Some of the biggest ambassadors you can find are your satisfied customers.

You can have a great online and offline presence, but if you’re not leveraging the feedback from your satisfied customers you’re leaving an important asset on the table.

With 92% of customers saying that they trust “earned” advertising, it’s time to start making your online reviews a priority.  

Here are 14 powerful advantages of online reviews to drive traffic to your dealership and sell more cars.

1. Creates free advertising

Every review that you get online is, in its own way, a form of advertising for your dealership.

The more reviews you obtain, the more your name and products are exposed to readers which will increase awareness of who you are.

These reviews are unique because they can cover your dealership in a way that no other media source ever would.

They provide mass exposure that would never be possible through traditional marketing channels.  

Are you ready for that?  

2. Improves SEO

Search engines like Google are now taking into account how many times your dealership is mentioned in reviews.

f you are mentioned frequently, you will likely appear higher in the local search results than other dealerships that don’t have as many reviews or those who don’t pay attention to their SEO.

Google will even pull your rating onto the search results page, showing one to five stars before they even click to your page.  

3. Creates peer recommendations

It’s generally understood that anyone will trust the opinion of a good friend, but what about a stranger?

It turns out that for online reviews, they are practically the same thing.

According to a 2015 Nielsen survey of 30,000 internet consumers, 83% of people trust recommendations from people they knew while 70% trust any review posted online.

In all, every online review that recommends your dealership is a powerful form of marketing.  

4. Finds constructive criticism and suggestions

Online reviews are a great way to find questions or concerns that people might have about your dealership.

It can be a great opportunity to resolve customer’s problems and improve business practices that you had never realized before.

A major benefit of seeing the published complaint is the ability to respond to it publicly if you feel that it is necessary.

If you acknowledge and respond to the customer well, their negative experience could turn into a positive one.

Many customers have good suggestions on how things could operate, so review sites can be a free source of market research.  

5. Builds a closer relationship with customers

Online review sites, like other forms of social media, give you the chance to develop a closer relationship with your customers.

t gives your customers a way to talk about your business that they probably wouldn’t be able to otherwise.

If you respond to both the good and bad reviews it will demonstrate to these customers that you care what they have to say.

Often times the customers just want to feel that they are heard, and this can make the difference between a promoter and a detractor.  

6. Increases customer testimonials

If there are particularly good reviews about a specific part of your dealership, this can be a valuable asset.

If the good review you received was talking about your service department, you can take this review and weave it into your social media, or plug it into a newsletter for sales.

The key to this is making it look organic.

These testimonials are social proof or seals of approval for the next product promotion that will be landing in your customer's’ inbox.  

7. Creates case studies

Case studies take the testimonial aspect one step further.

They depict in detail how your services helped a customer solve a specific problem.

Tell their story from beginning to end.

Who are they?

What was their issue?

How did you help to resolve it?

Put in real numbers and pictures.

Reaching out to people that leave good reviews for your dealership is a good way to find potential customers to do a case study about.

The idea is to show people how you can solve other people’s problems in a satisfactory way and how it can solve their similar issues as well.  

8. Helps beat the competition

Almost every dealership is in the middle of an intense price battle between their competitors.

With the desire for customers to have a “no haggle” price experience, how are you going to win?  

This is one of the cases where online reviews can make or break you.

Your customers want to know which dealership will give them a better value for their time and money.

The problem is that they generally don’t want to hear self-promoting talk from you or your competition.

Who they really want to hear from is an impartial third party.

Your positive reviews on your site are this impartial third party that your potential customers are looking for.

This will give you a competitive advantage to help sway people to your store rather than the competition on the other side of town.  

9. Improves first impressions

Most customers don’t want to jump into archives of reviews to read everything that has been written.

They want to make a decision.

Chances are that they will read the first review that pops up, or the first hand full.

These reviews will provide the basis for their decision, one way or another.

Having a high percentage of good reviews to bad will generally help you create a better first impression.

The better the person sees at the dealership the better chances you have to receive another good review.

It’s a double edged sword though because the same is true for negative reviews and it’s a self-repeating cycle.  

