Brad, I have checked out some of your facebook ads. Have you had any success with this type of advertisement yet? Here is an article on the subject, although it is aimed at auto dealers it helped me understand the possibilities. Is there anyone out there who has made any MH sales from social media leads?
The Impact of NOT Using Social MediaPosted by David Johnson on November 24, 2009 at 1:33am
View David Johnson’s blog
.
What is the cost of NOT doing social media? How about NO business. That is a BIG cost isn’t it? A HUGE cost if you ask me, but then again you didn’t but it’s something I have been thinking about today and something that I wanted to bring up.
There has been a big paradigm shift online, it’s called social media and it’s bringing people together like never before. What does that mean to your dealership though? It can mean everything and nothing all at the same time but instead of this post being about why you should be doing social media it’s about the impact of NOT using social media.
Before we get into that though, let’s go over a little scenario:
Mike Rogers, a successful account executive, decides that it’s time to replace the family SUV. As you can imagine he isn’t too thrilled with the idea of spending countless hours on the internet researching and is even less thrilled about having to haggle with a salesperson. So, instead of bringing up a search engine he goes to Facebook and asks his network what they think about the current SUV’s on the market. He quickly finds out that 15 people in his network have bought vehicles in the past year, 8 of which were SUV’s. Of those 8 SUV’s that were bought in the last year 5 of them were the same make and model. After reading what his network has to say about this particular make and model he decides to make his purchase. In fact, 3 of the 5 bought from the same dealership and gave high marks on their buying experience, so now Mike knows what he wants and where he is going to buy it.
Did you see what happened there? This isn’t an anomaly, this scenario is played out thousands of times all across the internet because people trust the opinions of people they know. I will make a prediction and say that in the next couple of years people won’t buy a car from a dealership or salesperson that isn’t in their network. Think about it, people would much rather buy from people than from a brand and if they know somebody or know somebody that knows somebody that sells cars they would much rather buy a car from that person because of the trust factor.
That’s the power of the referral, we have all heard of them and would love to get more of them but they always seem too few and far between. How would you like to be referred everyday by somebody in your network to somebody in theirs? It’s not too farfetched and is something that you should be working on today, not tomorrow.
Social media is all about the relationship, if you have read any of my other blog posts you would know that I say that a lot. Keep in mind that the only reason why you should be using social media to market yourself is to build relationships with your target market. If you go into social media with the intention of selling cars you have already lost.
Just think about your own closest friends and family members, do you have to remind them every day that you sell cars? The odds are that you don’t and when they come into the market for a vehicle they will contact you. This is the same with your online network, you don’t have to shove it down their throats that you sell cars every day, instead work on building that relationship and when the time comes they will come to you.