We covered in Part I why a blog is important to your content strategy – but it doesn’t have to seem like a chore. This is a great time for your staff to get creative, create your own voice, and learn more about what drives your customers.
Blogging can also be a great pathway for learning that can help your staff become more educated on current products and trends – while venting a little creativity into your content marketing strategy.
Getting Your Staff Involved
One of your greatest resources for blog content is already right at your dealerships fingertips and you might not even know it. It’s your staff.
Getting your staff involved is critical to connecting with your customer base. If you’re writing about the features on a 2015 Ford F-150 have each one of your employees write about one of their favorite features on the truck. Another approach may be to educate your team members on the latest features on new models. Give them each a model they need to study up on and write a blog post about the vehicle. This can be a great way to take advantage of different perspectives and cultivate fresh content.
Remember what we said about being creative? Encourage your sales team to collaborate on coming up with clever topics to engage customers. There’s some great team-building benefits to this approach. It takes the anonymity out of your team members individually submitting blog ideas and gets them hearing each others ideas. And who doesn’t love a little friendly competition when it comes to coming up with the best blog topic for the week!
Getting Your Customers Involved
Blogging is also a great way to establish relationships with your customers. When you find customers asking a lot of the same questions, these can be great topics for you to blog about! Inform your customers through social media about the topics you’re writing about and let them see you as an educational source to utilize. Being the ‘go to’ source for customers to rely on is what will separate you from the competition. This is valuable to your customers as a quick place to go and answer questions like:
- How to program their Bluetooth.
- Common questions on navigation.
- How to program the clock on their dash. (This may seem like an easy thing to you but it’s a common question.)
… So Here’s The Gist
You may recall in the previous post The Smog Around The Auto Blog: Part I, we revealed why search engines love it when you are keeping your website up-to-date with relevant content. It’s because they’re constantly looking for relevant information to index. And when they see you consistently blogging it helps increase your visibility. Blogging is a great remedy for meeting your needs, but also the needs of the spiders crawling the web for content.
Don’t forget that blogging is about creating a voice for your dealership. This is your avenue to stand out. There are many marketing methods that are best practices sure, but blogging is the one practice that carries with it individuality.
There is a flipside to the blogging coin though. While it’s important to have your own voice there’s important things to remember when you’re brainstorming blog topics. Does your blog contain the proper messaging? Does it have consistent brand alignment? Is it connecting with your customer base? These are things our team at Dealer Marketing Refresh can help with!
We know there are many moving parts to a well functioning dealership and implementing n effective content strategy takes time. That’s why our team of dedicated content marketers can help. If you dealership needs to rev up its content marketing strategy, contact us for more details on how we can help you get started!
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