Dealer Public Relations

Dealer Public Relations will show you how to have customers send you good reviews.  The reviews are in turn sent to our writing staff.  The reviews are modified to accommodate keywords (that will fall within the first 62 characters) that will be picked up by search engines.  Otherwise, reviews are left exactly as they were written by the customer.  Finally, the reviews will be submitted to such social media sites as Yahoo Reviews, Yelp, Edmonds.com, and Carfax (to name a few). 

The important step in this process is to have original content and only submit it once to a review site.  This will increase the review’s ranking on a search.  For example, if your dealership has 20 reviews on Carfax, 37 on Yahoo, and 78 on Yelp – the Yelp review site will be at the top of the search window, while the others are further down the page.  The more reviews a site gets, the higher it will climb up the search window.  The original content of a review is crucial to keeping the integrity of the social media site, as well as the customer rating of your dealership (5 out of 5 stars, etc.).  You want real people telling other people (potential customers) what it is that they like about your cars and service. 

While positive reviews are great in and of themselves, we will also use them in a blog specifically designed for your dealership.  Blogs are useful for several reasons: we can use the placement of relevant metatags according to Yahoo and Google’s publication guidelines, they provide another forum for people to communicate about your dealership, and blogs have the ability to move their way up the search window quickly.  In this Internet-savvy society, the rise of social media sites has turned everyone into bloggers, thus creating a great tool for businesses and users alike.  Surfing and commenting on blogs is the new Internet pastime, so it’s about time your dealership gets involved! 

We will also show your dealership how to effectively use Internet press releases.  Press releases are very powerful forms of advertising and always get great search window rankings.  Your dealership can exercise freedom of press at its very best by distributing a press release (for free or for a small fee) that promotes your dealership’s great lease offer or rebate, or a fun contest, or a weekend special, and get amazing Internet visibility.  Well written and strong content will encourage readers to discuss the press releases and create great word of mouth and generate more car sales; which in turn may lead to a bigger story that can get picked up (by a bigger newspaper, TV station, etc.) as it travels the Internet news wire.  When accomplished correctly these steps should increase sales and now get the entire first page in a Google or Yahoo search of your dealership.

We offer these services on a month to month basis with no long term contracts. The modest fee for writing press releases, inserting keywords and metatags, posting blogs, and optimizing videos is only $1495/month.

Later in our relationship, as your Internet exposure invariably switches to a more positive light, your dealership will fill several pages of a search.  We will continue to maintain these services, as well as evaluating a pay per click or PPG campaign on Google and Yahoo.

Other services we can provide (for a nominal fee) include:

• Developing fresh new strategies that fit your market
• Showing you how to optimize every car on your website so that it can be searched on its own without expensive paid listing services such as AutoTrader
• Teaching salespeople how to market themselves on social media sites, car chat rooms, etc.
• Showing you how to market your cars worldwide by having a simple website in many different languages that refers them back to your main site
• Helping you target emerging markets

 

Let’s first start with a quick tutorial of social media. Someone once discovered that you could take Mentos (the candy) and put it in Diet Coke and it would explode.

Here is a quick video of what I’m talking about http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNgl6z5Z7k4

Mentos loved the idea and put up a contest with a $25,000 prize for the best video on YouTube.  For the money Mentos invested, they received hundreds of videos and an estimated $10 million in free advertising, causing sales to skyrocket. Coca-Cola, on the other hand, hated the idea and put out a press release saying people should enjoy Diet Coke, not destroy it.  The bloggers posted hundreds of negative blogs about Coke.  It turned out to be a public relations nightmare.

Dealer Public Relations could have provided a creative strategy to take advantage of the media attention Coke was receiving to propel their name and brand identity forward rather then backward as they did with their negative reaction to the Mentos experiment.

The one thing Mentos didn’t do right was to optimize the videos. If they had taken some more time to optimize all the YouTube videos, they would show up under the Mentos brand website in a Google search, therefore giving Mentos more positive exposure.