Published On: June 9, 2011

Jim Ziegler's perspective taken from the 10th Digital Dealer Conference.

Deep down, there’s a secret, a reason, and a strategy behind someone’s success. Jim Ziegler is a successful sales consultant, with 18 years of experience in the automotive sales industry. With a background that includes having trained 75,000 dealers, GSMs, Sales and F&I managers, as well as serving as a keynote speaker at 20 Groups, NADA meetings and various top car dealer conventions around the country, Jim is a respected veteran in the business for the results he brings to the table. Jim Ziegler recently spoke at the Digital Dealer 2011 conference, and revealed his perspective on how social media, if leveraged and used properly, can greatly improve sales at car dealerships.

Jim Ziegler’s view is that social media is just another communication channel, a way to engage and distribute information to potential customers. The key difference with social media as a communication channel is this: unlike traditional media like newspapers, television and radio, people are not as prepared to be engaged directly by an advertisement or sales-oriented information. In fact, Jim claims that hard selling is not effective at all on social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. Instead, he advises that subtle persuasion and pull marketing are superior strategies when it comes to using social media to garner attention from your customer base. Ziegler, who states that his facebook page alone nets $30,000 a month and has 4280 subscribers, believes that you must first give before you take, and always determine what people are looking for so that you can accommodate and give them what they want. With 100,000 subscribers, contacts and friends, Ziegler engages his fan base. The fact that he successfully put 500 Facebook “likes” on the Facebook fan page for one of his clients is an example he gives to show that his method gets results.

Jim argues that car dealers need to be on Facebook simply because that is where a large portion of car buyers are, so it serves as one significant communication channel to engage an audience of potential customers. The message is that it’s all about communication of information, and how you’re able to subtly communicate information that will lead to a car purchase. Since Facebook users are hungry for content and videos on a daily basis, Jim advises that the main way to get people to become a fan of a Facebook page is to keep adding content on a regular basis, particularly content that is relevant to your audience. For video-based internet marketing, Ziegler recommends adding plenty of links and tags for a used car video walk around added on YouTube. The takeaway point from Jim Ziegler’s Digital Dealer conference presentation on social media is this: it’s how you use social media—to subtly influence, participate with and give value to people on the Internet—that determines the increase in sales you can achieve from this new channel of communication.

For more information about Jim Ziegler, visit his facebook, personal website, and a website about his seminars at the links below:
http://www.facebook.com/jimzieglercarguy
http://www.zieglersupersystems.com
http://www.zieglerseminars.com