgety at their desks and are on their phones.”
She does find compulsive Tweeters or those who over-post on sites like LinkedIn and Facebook annoying. “They’re posting like 10 times a day,” laments Kripotos.
Regardless, she’s been pleasantly surprised at the reaction she’s received to Coordinated’s Tweets.
“Twitter has been a surprise. I’m amazed at the amount of engagement we get.”
Of course social media isn’t the be all end all and Coordinated still uses traditional marketing.
“We’re still doing our technology events and advertising on two radio stations (a morning show and a program for an IT audience), and we’ve had great engagement with that,” says Kripotos.
Kripotos has one final marketing recommendation for dealers. “Dealers need to pay attention to all the review sites,” she says. “People like going to the Internet for information. We’ve implemented an app for our service techs so as soon as they’re done with a service call they can hand their phone over and get customer feedback right away.”
In addition Coordinated’s sales department now has an app on their iPads which is more or less like an online catalog with all of the dealership’s brochures and information about imaging, document management, IT services, and business communications.
“Reps can do a proposal right from there and we can get analytics right back,” states Kripotos. “They don’t carry a bunch of papers anymore. We sell technology, we need to use it.”
Adrienne Bastinelli, Centrix
Centric Business Systems in Owing Mills, MD is in the process of a complete rebranding project, including improving its collateral materials, updating its Website, and refreshing its logo so that it’s more technology oriented. The new Website has clean lines, simple, concise text, and projects the image of a technology company.
Marketing Manager Adrienne Bastinelli acknowledges that business marketing isn’t as easy as it used to be back in the days when radio and print were the prime marketing methods. As the dealership re-evaluates how it markets itself, Centric is expanding its presence on social media.
“People want to see through channels like Facebook and LinkedIn that you’re engaged in philanthropic efforts in the community and what kinds of events and activities are taking place in your organization,” says Bastinelli. “The most effective way to communicate those things is not with a flyer or mailer, it’s via the Web.”
All these new methods for marketing Centric has made Bastinelli’s job more difficult, and she acknowledges that bringing the Internet into the picture has made things more challenging because the Internet is always evolving.
“Whether it’s a rebranding or retargeting, clicks or an SEO campaign, what Google is looking for and what advertisers are selling is evolving constantly,” she says. “The biggest challenge is staying on top of what’s the most effective way to send a message. It’s unbelievable what the Internet can do to keep you in top-of-mind awareness.”
Centric has enlisted a full service ad agency and social media firm for assistance.
“We’ve found their knowledge and experience provided us with a value add,” reports Bastinelli. “I can go onto Facebook and post something every day, but if it’s not being aggregated it doesn’t become searchable, people don’t see it, and Google doesn’t rate it. I had no idea there was so much involved with effectively using social media for business.”
The posts from the social media firm are a combination of sourced relevant content and Centric-specific content. “It’s a team effort,” states Bastinelli. “One of the challenges is getting short and concise messages across that explain who we are and what we do.”
Even as it branches out into the social media universe, Centric still sees tremendous benefit from traditional radio and print. “That’s important whether you’re in an established market or a new market,” opines Bastinelli. “You want brand awareness and top-of-mind awareness. We can’t reach the person we want at the right time if they don’t constantly see and hear about us. That’s where billboards, print, and radio have an advantage over digital because with digital you have to make an effort. The others you do naturally.”
Sports marketing, i.e., stadium signage, remains highly effective for Centric within the Baltimore marketplace. “People are paying attention to the club level sign in the stadium because they’re sitting there for three or four hours and have to look around at some point,” says Bastinelli.
Fast forward 12 months from now, how might things look at Centric if all these pieces fit together and are working like Bastinelli hopes they will?
“I see us using a fairly even combination of traditional marketing and digital, including retargeting, remarketing, SEO and social media. My hope would be that through rebranding and ramping up the digital side over the course of the next 12 months, we’ll have a stronger presence in all of our marketplaces and top-of-mind awareness so that when it comes time to make a decision, the key players in an organization will know who we are and what we do. Instead of trying to find a copier company or software solutions company, they’ll be searching for our phone number.”
Deb Dellaposta, WPS
WPS in Hagerstown, MD is fully immersed in social media, less so in traditional marketing.
“We’re not actively doing the kind of marketing that you have to pay for,” says Debra Dellaposta, president & CEO, even though WPS does the occasional media trade with radio stations.
WPS supports many non-profits when they have events and fundraisers, and during the past few years have ramped that up a lot more.
“We’re trying to get involved with every one of our customers,” she says.
That said, WPS still has to draw the line somewhere, and that’s why with golf outings and other events, they’re limiting their involvement to business partners. If it’s not a business partner, WPS has to use its discretion.
Lately there’s been a big push at WPS to get everyone in the company active on LinkedIn. The dealership also uses Facebook, primarily for posts about community service activities, while LinkedIn is focused on professional and business-oriented posts.
“Our people are publishing posts and blogs that establish them as experts in the field,” explains Dellaposta.
With everyone in the company encouraged to participate in its social media efforts, WPS has had to ensure that its brand is protected. Dellaposta created a video that explains the company position along with e-mails that explain why it’s important for WPS to protect its brand.
“Everything needs to be approved, and we’ve created a shared file folder for everybody in the company with approved documentation and approved images,” says Dellaposta. “If they’re going to publish anything on LinkedIn they must run it through my marketing director or me first. We try to control the message a little bit.”
Most posts are designed to provide people with useful information and aren’t designed to sell something, although that message is subliminal. While WPS is getting a lot of traction from LinkedIn and Facebook, Twitter is still somewhat of a wild card. Most Tweets are reposts of WPS’s LinkedIn and Facebook posts.
“We try to tie in with what our customers are doing, and want to show we live in the community, and that we care about the community and their health and well being,” says Dellaposta. “I want people to know that we’re about more than just trying to sell products.”
Dellaposta is still trying to wrap her arms around Twitter and agrees that some people Tweet way too much.
“I’m not sure what the right amount is just yet, but there has to be a balance,” she says.
The other thing she’s trying learn about social media is the timing, i.e., the best time to post so the most people see it and react to it.
Meanwhile, the training continues at WPS, including two classes focused on LinkedIn.
“We’re doing constant reinforcement about the things they should be doing and how to do it,” reports Dellaposta, who feels WPS’s marketing efforts are on the verge of becoming more social than ever. “This year I expect it to take off; last year we were slowly starting to introduce it to them, and this year I’m starting to see some traction. There’s a lot more of our customers better connected to us on LinkedIn.”