10. Demonstrates social proof

Having a high number of reviews is ideal for your dealership because it indicates that you’re a “tried and approved” business.

It adds a certain degree of “social proof” even with a handful of reviews.

As the number of reviews you have increase, the more sense of legitimacy your business will have and the more trusted it will become.  

11. Adds more content to your website

If you’re receiving a lot of reviews on your products and services, or even the dealership as a whole, you can use this to increase the total amount of content on the site.

Imagine having service related reviews appear on the service section of your site or general dealership reviews on the homepage.

Encouraging visitors and website users to be as descriptive as possible in their reviews, which will increase the amount of usable content you have for your site.  

12. Increases click through rate on your search results

One feature that you can tap into is Google’s rich snippets in the form of reviews.

By using structured markup to feature your reviews, or if you get more reviews through Google directly, you can have star ratings and reviews show up for searches relating to your dealership.

If the average review is positive, or you have high average ratings, you can expect a higher click-through rate in organic search results.  

13. Increases your rankings

The quality and quantity of online reviews play an important role in how your business ranks in local search results.

To find information on your business, Google looks at review sites and third-party directories related to local business.

In general, the more positive reviews you have, the higher authority you’re going to receive, increasing the organic traffic that you will receive.  

14. Helps you learn from past experience

Every review that comes through holds important qualitative information, good or bad, that you and your consumers can learn from.

Consumers look closely at negative reviews so it’s important to have someone checking all of your reviews at least once per week to collect this information.

Create a process for them to report what they have learned and an action plan for this information to be acted upon.

Continual improvement is the best way to create a better experience for consumers in the future, which will, in turn, help you sell more cars.  

A word of warning...

With so many benefits to having good reviews and such damage that can be caused by negative ones, it can be tempting to create reviews.

Don’t do it!

Your dealership can get hit with costly fines for creating fake reviews, so it’s better to take the morally high road and stay safe, rather than sorry.  

Closing remarks

It’s hard to put a monetary value on each review you received, but an example might help get my point across.

For a consumer, the purchase of a car is a big decision, just like it is for a dealer to choose a new CRM, DMS, or SEM provider.

With so many decisions it can take a lot of time and effort to research different options and it can be very costly to make a wrong decision.

This is where DrivingSales Vendor Ratings comes in handy.

Vendor Ratings helps you shop for your next vendor solution by showing you reviews from verified dealership employees that will help you make the best choice for your dealership.

Click Here to contribute to the community by rating you dealership vendors or to shop for vendors.

With a little over a year’s experience with LinkedIn Advertising and some insights from a connection at LinkedIn, I’ve put together a list of 6 suggestions to help you increase the ROI and performance of your LinkedIn advertising campaigns.

Tip 1: Bid Popping

Bid popping is the strategy of bidding high at the beginning of the life of your ad to get your ad to the best audience possible and to get the best Click Through Rate (CTR) possible. But if you’re paying per click anyways, why does this matter?

LinkedIn is dedicated to making sure that it’s users have an enjoyable experience and are shown good content. To do this, they built a 0.35% CTR benchmark into their algorithm. If your ad is performing above this benchmark, LinkedIn will help you out by automatically giving you better ad placements. This way, good content that entices people has an advantage over the not so good content that might have a larger budget. Cool, huh? Again, the strategy is that having a higher bid will likely get more people clicking on it, increasing your CTR. After a week or two you can cut back on your budget and will be able to get higher bid positions at lower costs than you would have been able to before, and you can stay competitive with lower budgets. If your ad is going to have a longer life than just a couple of weeks, it is well worth the effort.

P.S.— If you’re familiar with Google AdWords’ Quality Score, this strategy can be used very effectively there as well.

Tip 2: Create Multiple Ad Variations

Multiple ad variations can help you in a few ways. First, running A/B tests is always a good idea. If you’re not testing your content, you are missing out on a learning opportunity. Most importantly, though, is that you get a chance to show your ad more often. LinkedIn only gives your ad one shot at each user per 48 hours but creating variations of your ad will allow each one to be shown in that same 48-hour window. Having 2-3 at a minimum per campaign would be a good idea.

