In today’s global economic slowdown, keeping a competitive advantage over other dealerships is crucial for sustaining your business.
With traditional marketing channels saturated for decades, social media is a new alternative to reaching out and connecting with new customers.
Social media marketing makes it possible to reach your target market and constantly engage your current follower base.
This simple guide shows how Wishpond provides the social media marketing apps your dealership needs. Get people talking about your brand and get people on your lot.
What ROIs can I achieve by using Wishpond?
- Increase engagement with your fans
- Attract new followers through promotions and buzz
- Obtain a deeper understanding of your audience through Wishpond’s Analytics
- Differentiate your dealership from competitors and cut through the clutter of advertising
- Get people in the door of your dealership and increase sales
Here are the 3 best types of contests to promote your dealership(s):
- Sweepstakes
- Photo Contests
- Video Contests
- Vote Contests
Sweepstakes are have a very low barrier to entry for participants. Users submit their emails to be entered into a random draw for a chance to win a prize.
Sweepstakes are incredibly simple, and can be set up in 5 easy steps. Additionally, Wishpond’s intuitive dashboard makes it easy to collect participants’ emails and even export them to your CRM system.
Once people enter the sweepstakes, they automatically post about the sweepstakes to their Facebook friends, or Twitter followers, which could exponentially increase exposure to your sweepstakes and your brand.
As an example, we made up the car brand “Wishpond Vehicles” (WV).
WV wanted to promote their new line of vehicles, which just arrived on their lot. To do so, they chose to run a sweepstakes, for a chance to win $10,000 towards a new car.
This not only generates excitement about the sweepstakes, but generates buzz about the new car line too.
4 Social Campaigns to Boost Sales for Car Dealerships
Photo contests are simple to set up on Wishpond and are very effective. Simply put: you give participants a photo theme, and then they upload a photo of that theme to your Facebook Page (or Twitter, or website), and a winner is chosen.
A photo contest encourages relevant user generated content, has a chance of becoming viral, and spreads awareness about your brand.
Many car owners feel a certain level of brand loyalty towards their automobile. This, combined with the visual nature of cars, makes photo contests an excellent fit for a car dealership.
For example, a dealership could ask WV users to take a photo of their current WV vehicle, where others would vote on which one looked the best. This is a good way for the most brand-loyal users to show their dedication and positively influence others.
Another way to run a photo contest is to tap into the pride many people feel for their cars. One way to do this would be to ask users to submit photos of their car decorations or modifications. While this is not absolutely relevant to your brand, it would possibly encourage participation from a wider audience.
4 Social Campaigns to Boost Sales for Car Dealerships
Video Contests
Similar to photo contests, video contests provide an outlet for the brand loyal to show off their vehicle. As a dealership, ask participants to submit a video that fits the theme of your contest and then the winner receives a prize.
Video contests are high-involvement, which translates into a lower turnout than other contests. Those that do participate, however, gain a stronger connection with the brand, and the videos that are produced are useful in spreading buzz about both the contest and your brand.
4 Social Campaigns to Boost Sales for Car Dealerships
With the growing prevalence of dash-cams, video contests have become increasingly viable as a contest medium for car dealerships. Dash-cam themed contests address this problem of high involvement by greatly lowering the barriers of entry for participants that already have a dash-cam installed.
Important: when using dash-cams as a contest, be sure to include legal stipulations so that your dealership will not be held liable for any unsafe or dangerous driving done by participants.
If using a dash-cam is not suitable for your company, a traditional video contest will also work very well. Phone cameras are very commonplace, and the creation of videos is a lot less troublesome than it was a couple of years ago.
Try to relate the contest back to your brand directly or at least tie it back to cars in general. The same applies to prizes. If your prize is unrelated to the automobile industry, people outside of your target market will sign up just to get the prize. This will stifle future promotion opportunities.
Make the theme something simple to do, yet still complex enough to be interesting. A theme of “Submit a video of your drive to work every day!” will be very easy to do, but will be (generally speaking) very boring.
The best video contests facilitate interesting content that can be shared to non-participants as well. Make an interesting theme and you will receive interesting content.
Vote Contests are one of the most versatile and effective contests that Wishpond has to offer. It works for virtually any industry, has very low barriers to entry, and can empower your followers.
Quite simply, participants submit their email addresses and are then allowed to vote between any number of options. In addition to a prize, vote contests give your audience a chance to voice their opinion on a variety of topics.
One particular way to use vote contests for the auto industry is to focus on the hobbies that your target market enjoys. The key to maximizing the participation for a vote contest is to find a topic that people feel strongly about.
Voting contests can also be used to empower customers by giving them a level of control over future promotions. If your dealership has a lot of control over their own promotions and sales, customers could, for example, be given an opportunity to vote for the next discount they want to see.
WV is planning on having a major discount on car-wash products (such as scratch-removers and special sponges) for their dealership, but they aren’t sure how often their customers actually washed their cars. By doing a vote contest (shown below), WV can interact with their followers and begin segmenting their fans into heavy, medium, or non-existent customer categories.
4 Social Campaigns to Boost Sales for Car Dealerships
With Wishpond, tracking the effectiveness of your campaign is incredibly simple. Most of the work is done for you and condensed into an intuitive dashboard. All the contact information collected is also available for your company databases and mailing lists.
4 Social Campaigns to Boost Sales for Car Dealerships
Setting up comprehensive social media promotions has never been easier. This guide is by no means exhaustive of Wishpond’s many features and analytics. Take a look at Wishpond’s apps today and see for yourself!
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