Facebook provides numerous insights for your dealership’s page, and all those graphs and numbers can be a bit overwhelming. Fortunately, we’ve taken a few of the basic statistics and broken down what they mean.

Impressions

Impressions are the number of times that your post or ad appeared in someone’s timeline. Impression rates don’t reflect a unique number of users, as a post or ad may appear in a user’s timeline multiple times. A high impression rate doesn’t necessarily mean that your content is reaching a large group of people. However, it can mean that your content is being viewed frequently.

Reach

Reach tracks the number of users that have viewed your post or ad. It counts only one view for each person. Therefore, the reach metric provides a much better idea of how many people are viewing your content. Seeing a high reach rate in your Facebook insights means that your content is getting in front of a large group of people.

Engagement

You might be able to guess what this metric means. Engagement is the number of times users interacted with your post. By “interacted,” we mean likes, reactions, sharing, or commenting on a post. A high engagement rate can be a good sign. It means that your posts are interesting to your audience and can result in both a higher reach and impression rate.

Facebook insights are an amazing way to understand your audience and how they are receiving your content. With these numbers, you can learn what is or isn’t working as far as what you post on your Facebook page or the ads you promote.

The Social Media Management team at Chumney & Associates oversees practically all social media aspects for our clients. They post on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and more. They track and respond to reviews, and they provide monthly reports that provide a comprehensive look at how our clients’ profiles have performed. Contact us today to inquire about how our Social Media Package can grow your dealership’s following!

How You Can Inspire Customer Feedback

A happy customer leaves your dealership with the vehicle of their choice. Naturally, as a business owner, you want to understand why this person decided to buy from your store. You send them the usual request for customer feedback and anxiously await their response. But it never comes.

Those who depend on customer feedback when it comes to solidifying future business strategies might find this common issue quite disheartening. Convincing someone to send you their thoughts has become an impossible task. How do we inspire customers to share their opinions with us so we can create the ideal experience for them in the future?

Consumers are busier than ever, and we have to persuade them to spend their time answering our questions. Luckily, there are some easy tactics you can use to increase your response rates and find out the information you desperately need to know.

Use Real People When Reaching Out

A customer is more likely to engage in a conversation with your company if they know a real person is doing the talking. Automated responses can seem insincere and cause someone to ignore your request. A genuine response crafted by one of your employees could have the opposite effect. Also, instead of using a generic customer service email, you could include the general manager’s email address or the email of the sales employee involved. Having a person to contact directly makes your company more accessible to the consumer and creates a better discussion.

Tell Them Why You’re Contacting Them

Always explain why you are contacting someone specifically. You could say, “We noticed you visited our online inventory pages and would like your feedback about your experience using the search tools.” This creates a personalized experience that feels more sincere than if you simply said, “Hey, we’d like your feedback.” You also might get a response that shares more detailed information, allowing you to better target this customer with your marketing efforts. For example, they might tell you they were looking for a specific style of SUV for their family and that your tools helped them find some good options. You can then send follow-up information about types of SUVs that you think will fit their needs.

Keep Your Questions Short

As mentioned before, consumers are incredibly busy. They aren’t going to give up their time to complete long surveys or complicated questionnaires, even if they want to share their thoughts with you. Many companies have turned to straightforward, one-question surveys that require little effort from the consumer. Make your questions simple, short, and easy to answer. Your responses will certainly increase if the contacted customer can quickly share their opinions and move on with their day.

Be More Specific

Along with keeping your questions short, you also need to make them more specific. Asking questions that are too broad requires more effort from the consumer, and even if they do respond, it might not be helpful information for your business. Narrow your line of questioning to a specific service at your dealership, such as sales or finance. For example, instead of asking if they found your overall customer service helpful, ask if they enjoyed the car search tools you offer or the financial help they received.

Refining your customer feedback strategies with the right tactics allows you to better target the car buyers in your desired market. At Chumney & Associates, we help you create dynamic marketing and advertising campaigns for your dealership. We connect you to consumers in unique ways and generate stronger leads for future sales. Contact us today to learn about our digital marketing and advertising services.

Four Reasons Why Radio Is Still Relevant

There’s no denying our digital footprint is taking up more and more space. Digital usage is integrated into all facets of life: social connections, financial/banking, news, streaming entertainment, shopping. It may seem as though the old school ways of doing business are not as relevant;  however, traditional advertising, like radio, is still a viable part of the media mix.

1. 1. Year over year, consumers are spending more time with all forms of media, with a notable increase in digital. However, the percentage of time spent with radio has remained consistent. Over 90% of U.S. adults 18 and older listen to radio each week, the highest reach across platforms. Daily, the average time spent listening to radio, is 1.75 hours. That’s over 12 hours a week you can reach out to potential customers!
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3. 2. The radio ad format provides four main benefits: 30 seconds of dedicated user attention, targeting audience based on format, frequency of the message and driving home catchy jingles.
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5. 3. One of radio’s most important listening environments is the car. You can connect with engaged listeners one-on-one with a creative message. Running a radio campaign in conjunction with a digital campaign reinforces the overall message. 
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8. 4. Local radio is about community. Radio is able to connect with the local audience through live broadcasts that are relevant (news in your market), familiar on-air personalities the listener can connect with, and local in-person promotions and events in the area (toy drives, kids’ events, concert ticket promos, fundraising for local needs).

