Socia(LIZ)e

New media marketing advice from Collision Hub's Operations Director and resident social media expert www.collisionhub.com @LizsHub @Repair_U @Collisionhub

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Now this is death-defying! 

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Yelp for Collision Repair

Over the past few years Yelp has experienced exponential growth and is one of the fastest-growing customer research and review tools on the market. It is becoming particularly relevant in the collision repair market in recent months due to the expansion of their mobile application. Here are some tips for shaping your Yelp strategy and leveraging the tool to gain new business.

Shape your Yelp participation model around your already successful repair and service delivery model of quality, responsiveness, attention to detail and consistency.

Yelp reviewers and visitors are members of a specific demographic group: Not particularly price-driven, and they recognize and reward great customer experiences – your brand’s sweet spot.

Being honest in this field is very effective. We do a quality job and we’re honorable. Yes, we make mistakes, but how we handle mistakes helps define us.

Step 1- CLAIM YOUR BUSINESS

Yelp is a location-based consumer service that allows users to find specific services in their vicinity.  Claiming your business page will allow you to: 

Track and respond to reviews of your business

Create Yelp Deals to convert your visitors to paying customers

Add photos and information about your business

Leverage Yelp's geo-location technology so local customers can find your shop

Step 2- FOCUS ON CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

By focus on providing an exceptional customer experience the reviews will take care of themselves and when they don’t all you have to do is stay true to your shop’s warranty guarantees and invite those customer’s back to better meet their needs.

 Step 3- DON'T STRESS ABOUT THE NEGATIVE

Responding to reviews is a great way to learn from and build goodwill with one of your most vocal customers. Yelp allows businesses to respond publicly and privately to user reviews. However, contacting reviewers should be approached with care; internet messaging is a blunt tool and sometimes good intentions come across badly. Keep these three things in mind as you're crafting a message to your customer:

 Your reviewers are your paying customers

Your reviewers are human beings with (sometimes unpredictable) feelings and sensitivities

Your reviewers are vocal and opinionated (otherwise they would not be writing reviews!)

Step 4- ASK FOR REVIEWS

In order to get reviews you have to ASK for them. Don’t encourage positive vs negative just suggest that people post about their experiences. Yelp discourages using incentives and in an effort to minimize spam and maximize trustworthiness of the site's content, Yelp actively weeds out suspicious reviews through a combination of community self-policing and automated filtering; aggressively solicited reviews can ring hollow at times and end up flagged by users or the website for removal. The system is designed to ensure the reviews consumers rely on are as authentic and useful as possible. Keep it real and remember if you build it (and ask for it) they will come!

Step 5- HAVE AN ENGAGEMENT STRATEGY

Your customer’s experience should remain consistent whether on or off-line and in order to develop consistency your shop needs to define and train a strategy. Knowing how shop employees should respond to customer engagement and complaints on and offline is key. Monitor your reviews and make sure that your chosen “brand-i-vidual” has set guidelines for how to redirect reviews to the appropriate representative and retain the business.

Overall, Yelp is a rapidly growing customer service tool and users are paying very close attention to HOW you respond to your clients. More than likely people are already commenting about your business on Yelp so it is vital that you get your hands around that presence and take charge of it before customer celebrations and complaints go unnoticed. Take advantage of the positive and negative to show that you really are all about taking care of your customers and remember: quality, responsiveness, attention to detail and consistency are key!

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My Facebook Timeline tips for businesses particularly in the collision repair industry! 

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Just completed this month's cover design of TheHub featuring:

- [Facebook] Timeline for Business with me, Socia(liz)e

- Let it Shine, a guide to gaining brand engagement through personalization with Kristen Felder

 If you haven't subscribed and still need to visit: CollisionHub.com/TheHub 

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Check out our first ever episode of HubTalk and keep an eye out for the next episode coming out later this week! Let me know what you think!

www.collisionhub.com

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"If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money. But if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears."

Simon Sinek (via fralcon)

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Getting Women in the Boardroom

Check out this article from Forbes about the importance of getting women in the board room or in leadership roles and 5 basic steps for getting them there! http://www.forbes.com/sites/women2/2012/02/08/five-steps-for-women-to-reach-the-boardroom-career-advice/ I know that I post about women in leadership a lot but I believe that as a country we have stalled when it comes to gender parity in leadership. Last night Kristen and I went to hear Geena Davis speak on gender in media and the state of female visibility today and here are a couple of take home statistics from her talk: 1) In terms of women in political leadership the United States ranks 90th in the World! I'm not even sure I can fathom this in terms of negative fallout. Our nation harps all the time on the issue of women's subjugation in underdeveloped nations and here we are ranked 90th??? 2) If we continue to add women to Congress at the rate we are now we will not reach equal representation for 500 YEARS!! And again I say....how is this even possible?? Take initiative, speak up, and work together to effect change don't just expect positive change to occur organically.....unless that is you want to wait another 500 years for equality? Check out the work being done by Geena Davis and others on this topic: www.seejane.org

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Breaking Into LinkedIn

Collision Repairers are hardwired to network and have always been great at engaging with the community. We shake hands with our customers, sponsor little league teams and join the local Chamber of Commerce. However in this new consumer age and with cars becoming increasingly complex, it is VITAL that we continually educate ourselves in order to remain competitive. Social networking particularly through the valuable B2B network LinkedIn, is a great way to access new ideas, people, perspectives and solutions that can help to transform your business or just keep you fresh in an ever advancing technological world. In our business it is rare to find constantly available training and resources. Think of LinkedIn as the ultimate international 20-group or industry conference. You have endless resources and the greatest minds in business at your fingertips 24-7. In order to properly leverage this new tool you must first understand the platform. 

