Friendemic

In this blog post we’ll reveal how Heritage Toyota’s Service Department has grown search volume to over 5,300 searches a month and can boast that they appear on a strong number of category search terms, like “oil change near me. In tandem, Heritage Toyota’s Service Department has boosted their Service star rating to 4.7 from 3.5 and generated 150 service-specific reviews. Heritage Toyota is located within a 2-mile radius of 6 other repair shops so Ross needed a way to stand out and outsmart the competition to ensure his potential customers didn’t stop along the way before pulling into his service lane. Additionally, Heritage Toyota asked a staff member with strong photo skills to take pictures of the technicians, the service bays, and even some of the in-house amenities that separate Heritage Toyota from the others – like the coffee bar and work lounges.

There has been a flurry of enhancements to Google My Business lately, and one change that dealerships need to pay attention to is the increase in opportunity for consumers to provide Google with attributes about your business. Google has long asked consumers and Local Guides to edit GMB listings via the “Suggest an edit” link on all listings. For example, earlier this month we saw a consumer’s recommended hours for a dealership posted below the dealer’s published (and accurate) hours. For Friendemic’s GMB, Google is crowdsourcing information regarding accessibility to our building: For dealers, GMB is asking consumers about how to shop at the dealership: Google is also asking about products offered at the dealership:

For Friendemic, we are thrilled that Google continues to acknowledge the importance of reviews in automotive decision making, as detailed within Google My Business Help as follows: Manage & respond to reviews. High-quality, positive reviews from your customers can improve your business visibility and increase the likelihood that a shopper will visit your location Car dealer review generation, monitoring and response is certainly what we do well at Friendemic! According to a recent BrightLocal study posted on SearchEngineLand, businesses with over 100 photos on their GMB receive: * 960% more search views than the average business, while those with just one get 62% fewer. In addition to offering dealers premium software for reputation management, Friendemic has been providing dealers with an app to capture local photos for several years via Content Fuel.

During a Covid-19 lockdown, Friendemic encourages dealers to meet them metaphorically with the help of 1:1 video, website chat and SMS marketing. Recently, Friendemic conducted a study to determine if the long-utilized best practice of marketing to consumers with an MMS (multimedia message) versus an SMS (short message service) has as many benefits as is often assumed. Using Reputation Accelerator, we texted over 300,000 review invitations to dealership customers, asking them to rate and review their experience with their dealer. One group received a message with the dealership image in the text (MMS) while the other group received a plain text message (SMS).