Trust, more than anything else, is the catalyst to all sales relationships. If your customer trusts, you sell more. If they don’t, every lead is a challenge.
Caring is individualized attention. Caring facilitates loyalty. It builds trust and there is to substitute. There’s no work around. Caring paves the way to trust.
There was a post recently on Business Insider with the headline, “Car Dealers: Why Are So Many of Them So Slimy?”. This is what we’re up against, folks, and changing that perception is imperative to future growth. What’s the quickest, most-effective way to change consumer perceptions? Capitalize on Social Media to develop trust and show that you care.
“The best marketing strategy is to care.”
The awesome Gary Vaynerchuk says start by creating valuable content for your audience. Discover how much you care about your audience and always show that in strategic ways.
Make no mistake. Marketing in the Social era is not easy. It’s a challenge spending 10-15 hours per day interacting with your customer. I have many dealers who ask me, “Can’t we just have someone do it part time?”. My answer is sure, just like you can do seven push-ups every day. Something will happen. You can also do seven hundred push-ups every day and much more will happen.
The consumer is now the media.
Business cannot escape this consumer revolution. The one-way version of old school advertising obliterated trust years ago. As a consequence of that, Social Media amped word-of-mouth and now, studies show that consumers trust other consumers’ opinions before anything else.
You have 2 valuable ways to channel this shift at your disposal:
- Engage repeat customers in your marketing campaigns.
- Encourage employee participation in your marketing strategy.
Social Media goes hand in hand with your online reputation as well. Managing your store’s presence is not only about the tools and the strategy. Its core is about the people. You and your people. If you don’t have a culture that strives to show you care, and you have no internal process to facilitate your credo, it doesn’t matter how good you are at the tools and strategy.
Care about the customer, not about selling to the customer.
C – Connect with them.
A – Acknowledge their importance.
R – Respect them.
E – Engage them with your brand.
I worked recently with some dealers who were under the assumption you could put up a Facebook page and post updates about the store. Any visitor would perceive that as not caring. You would too! What if your first meeting with someone consisted with them only talking about themselves. How excited would you be to spend more time with them?
To foster trust and become known as a caring seller, you must enable a collaboration to humanize the customer experience. Unstructured processes are the challenge to overcome. Add a human voice to the business by engaging employees. Don’t connect the dots, connect the people.
