According to Wikipedia Customer engagement (CE) refers to the engagement of customers with one another, with a company or a brand. The initiative for engagement can be either consumer or company-led and the medium of engagement can be on or offline.
Marketers in all industries know that the market has changed, but in automotive the market has really changed. Traditional methods of securing customers and driving buyer behavior, along with sales and marketing methods of yesteryears are no more. Some would argue that the recent economic downturn is the culprit, other would say that social media is at the heart of the change. Regardless of the catalyst, automotive leaders everywhere are seeking help to move vehicles, fill their service centers and profitably grow their business.
Most agree that social media has changed the way customers interact with dealers. Accustom to telling potential buyers about a vehicle, social media has forced automotive sales teams to engage in a dialog about the vehicle
Facebook is clearly the leader in social media:
- Estimated 700 million Facebook users
- Estimates show that social networking now accounts for 11 percent of all time spent online in the U.S.
- Nearly one in 10 internet visits ends up on a social network
- Nearly one in four pages viewed is on a social networking site
- Daily, about 200,000 people sign up for new Facebook accounts
- It is even projected that Facebook will soon replace e-mail as the preferred business communication tool
On July 6th, Facebook in conjunction with Skype announced video chat as a new way to engage. Chat is already a huge influencer in automotive marketing with many sites seeing significant traffic increases and conversions when deploying chat. Chat is being used by nearly every demographic segment making it a must have in the arsenal to move units.
Dealer eProcess shared a great chart at a recent PCG Pit Stop that showed all demographic groups are using chat. See chart below:
With this move to take engagement to the next level, Microsoft is well on the way to recouping some of the $8.5 billion the tech giant spent on its purchase of Skype in May. It is interesting to note that in 2007 Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook; this new feature continues the integration between the two companies, including Microsoft's Bing search engine, which indexes Facebook's social data, according to their recent press release.
What all this means for automotive marketing is that marketers are faced with yet another channel they must account for and make available to potential clients. Chat is real-time insight that will force a two-way dialog between dealers and potential buyer in a highly visual way. Prepare your data teams to index chat sessions in the database-they will matter in segmentation and channel preference, smile pretty for the web cam and enjoy the exchange.