By Craig Stowell
I sometimes see myself as a late model vehicle, still new to the auto industry and learning my way around.
Then I look back at all the things I have experienced over the years and quickly realize that I am more of an aged unit. I have seen advertising change from the “Want Advertiser” to “Pizza Store Books”, Craigslist, Marketplace and so on. I survived the crash of 2008 and sadly watched dealers lose their floor plans and sometimes their entire dealerships. I struggled through the lows of COVID and learned to adapt to the wild west of outrageous markups and lack of inventory driving prices sky high.
All of this has taught me how to adapt. We have chosen an ever-changing career. Our marketing strategies are always evolving.
A marketing budget can sometimes be the largest portion of our overhead. Let’s face it, without our name out there, we have no foot traffic, no sales, and eventually are out of business.
To keep overhead low, I have focused on an outside-of-the-box approach to marketing.
“How can I grow my business, generate sales, and do it all without spending our entire budget?”
The answer for me was social media. I originally went to school for broadcast journalism and communications. I enjoyed public speaking and writing, and most of all, being in front of a camera.
I later transitioned to business management because it was more practical, but I never lost the passion for reaching people in masses.
This helped me as I began to see the rise of social media and how it could engage potential customers. I quickly learned how to build my brand and grow my business through social media.
Nowadays, a walk-around video is the standard for Flying Wheel’s websites before our customers walk into our doors. I have been using this tool since 2015. I actually taught a session at the NIADA Convention years before it became the standard post-COVID. I saw the opportunity with video creation and capitalized on it early. And let’s face it, no one cares about what car I am selling. They want to learn or see something interesting.
From the car video walk-around, I expanded into creating video content about owning a car dealership, from common problems and repairs to specific vehicles.
Over the years, we have built a brand and a following. We now reach more than 2 million people monthly for free through social media. We also release weekly videos updating people on the market, a project, mishap, or just something I find generally interesting.
The day after a video airs, our inbox is flooded with inquiries from people across the U.S. and the world on a vehicle they saw in the background of a video or a car we may be working on currently. This generates free organic traffic right to our website without having to pay an expensive third-party vendor who also advertises for other dealers.
This is something I am passionate about, but for those that aren’t, there are social media marketing agencies that specialize in this field and can take care of it for you.
Learning the art of social media marketing and building a national brand on the internet has helped increase sales tremendously.
I look forward to teaching you more about it at the 2024 NIADA Convention & Expo. I am looking forward to seeing you. See Stowell’s session “Building Your Brand Through Social Media” at 2:30 p.m. Tuesday, June 18.
