Guest Posting by Karry Moore
Video online is the newest way to increase dealer exposure on the Internet.
What is online video and how can it benefit your dealership and help you sell more cars? Using video on the Internet is a great way to promote your dealership, your cars, as well as your own customer testimonials. The Internet and more specifically Videos about your dealership and your own website has become your new showroom. 88% of all car buyers go online FIRST to research a vehicle and a dealer before they ever step on to a lot. What does that mean to you? You need have as many
opportunities to be in front of that customer, from the very top of the funnel down, as you can. Not only that, you are advertising your dealership using the richest medium ever VIDEO, which incorporates Sight, Sound, and Motion. Traditional web advertising only delivers Sight (static website).
Will uploading your videos on YouTube increase your exposure?
Absolutely!!! YouTube has just surpassed Yahoo as the 2nd largest “search engine” behind its parent Google. That’s right, I said search engine. People are going to YouTube to research and watch videos about products and services in droves. 13 hours of video content is uploaded every minute to YouTube, 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube each month and growing. Your dealership needs to be on YouTube. But is YouTube the only video site that people search? No, there are multiple video search sites already like; Carspace.com, AOL Video, Truveo, Jumpcut, MSN Video, Yahoo Video, and Metacafe with more popping up every day. Why is this important?
In May of 2007 Google unveiled Universal Search, which put succinctly is the aggregation of all of the information that Google indexes; Web, Images, News, Maps, and VIDEO and returns a more media rich result. This means that when consumers are searching for a particular vehicle, they may see a map of the closest dealership, or an image associated with the car, or even a video that extols the benefits of a particular vehicle or a customer testimonial about your dealership and the great experience they had buying from you. What is the value of being on the first page of Google? What is the value of having multiple listings on the first page of the search engines? With the launch of Universal Search it has become very important for your videos to be not only on YouTube but on as many of the other video search sites that now populate the web. The bottom line is as follows:
- Uploading to YouTube alone only marginally increase your visibility. You need a combination of proper video optimization and wide scale controlled distribution and management of you video content to maximize your results within Universal Search
- The more places you are on the Internet the more Google indexes your videos and thus the more relevance Google gives to your video when a search is initiated by a user.
Utilizing this method will give you the opportunity to capture valuable territory on the organic listings of the first page of Google and other traditional search engines, and dominate your DMA.
Now that we have a clear understanding of Video online how do we use video to convert traffic into sales and calculate an ROI. We all know that buying 3rd party leads can be expensive and can be difficult to close. On average only 8% of 3rd party leads ever close with 16% closing when a lead is submitted to a dealer’s website directly. By taking advantage of Universal Search you are putting your dealership in the position all of the lead aggregators are vying for, except now you have your dealership to have that lead come directly to you.
How can you track your success with VSEO?
Techniques a dealer can use to track the success of a campaign.
- Watermark a campaign specific URL throughout your video that will have users going to a specific page. For example: www.mydealership.com/specials or www.mydealershipvideos.com
- Watermark a unique 800# on the video and track the phone logs.
- Build a page on your website dedicated to customer testimonials. You can make the videos clickable (if you are hosting your own website) and drive traffic directly to a lead form.
Remember, television and radio advertisements, you can never be 100% accurate on who is actually hearing your message, or how you track that customer who heard that message back to your dealership and to a specific sale. But with Video SEO you have an active audience that has said they want information about your product and now you have the opportunity to deliver your message through video. This is an example of Demand Driven Advertising in which a customer is actually looking for you, whereas Radio, TV, Print, and Billboard are passive advertising.
The biggest reason for doing any type of SEO or Video SEO is for the exposure you get for your dealership, BRANDING. The Internet has become the proverbial Haystack and your website is the proverbial needle. The true ROI associated with online video advertising is comparable to TV advertisements as videos in the search engines are still not clickable to a website. We know that people watch TV and we know that videos online are being watched. How that traffic arrives at the website or to the showroom is directly related to the amount of exposure a dealer has within their DMA. The real ROI will be recouped by the dealers that take advantage of the technology and are there to ride the upswing when the market comes back. Dealers have to find ways to out think their competitors, do things different, take advantage of technology, and separate themselves if they are going to survive in a down market.
About the Author: Karry Moore is the President
for Car Buyers Engine