Tip 3: Create LinkedIn Friendly Ads

There are a few things unique about LinkedIn ads that differ from other places. First, use stock imagery. Based on what historical databases at LinkedIn say, you can expect that users will respond very well to clean and simple images. In other words, exactly what you would expect from stock images.

It is also important to keep your character count below 140. Even though this is not  Twitter, it is a really good standard to keep. In today’s world, people’s attention spans are short, and the ability to say the same thing in fewer words is highly desired skill in today’s market. I’m not the only one that says that either. Adam Shiflett, the Marketing Director at DrivingSales, has said that “if your email has more than three paragraphs I won’t read it, just mark a time to come talk with me.” And if that’s not enough to convince you, data shows that ads with more than 140 characters start to see a diminishing CTR.

Tip 4: Optimize Targeting (Don’t Spend More Than You Need To)

When I built my first campaign I was told that we were targeting X job titles in  Y Industry, so when I got into the Campaign Manager to select my audience, I went straight to the ‘Job Title’ and ‘Industry’ fields to target “Job Title X” and “Industry Y.” Now, that’s a good way to do things, but I have learned that each filter you use charges you at different rates and that the “Job Title” just happens to be the most expensive one. Plus, you’re probably not reaching everyone you could be. Instead, I would be filtering by “Seniority.” You can easily include or exclude the different levels that you want (Owner, CXO, Manager, Entry, Etc.) and get those long tail job titles that you wouldn’t have thought to include in your job title search, and spend less money doing it. Win-win, right?

One additional pro-tip is filtering by relevant Member Groups. These people are raising their hands telling you that they are interested in seeing your content, are more likely active LinkedIn users, and are more likely to engage with content. It takes a little more effort to find the perfect groups but is well worth the effort.

Tip 5: Allocation of Budget (Where & How Much)

Now, there are two main types of ads that I use on LinkedIn: Sponsored Content and Text Ads. Best practices say that ¾ of your LinkedIn advertising budget should be spent on Sponsored Updates and the other ¼ on Text Ads.

Text ads don’t perform as well but also aren’t as costly. The purpose of text ads in your campaign is mostly to build brand awareness and get your name out there. I’ve personally seen a lot of these ads, read them, and never clicked. That’s a good thing for these companies. I’m seeing their content and becoming more aware of that brand while not costing them anything. However, if I do click that’s not a bad thing either. You now have a chance to convert them on your landing page at a lower price than Sponsored Content. The main downside is that these ads have very limited text and image space, so landing page conversion rates tend to be lower.

Tip 6: CPM Bidding

In all honesty, this article was written to be only five tips, but I just found out this tip this week and had to add it. If you have posted an ad and have gotten the click through rate over 1% you should think about changing from PPC to CPM. CPM stands for Cost Per Mille which means that it will charge you a fixed rate per 1000 impressions. If your add is picking up momentum and have this high click-through rate, you can save a lot of money by changing payment methods.

There are, of course, a lot of other things that go into a conversion than just these things, but I’m confident that applying these principles will help you increase your ROI from your LinkedIn campaigns. Don’t take my word for it, get out there and test out these theories. The market and tools are constantly changing so always be testing and always be improving. 

Who did your grandfather go to when he needed information? Most likely his father. Where did your father go when he needed information? Again, probably his father. Now, where do you and I go when we need information? Most of us would probably say Google.

In writing this article I wanted to make a point that as we get more digitally connected we stop relying on our family and friends for information. I thought it would be cool to put some data behind that idea and I would have an awesome marketing article, right? The problem is that I was wrong—This article just got a lot more interesting.

In this article, I’ll show you what I found, explain why I was wrong, and tell you what that means for us.

In order to prove my point, I needed to show that search engines were gaining in popularity and that the millennial generation is going less to their family and friends for advice. I started my research by jumping into multiple databases trying to find credible information backed by data. The problem that I ran into with my research is that no matter how long or far I looked, I couldn’t find evidence of this. In fact, I started finding information contrary to the point I wanted to prove.

