Social Media 101: Holiday season promotions
This is the season for holiday cheer, which means the perfect time to promote your dealership’s holiday sales and events. As you identify your marketing channels, include social media sites to reach niche audiences. Your audience is increasing due to e-commerce growing substantially every year. There will be a 16-percent increase in online sales compared to last year’s holiday season. Furthermore, according to a survey by Crowtap, more than 60 percent of their survey participants used social media to find the perfect gift. Are you using your social media sites to capture holiday buyers?
In this blog, I take you through some of the more popular social media platforms and explain how you can use each one to spread your dealership’s holiday cheer.
- Cover Photo: Create a festive cover photo. Consider featuring a popular unit wrapped with a holiday bow.
- Posts: Have fun posting upcoming holiday events. For example, “Check out our spook-tacular specials on pre-owned inventory.” Promote your holiday sales events with links to your website where all of your sales and specials can be viewed.
- Pictures: Create an album of the specific holiday and year and add/post pictures of the holiday sales events that occurred at your dealership. For example, upload photos from your gift-buying themed events, such as exclusive shopping nights or breakfast with Santa.
- Coupons: Give your Facebook fans a gift. If you are running a Cyber Monday event, post a coupon for extra savings, include your coupon code and a link to your e-commerce site to make it easy for customers to make a purchase.
- Promotional Themes: Feature a Twelve Days of Christmas sale with a spotlight on popular dealership merchandise and whenever possible, a link to purchase on your website.
- Header Photo: Get festive and creative. Create a header photo of inventory decked out in turkey and pilgrim décor.
- Tweets: Create and send out tweets about holiday promotions your dealership is running and add expiration dates, too. Along with these tweets, add hashtags to capitalize on the general holiday chatter. For example, #Xmas #HappyThanksgiving #CyberMondayspecials, and add your own distinct take on the holiday by adding your dealership’s name, for example #JoesCycleridehappyXmas
- Tweet pics and share Vine video clips: Record and post clips of holiday event activity, such as discounts, specials, or extras added to programs and services your dealership is running on behalf of Black Friday and Thanksgiving.
- Pics and Clips: Upload pictures and video clips of your holiday sales and promotions unfolding and occurring in real time. For example, take snapshots of the staff in Halloween costumes riding, sitting on, or posing by bikes in the showroom.
YouTube
- Your Commercials: You worked hard and/or paid for these ads, so upload all commercials you created for the upcoming season. For example, a Black Friday commercial or teaser clip of the OUTRAGEOUS sales your dealership offers this holiday season.
- Their Commercials: Use OEM videos and post them to your website to increase the hype for a new toy or gift for that special loved one or themselves. Your dealership should be promoting the cheese out of these products.
Share your social media content with your other social media sites to increase dialog opportunities. If you post a video to your YouTube channel, share it on your Facebook page or tweet a link to your YouTube channel.
Before, after and during the holiday push, be sure to track your social media insights and stats to see how much of a bump holiday sales and promotions generated. You should investigate and record interactions via number of shares, re-tweets, likes, hashtags and comments left on holiday-related posts.
Holiday season is upon us! This is the time to apply your great ideas to promote inventory, sales and events across various social media platforms.
Amanda White is an account manager for PowerSports Network.
Website: psnsales.com
