Category Archives: Content Marketing

Terrestrial radio ad spots have long been a foundation of many car dealerships marketing efforts. In the past couple of years digital radio, on platforms such as Pandora and Spotify, has increased in popularity and taken listeners away from terrestrial radio. With that shift comes a shift in ad dollars as dealerships look to reach their target audience on the new frontier of digital radio. Before dealers sign up for a digital radio campaign they need to be aware of the returns that they’ll most likely get from the campaign.

In the past, a couple of dealerships have reached out to us to investigate a rise in bounce rate on their site. In more than a few occasions I’ve poked into their analytics account to find that the culprit of the rise in bounce rate was a digital radio campaign that the dealership was running. In one case, I saw a site’s bounce rate nearly double on the days that their digital radio campaign ran.

In the analytics accounts that I’ve seen, the engagement metrics for digital radio advertising leaves a lot to be desired. You may expect to see these kinds of results:
• Bounce rate in the low 90’s
• Time on site less than 40 seconds
• Pages/Session less than 1.5

Also, you’ll see very little goal conversions, if any. With these dismal engagement metrics you’ve got to really question the quality of traffic that these campaigns are bringing to your site.

The majority of digital radio users are on mobile devices. With mobile banner ads comes the peril of the accidental clicks from fat finger syndrome. The accidental click rate on mobile banner ads is typically 65%. For digital radio campaigns I expect the accidental click rate to be much higher when you consider that oftentimes the banner ad placement is typically above the radio navigation buttons. A person who accidentally clicked on your ad when they intended to ‘Skip’ that One Direction song on their Taylor Swift Pandora station is not a likely car shopper and will most likely bounce from your site faster than Taylor Swift goes through boyfriends.

Digital radio campaigns aren’t without its benefits. The campaigns will yield lots of impressions at a pretty decent CPM (cost per thousand impressions), which has its benefits when it comes to branding. As a dealership you’ll have to weigh on whether this benefits outweighs the bounce rate hit that your site will take.

Google announced a few days ago via Matt Cutts Twitter that they are rolling another Panda update.

This is significant because we tend to react to big events but not to small roll outs and Google (Panda updates started in 2011). In this article from last year you can see some time perspective and also a good video from Matt Cutts explaining what to do if you were affected by the changes.

How does Panda affect my dealership?

We believe that Panda will affect long tail searches right away and different dealers need to look at slightly different strategies depending on their situation.

Some easy to see gains are searches like this one 2014 toyota corolla everett.

For dealers like Tom Matson in Auburn where they have heavy PPC competition plus Google bringing “other” Auburn’s across the US into the SERP local content was very important (notice usually Auburn Dodge Indiana in the SERP).

May 20^th, Google released yet another update to their search algorithm.  This update primarily targeted duplicate content, thin content, and low quality content.  This update is estimated to effect approximately 7.5% of search results.  Everyday Google is working on ways to improve their search results, trying to serve up the best possible search results.

What is duplicate content, thin content, and low quality content?

Duplicate content is when one website steals or borrows content from another website.  For example an article from one blog is copy and pasted into another blog.  Google gives very little value to content it recognizes as duplicate than original / unique content.

Thin content is when a webpage or website has very little content on the page or site.  Google doesn’t give a number of words it likes to see on every page, but if a webpage has less then 50 or 100 words on it, there is a chance Google won’t value it very highly.

Low quality content is a mixture of duplicated content, spammy content, bad spelling, and grammatical errors.  If a webpage’s content is copy and pasted from another site and then only reworded slightly, that could be seen as low quality content.

What does this mean for dealerships?

With every update Google releases the importance of high quality and unique content increases.  Content Motive offers a variety of SEO and content marketing products that focus on producing high quality unique content.  Not only does the content Content Motive produces index well in Google search results, the content is also invaluable to car shoppers looking for information on the cars and services they are interested in.  Let our professional writers help boost your dealership’s content marketing strategy.

We started building a new type of set pages for content, specially focused on new cars.

The pages don’t look different than many other companies new car model pages, what is different are the links to content.

In this example for Larson Nissan, you can see that besides accessing the inventory, brochures, incentives, etc (information that most dealer websites have) we also added pages with model information and trim information. The model and trim pages are build with unique content as required by the latest Google SEO updates.

These pages are not built all at once but several each month, for example you can see that Larson Cadillac has model pages but not trims yet. Whilehttp://www.toyotaoftacoma.com/op-2013-toyota-camry-hybrid-for-sale-near-fife/ it would be easier for us to build it all at once a constant flow of content signals Google that there is new material to index and therefore increases the chances of getting our website crawled and therefore indexed.

Enhancing content with video:

We also build pages for those dealers that have been working with us for a while for the 2013 model line. Notice that in this case we also added pages for the Hybrid models and that we used Toyota Corporate Youtube account videos with custom geo-located content to create video / model pages.

Magic Toyota created high quality videos with What’s Next Media so we open those as a layover instead of cresting a new page (we created pages with them in a different section of the site for indexing purposes). These videos have a specific branding purpose for the dealer so we wanted to keep the customer’s full attention on them.