Let’s start with the basics and break into LinkedIn together....

Before being able to network at the top of your game you must first build a solid and engaging online profile. Keep it personal and use other online profiles as a guide. If it grabs your attention then you’re on the right track. Use LinkedIn’s resume to the best of your ability and use it to illustrate your relevance and expertise. Be descriptive and creative. In this new media world people are bombarded by content and connection requests. You have to stand out from the crowd and your resume is the first way to do that. When engaging with LinkedIn think of how you would behave at an industry event. Lead with personal and follow with business. YOU are your business’s ultimate resource and networking tool. Linking is KEY in any social networking situation so make sure to backlink your profile to other existing online content such as a personal blog, Facebook page, Twitter account or business website. Keep in mind that if you want to use LinkedIn for business networking you should link it to business resources. 

Now that you’ve built your profile let’s talk about how to CONNECT. Start with people that you already consider business contacts. This is a great way to get your feet wet and build a foundational network. Explore these connections and their profiles in order to get some ideas about how to improve on your own. Once you’re happy with your profile then it’s time to get to work. Networking takes effort and planning. Make a list of people in or outside of the industry that you think would be valuable additions to your network. Think about who you may know who could recommend you to that person as well and don’t be a fly on the wall. LinkedIn provides you with some great networking tools. When searching for someone to connect with LinkedIn actually provides you with a list of who your shared connections are. These “go betweens” can actually recommend you to your desired connection if they are more controlled about their network. Use the tools. Do the legwork and you will be rewarded with a solid gold network to grow and enrich your business. 

Want some tips and tricks to help you leverage that golden online community? Subscribe to The Hub: Your Social Media Toolbox and read more about this and other information about being Hardwired2Network

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Brand Advocacy and Bringing the Customer to the Drawing Board

Social media allows customers to give instant feedback on products and services. They become a part of the social branding of a company. This is where some companies fail. If a brand isn’t responding to its engaged consumers, they lose valuable advocacy and break spread of the brand’s message. The branding can quickly go from “The company that cares” to “The company that doesn’t listen”. Social marketing is all about building a community and then marketing to that community is a conversational way. 

 We call this the creation of a social value chain that enriches the brand and business growth.  Social media integration ensures that genuine interest is sparked by real people around a brand. Building a community of repeat customers will help a brand gain in social finance and create a credible social name among consumers in general. 

Proper social media integration and leveraging of various new media resources can also accelerate the product innovation cycle and reduce the risk of that innovation by utilizing your consumers in the development process. By building deeper relationships with your key consumers you can quickly build a customer-to-customer interaction and learning community who can help in the growth of your business. In addition, social media leveraging allows you to go to market faster with products and service models that have a much higher probability of success—involving customers early on in the product and service definition phase and also listening to the customer on social networking channels would ensure that the products and services you develop are exactly what the customers want.

Because of the increasingly vast and overwhelming amount of content now online, search engines have begun redesigning the way they provide search results. In addition to crawling traditional content of a company’s website and blogs for relevant keywords, search engines are beginning to pull results from social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Therefore, as we search online, we will start to see more real-time information in our results from Facebook, Twitter, blogs and user-generated reviews.

Already in 2011 we have seen that Bing has started pushing relevant content from our personal networks to the front of search results, making them more personalized. User generated content is permeating the web and generating a massive global social brain and will become the primary way a person will experience a brand.

This paradigm shift in online searching and brand interfacing makes the development of brand advocates integral to a company’s online presence in the coming year. These evangelists of your brand work to produce relevant streams of content that can be shared and tagged by users. What this means is that once a user interfaces with your brand or product you are moved up in that individual’s organic search results in the future and are more likely to be interacted with a second or third time and ultimately creating an ongoing cycle of increased visibility and engagement. 

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The Consumer Journey- A New Consumer Model

The marketing landscape of our industry is changing rapidly. Five years ago companies reported that 90 percent of their marketing budget was in advertising and retail promotion. The goal was to drive the customer to a purchase decision.  We based these marketing decisions on the classic “Funnel Model” of consumer purchase behavior, where you start with many brands and methodically narrow the selection until the final purchase is executed. However, in 2009 a new model was introduced after extensive consumer research, the Consumer Decision Journey. The model shows how the internet and peer influence have changed the way a consumer shops, relates and recommends a product.

Today the point of purchase is just the beginning of the marketing journey. The challenge to today’s advertising and marketing company is to target consumers in various stages of the journey to influence various outcomes. What does this mean? Research shows that the more influence a company can exert during the evaluate, enjoy, advocate and bond stages has a greater ROI than point of purchase. The significant fact is that 4 out of 7 phases of the consumer decision-making process are AFTER the purchase. This is extremely important to the vendors and collision repairers within our industry.  

“60% of consumers report that they research a product online AFTER the purchase”

The new marketing model is about service after the sale and maintaining a customer by engaging them. This is critical to collision repairers as claim frequency continues to decline and the gap between losses widens to now 7 years! Keeping a customer is now more critical than gaining a customer and marketing departments must assume what was once seen as a customer service function.

Social Media isn't just one way, it is the only way a company can properly engage consumers in all levels of the consumer journey.