Canadian auto dealer spoke with Alexi Venneri, Co-Founder & CEO of Digital Air Strike, to get the scoop on how dealers can maximize their social media ROI. In part one of this article, Venneri explains why social media management and strategies should be left to the pros.
Alexi Venneri, co-founder and CEO of Digital Air Strike
PUTTING YOUR DEALERSHIP’S social media strategy into the hands of your nineteen-year-old niece or the summer intern, and expecting them to generate leads and tangible results, is not likely going to work in the long-term.
While it may seem like a good idea to delegate your dealership’s social media to someone who’s a whiz at running their personal platforms, it’s a whole other ball game to develop a solid business strategy that’s sustainable.
Cultivating a social media strategy takes expertise, resources and lots of time — something that’s tough to do for dealers who need to focus on selling cars and servicing them.
That’s a problem Digital Air Strike aims to solve for dealers.
Canadian auto dealer spoke with Alexi Venneri, Co-Founder & CEO of Digital Air Strike, an Arizona-based provider of social media, reputation management and lead response solutions for the automotive industry, who shared her insights on the ways dealers can maximize their social media ROI.
Venneri says dealers do realize they need to have a social presence. “More and more it’s no longer ‘should I be putting social media up?’ but it’s ‘how much am I going to spend on this ad campaign?’” she says.
“We help cultivate a relationship throughout the customer lifecycle,” says Venneri, who has a background in media and technology and worked at a large automotive retail store in the U.S. prior to co-founding Digital Air Strike about five and a half years ago.
As its militaristic name implies, Digital Air Strike goes beyond setting up social sites and monitoring online reputation by taking forceful and quick action to drive traffic from social media to the dealership.
Social media truly is making an impact in the way consumers shop for cars. In October, Digital Air Strike announced the results of its 2014 Automotive Social Media Trends Study at the J.D. Power Marketing Roundtable in Las Vegas, Nevada, which found a staggering 91 per cent of car buyers of the 2,000 surveyed used social media and review sites to choose their dealerships.
In the digital age, being active on social sites isn’t enough, says Venneri. She cites a study that shows that less than one per cent of all organic content is pushed through Facebook’s news feeds. Even if a dealer is posting compelling content, the chances of it being seen are slim to none unless that dealer has a paid advertising campaign.
Digital Air Strike takes advantage of social advertising and creates custom campaigns for a dealership to target specific demographics.
Venneri and her team also work with dealership staff to provide photos and updates on community events, and they help build social media content to keep stoking the social media furnace that requires constantly updated content.
In part two of this story to be featured in the May edition, Canadian auto dealer looks into best practices for leveraging online reviews and the ways in which Digital Air Strike can help dealers with online reputation management.