Simple pages purely for content:

BMW is known for their remarkable number of different sub-models, however we kept it simple for this dealer. Same as for this Audi dealer where links to their incentives pages were more important than other things.

For more information about creating content please check our latest article: Top 5 must knows for dealer content marketing or go to Content Motive for more dealer content marketing and SEO services.

Millenials, those born after 1982, are often described as tech-savvy, educated, self-involved, socially connected (a product of coming to age during the social networking era), and impatient. At 80 million strong they make up the largest generation in U.S. History since the Baby Boomers. According to industry experts they carry as much as $170 billions annually in spending power. Car dealerships and automotive brands that can develop brand loyalty early are well positioned to reap a hefty portion of the millenial’s spending pie.

Selling a car to millenials is a lot different than selling to their parents. Here are two things that car dealerships can do to market to millenials.
 
Get On Social Media
For many millenials, their social network is the center of their lives. It’s the driving force that keeps them updated with their peers and the world around them. In fact, some millenials don’t make a move without consulting their social network. It’s important for car dealerships to develop a social presence. This means crafting social media content that is shareable and using social media as facilitator for communications with them.
 
Target Them Where They Spend Their Time
Millenials came of age in the era of personal computing and have fully embraced the era of the smartphone. It’s estimated that they spend as much as 8 hours a day consuming media through various devices. Whether it’s checking their e-mail on their desktop, texting their friends on their smart phones, or reading an article on their tablet; millenials spend a lot of time online. If car dealerships want to attract millenials, then they need to invest in their online presence. This means doing PPC advertising to drive traffic to their site, making sure the dealer website is SEO optimized so that it can be found on organic search results, and crafting a user friendly website that’s easy to navigate for both desktops and mobile devices.

Why not let Content Motive’s dealer marketing experts handle your social media and SEO marketing needs for you?

In the age of social networking Facebook has become a large part of any online marketing campaign, alongside SEO and PPC. Just as how Google is constantly making changes to their algorithm to alter best practices and penalize SEO tactics that moved from an acceptable tactic to a spammy tactic (i.e. keyword stuffing); Facebook is following suit with changes of their own that will affect how many businesses use social networking to meet their marketing goals.

It’s a common practice for businesses to ask for likes, shares, and comments to promote their product or business. This practice has been going on since business started using their Facebook pages as a marketing tool. Under Facebook’s new guidelines, the social networking giant is cracking down on these calls to action, referring to this practice as “like-baiting”. If a business or website continues to follow the practice of “like-baiting”, it will be much less likely that their posts will show in a users news feed.

Another tactic Facebook is looking to squash is recirculated content. It’s not uncommon for businesses to re-post the same content over and over again to promote a product or an event. Facebook finds the repeated visibility of duplicate content greatly diminishes the user experience of their news feed. They found that reducing this practice causes users to hide 10 percent fewer stories from their news feed.

Facebook says that their goal isn’t to impact pages that are genuinely trying to encourage discussion among their fans, but rather focus on Pages that post explicitly asking for likes, comments, and shares. So if your business is practicing any of these social media marketing tactics, then you may need to rethink new and creative ways to get people to like your posts without specifically asking for them outright.

Content Motive’s current social media posting strategies will not be effected by these updates.  Content Motive is proud to offer unique content on each post and does not bait likes, but instead encourage people to follow on Facebook naturally.

By its very nature, which is rooted in a bidding system for premium ad placement, PPC is very competitive form of marketing that breeds competition between brands. A PPC strategy that many business owners use is bidding on their competitor’s branded keywords. Bidding on your competitor’s branded keywords can open your business up to customers who you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. On the other hand, a shot across the bow at your competitor may cause your competitor to retaliate and bid on your branded terms – driving up the CPC for both terms. So before you decide to open the can of worms of bidding on your competition’s keywords, consider the pros and cons.

Pros:

• In general, branded keywords are a great way to attract customers who are high in the sales funnel and still weighing their options between brands. These are customers who may not have known about your brand, otherwise.
• Bidding on your competition doesn’t cannibalize your organic search listing. Chances are that you probably rank pretty high in organic search listings for your own branded terms. By bidding on your own branded terms you may be cannibalizing traffic that you would’ve gotten anyway through organic search listing.

Cons:

• Since the landing page has very little relevance with your competitor’s branded terms, you can expect low quality scores when you bid on your competitor’s branded keywords. This means you’ll have to pay a higher CPC when bidding on the competition.
• If your competitors aren’t bidding on your keywords now, then they will shortly as soon as you start to appear for their search terms.
• Using your competitor’s trademarked brand name in your ad text may draw the attention of Google and get your ad disapproved.

How to turn the “Cons” into “Pros”:  Don’t target exact trademarked names, but instead the city and the make that that dealership sells.  Create custom landing pages with keywords targeted not directly at your competing dealerships, but close to it.  This will raise the quality score of the page, lowering your CPC.