As it turns out, these college age students have actually started to think of their parents as informal advisors when they need to make important academic and career decisions, according to Javeed (2010). Actually, 45 percent of students will call, text, or email their parents on a daily basis! They like this level of involvement from their parents; they rely on it frequently as it makes them feel safer in these important decisions. Why? Quigley (2016) says that an increased use of technology is thought to be one of the most obvious causes of this social trend. She notes that these students are leaving home but never really need to separate from their parents when they all have cell phones in their pockets and can call at any moment with no additional cost.

We now know that millennials communicate with parents more, not less. So does that mean that Google is just a fad that will die out as people connect more with their families for information? Well, no that’s not true either. Google reported 2012 as a record year for new searches, coming in at 1.2 trillion averaging around 100 billion per month (Google, 2013).

Unfortunately, that was the last report that Google has put out which doesn’t tell us anything about the recent growth pattern I was searching for. Luckily there is a third party, comScore, that has published reports on search engine history. comScore’s report shows that from December 2012 (Lella, 2013) to December 2014 (Lella, 2015) search traffic has increased by 3.4%. So no, it doesn’t appear that Google is just a fad, but what does that mean for us?

This answer puzzled me for days when I finally stumbled upon the article “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips” by Sparrow (2011). The team of scientists working on this ran a number of experiments and found out three key things. They found out that as (1) people discover that they need information, they think first of the computer, (2) we remember things best that we don’t think will be available later, and (3) we identify where an item has been stored better than what that item was. With this information, things start to make sense.

Millennials continue going back to their parents because they are a trusted source of information and they slowly learn that their parents know more than they gave them credit for. They will keep going back for both the information they have forgotten and to learn more about important decisions as Javeed taught us earlier. The same goes for Google. If they know that they can do a simple search again and find the same information easily, they are less likely to remember it. That will cause them to continue coming back for that information and Google continues as their number one resource for new information.

In August 2013, all Google servers went down for a total of five minutes, but in just this small amount of time global web traffic went down by 40 percent, as reported by Bell (2013). We have become dependent on the knowledge we get from the Internet the same way we are dependent on the knowledge we get from our family, friends, and parents. The experience of losing an internet connection is quickly becoming more and more like the experience of losing a friend, a family member, or a parent.

As we’ve seen, people are becoming more dependent on the paths they use to get their information. What does that mean for us as marketers? We need to start thinking more about how we can influence that inner circle of family and friends that will eventually influence the audience we are marketing towards. If they are already going to social media for information we need to be on social media and become a reliable source for them. Once you can build that image in their mind they will continue coming back to you for both past and future information. Our goal is to become a member of their inner circle of friends and family, almost like a parent. Your goal is to become their father, their patriarch, their ultimate source.

References

Bell, L. (2016). Google Goes Down for Five Minutes, Web Traffic Plunges 40 Percent. Retrieved from http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2289637/google-goes-down-for-five-minutes-web-traffic-plunges-40-percent

Google. Zeitgeist 2012. Retrieved from https://www.google.com/zeitgeist/2012/#the-world

Javeed, S., Bruschke, K., & Chen, E. (2010). Bringing the Message Home: Teaching Effective Communication to Students and Parents. Retrieved from NACADA Clearinghouse of Academic Advising Resources Web site http://www.nacada.ksu.edu/tabid/3318/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/165/article.aspx

Lella, A. (2013). comScore Releases December 2012 U.S. Search Engine Rankings. Retrieved from http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press-Releases/2013/1/comScore-Releases-December-2012-US-Search-Engine-Rankings

Lella, A. (2015). comScore Releases December 2014 U.S. Desktop Search Engine Rankings. Retrieved from http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Market-Rankings/comScore-Releases-December-2014-US-Desktop-Search-Engine-Rankings

Quigley, M. W. (2016). Keeping the Lines of Communication Open with Millennials. Retrieved from http://www.aarp.org/ home-family/friends-family/blogs/info-2016/millennials-communication-with-parents.html

Sparrow, B., Liu, J., & Wegner, D. M. (2011). Google effects on memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at our Fingertips. Science, 333(6043), 776-778. doi:10.1126/science.1207745