You Tube for car dealers
As of February 2011, You Tube has 490 million unique users worldwide per month, who rack up an estimated 92 billion page views each month. We spend around 2.9 billion hours on You Tube in a month — over 325,000 years. And those stats are just for the main You Tube website — they don’t incorporate embedded videos or video watched on mobile devices.
Social media-related You Tube stats are just as impressive. You Tube says that on average there are more than 400 tweets per minute containing a You Tube link. Meanwhile, over on Facebook over 150 years worth of You Tube videos are watched every single day.
Bearing this in mind, surely all cars dealers are fully utilising this excellent car dealer marketing strategy? Well this isn't exactly the case as from doing my own personal research, only half the dealerships I investigated had You Tube channels and only half of those were making good use of this type of media.
If you are a car dealer and you are reading this, you might be thinking “so what if I don't have a You Tube channel?”.
Well here are some of the benefits of You Tube...
You Tube is proven to dramatically increase SEO value. The more video content you can create and distribute via You Tube, the better google will find that dealer and rank them in organic searches.
Ok, so we have established that having a You Tube channel is an excellent online car marketing strategy, but isn't that a lot of hassle? Well actually no it isn't. It is essentially 3 simple steps:
1. Setting up an account on YT
2. Shoot a video
3. Upload the video
It's important to select good titles, descriptions and tags to get more hits. For instance, putting the URL of the dealership at the start of the video description is a great way to drive traffic to the dealer's web site. Consistency is very important too.
From my research, the car dealers that are using You Tube effectively are doing the following things:
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Keeping their channel up to date with video presentations of their current stock on their fore court
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Including customer testimonials about the good auto retail sales experience they had with the dealership
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Also use videos to promote other services the dealership might offer, for example one dealership I researched had a video on their channel to promote a superguard service they had.
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Uploading TV ads of the cars they had on their forecourt.
However, to be even more successful with You Tube go an extra step and participate as You Tube users. To really be successful with You Tube, you have to both manage your own channel and interact with the You Tube community by sharing content, liking videos... Showing that you are participating speaks about how your brand does business.
by
Lauren Coakeley