Together Integrated PPC and Content Motive can create great landing pages lowing your cost per click and greatly improving your landing page’s quality score.  What does this mean?  You can save money while maximizing your profits!  Click here to get started!

Whether you manage a small, yet burgeoning, blog with a few dozen readers or an immensely popular blog with a profitable Adsense account; you can utilize Google Analytics to gain insightful measurements on your blog’s performance. The myriad of data and graphs may seem daunting at first glance. However, if you know what data to look for; you can cut through the clutter and make sense of all that information. In this article we’ll point out some statistics you should consider monitoring to understand how well your blog is performing.

When it comes to blogging, content is king. Great content on your blog will get visitors returning to it repeatedly. Google Analytics allows you to see how many people came to your website once, twice, thrice, etc over a period of time. In the navigation panel go to Audience > Behavior > Frequency & Recency to see this information. Checking the number of return visitors to your blog is worth monitoring on a monthly basis to see if this figure gets better as you continue to develop loyal readers.

The Audience Overview report in Google Analytics has some valuable statistics you should monitor. In the navigation panel go to Audience > Overview to access this report. The metrics that you should monitor on this report includes:

Average Pages per visit: This statistic tells you how many pages your average visitor goes to during a session. Your blog should entice readers to explore other content within the site.

Time on site: The amount of time a visitor spends on our blog can give you valuable insights on the user experience. If your visitors are spending lots of time on your page then it may be an indication that they’re reading your content. That is great! On the other hand, if they are not spending significant time in your site then it may be a red flag for issues with your blog. Issues such as offensive content or long page load times – a likely cause for graphic heavy pages – might be some possible causes for visitors to retreat from your blog prematurely.

Bounce rate: The bounce rate is the percentage of users that visit your site, but leave without engaging with other pages. A high bounce rate can be addressed by implementing an internal linking strategy to relevant posts within your blog.

These are just a few metrics that you should consider. There are many other ways to measure blog performance. What analytics do you use to measure your blog performance?

Are you looking for an automotive blog with transparent results?  Content Motive uses professional writers who specialize in SEO in the automotive industry.

Online content marketing is any marketing done online that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire customers.  This information can be presented in a variety of formats, including custom websites, custom webpages, blogs, review sites, social media, how-to guides, question and answer articles, photos, etc.

So basically, online content marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and potential customers without selling.  It is a non-confrontational form of marketing. Instead of pitching your products or services, you are delivering information that makes your buyer smarter and increasing their interest in the product. The essence an online content strategy is the belief that if we deliver consistent, ongoing valuable information to buyers, they ultimately reward you with their business and returning loyalty.

 How does online content marketing create website traffic?

Traffic is received through search engines and social media.  Our content is written in a way that utilizes keywords that customers search for.  Most of our keywords are also accompanied with local cities and places near your potential customers.  Example: some one lives near Everett, WA and they are searching for a new Honda Fit.  Naturally that person may search for “New Honda Fit in Everett” or “New Honda Fit for Sale near Everett”.  If the correct keywords and locations are used, then your website traffic will increase. Along with these keywords, we also up-sell and educate your readers with our professionally written articles. Our articles are accompanied with call to action buttons and links, to retain the customer and keep them on your site. This leads to conversions and increased sales.

What are our content goals?

• Brand / Dealership Awareness
• Lead Conversion
• Customer Conversion
• Customer Service / Education
• Retention / Loyalty
• Up-Sell

Want to learn more about how Content Motive can help your dealership retain and get new customers? Click here for a free web presence evaluation.

Online content marketing is any marketing done online that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire customers.  This information can be presented in a variety of formats, including custom websites, custom webpages, blogs, review sites, social media, how-to guides, question and answer articles, photos, etc.

So basically, online content marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and potential customers without selling.  It is a non-confrontational form of marketing. Instead of pitching your products or services, you are delivering information that makes your buyer smarter and increasing their interest in the product. The essence an online content strategy is the belief that if we deliver consistent, ongoing valuable information to buyers, they ultimately reward you with their business and returning loyalty.

 How does online content marketing create website traffic?

Traffic is received through search engines and social media.  Our content is written in a way that utilizes keywords that customers search for.  Most of our keywords are also accompanied with local cities and places near your potential customers.  Example: some one lives near Everett, WA and they are searching for a new Honda Fit.  Naturally that person may search for “New Honda Fit in Everett” or “New Honda Fit for Sale near Everett”.  If the correct keywords and locations are used, then your website traffic will increase. Along with these keywords, we also up-sell and educate your readers with our professionally written articles. Our articles are accompanied with call to action buttons and links, to retain the customer and keep them on your site. This leads to conversions and increased sales.

What are our content goals?

• Brand / Dealership Awareness
• Lead Conversion
• Customer Conversion
• Customer Service / Education
• Retention / Loyalty
• Up-Sell

Want to learn more about how Content Motive can help your dealership retain and get new customers? Click here for a free web presence evaluation.