At Chumney & Associates, our in-house production team can take your message and create a radio spot that’s airplay ready when completed. Contact us today to get started!

Key Characteristics of Positive Online Customer Interaction

Positive online customer interactions improve your dealership’s public image and ensure greater satisfaction with your services or products. Conversely, negative online customer interactions damage your company’s reputation and leave your customers feeling insignificant and dissatisfied.

Think about the online exchanges you’ve had as a customer and remember the companies who excelled at handling your concerns. Our guess is that companies who delivered a positive experience had several things in common.

If you want your company to provide customers with a positive online experience, it’s important to make sure your employees follow those same characteristics with every interaction.

Empathy and Genuine Concern

Empathy allows you to understand your customer’s apprehensions and work through them with genuine concern. To add empathy to your customer conversations, remind yourself that there is a real person on the other side of the screen. Thank them for their patience and don’t be afraid to apologize on behalf of their inconveniences. You always want your customers to feel valued during every online interaction. By creating a positive experience with empathy and genuine concern, you’re more likely to retain loyal customers who trust in your brand.

Transparency and Strong Communication

Transparency provides customers with insight into the situation and how your company is handling the issue. Strongly communicating what has happened, how it happened, and how you’re going to fix it is key for a positive customer interaction. Your customers want solid information to lean on, and they won’t be satisfied if they don’t know exactly what’s going on. Make sure your customers fully understand what the next steps are and how you’re going to handle their concerns. Don’t leave them in the dark or try to make excuses for what happened with your product or services. Take responsibility for the issue, despite whose fault it is, and fix it the best you can.

Simplicity and Ease of Contact

A positive customer interaction requires a quick and easy form of contact. Getting in touch with your dealership should be simple and straightforward. Display where customers can contact you online in plain sight. Go where your customers are and don’t expect them to come to you. When customers reach out through Facebook, they should get a genuine response on Facebook and not just a message with another department to contact.

Timely Follow-Ups and Added Value

To create a positive online exchange with a customer, your auto dealership must proactively reach out with timely follow-ups and added value. Being the first to reach out is especially important for online interactions that require additional attention to solve the issue. Another way to enhance a customer’s experience is by providing extra value to the conversation. This can be as simple as emailing them a step-by-step guide for fixing future problems or a discount on another service.

At Chumney & Associates, we offer services to help you manage your dealership’s online reputation. Our team creates solid responses and delivers them in a timely manner to keep your customers satisfied. You can find out more about our Reputation Management services on our website or by calling us today.

What You Need to Know About the Future of SEO

What we know about search engine optimization (SEO) changes frequently; therefore, keeping up with new information is the key to your success for targeting shoppers during online searches.

Google and other search engines constantly tweak their methods of finding and displaying content to their users. These complex ranking systems will undoubtedly evolve and become more intuitive this year, so here are a couple of trends you should know.

Topic Clusters Instead of Keywords

For the future of SEO, Google and other search engines are looking at the intent behind consumer searches. They are shifting their focus from keywords to topic clusters. You might be wondering, “What on earth is a topic cluster?” It’s really quite simple.

According to Hubspot, topic clusters involve a pillar, which is like a major page for a website or a category page on a blog, and then multiple pieces content that all link back to the pillar (i.e. different blog posts, smaller website pages, and such). Linking clusters back to the pillar signals to search engines that this page is full of amazing, quality content related to the topic of choice. Over time, the topic cluster method allows your pillar page to rank higher, making it easier for consumers to find it during a search.

The Rise of the Featured Snippet

Featured snippets appear at the top of a search results page, and they answer consumers questions about who, what, when, where, why, and how. Google selects the featured snippet from a website that ranks on page one of the search results. This placement presents a huge opportunity for your content to sit above the highest ranking website page, and therefore, your link will be the first consumers see.

Featured snippets also play a vital role in voice search. Virtual assistants locate their answers by exploring featured snippets. With voice search becoming the rising trend among mobile searches, claiming the featured snippet with your page will drastically affect how many consumers find your content first.

What Does This Mean for You?

Now that you have more insight into the future of SEO, you’re probably wondering how this affects your dealership and your current website. This change is good if you already create great content about specific topics. However, if you’ve focused too heavily on keywords and a wide variety of topics without linking it all together, you’ll need to do some adjusting.

These search engine changes reaffirm that content is king and that internal linking matters for SEO. Moving forward, your website must focus on making your most important topics well-structured. This change doesn’t apply only to new content, but also to your old content. Clean up older blog posts or current webpages to make them more like the topic cluster model. Then you can link relevant pages to your main website pages and get those ranking higher.

At Chumney & Associates, our Digital Marketing team stays up to date on all the changes to search engine algorithms as we work to improve your websites and future content. The digital world is ever-changing, but we’re here to help you keep up. To learn more about our digital services involving SEO, contact us today for more information.