For some owners of car dealerships, SEO, social media marketing, and all the other aspects of modern promotional efforts can seem positively confounding. You know the basics: you need to have a website so that people can find out about what vehicles you have in stock, and you need social media so you can reach out to potential customers. That could very well be the extent of your knowledge.
However, you can hire an internet marketing agency for car dealerships to assist as you tackle these challenges. You know that internet marketing agencies can be helpful, just as you know that social media can be useful.
This leads to a further quandary, though. Now that you have an internet marketing agency for car dealerships that has active social media accounts for you, how can you tell if the money you’re giving them is being well spent?
How to Quantify Social Media Efforts
Essentially, what you are asking is how to tell if a social media campaign is finding success or not. There are three ways to do that. You can use sales, customer service, or social proof. Let’s examine each of these.
Sales
This is the easiest way to determine if your social media efforts are paying off.
How many cars are you moving? If the number is up since you started using social media, then you have to figure that played a part in it.
To be certain, you can ask your customers as they come in for test drives. If they say that social media interaction played a part in their decision to shop with you, then you know that your internet marketing agency is doing their job well.
Customer Service
For customer service via social media, you can use automated replies for many of the questions that people frequently ask. This is the equivalent of an FAQ section on your website.
If people are reaching out to your dealership via social media, as they often do these days, then you can check your feeds and see if customers are going away satisfied by the responses they’re getting.
If they are, this is further proof that your social media strategy is working.
Social Proof
Social proof relates to how many people are following your various social media accounts, liking posts, retweeting your messages, signing up for your newsletters, etc. With auto sales, this is probably the least reliable method of telling how much good your social media is doing, but it still bears mentioning.
Keep in mind, though, that ultimately, you’re looking for sales. Someone liking one of your Facebook posts is nice, but it only matters if they eventually decide to become a customer.
Your internet marketing agency for car dealerships should be using social media to your advantage, and these are the rubrics you can use to determine if they are doing so. If you see that the campaign they launched is finding success, then you can breathe easy, and that’s the company with which you should establish a long-term working relationship.