What’s the name of the game in automotive? It’s generating floor, phone, and digital traffic, managing expenses, and getting more bang for your buck. While ensuring the prospect and customer are happy with their product, process, and service experience. And this means optimizing marketing through data, generating gains in operational efficiency wherever possible, and delivering impactful customer care consistently. Increasingly, this means doing it fast, in the customer arena – with their family and friends — in social, outside of social, and based on social.

What’s preventing us all from knocking the cover off the ball? It’s focusing on the wrong things. And that, per eMarketer, is focusing on tactics, and the metrics associated with them versus strategy and business objectives. Simply after increasing fans? Posts? Increasing tweets and retweets? Checking the box by having an internet department or social manager? Nice, and helpful, but that’s not what we’re really trying to do, is it? We need to take our existing approaches, and make them produce – move metal over the curb – or sell labor hours and service contracts, – and that starts with knowing our objectives and setting social strategies and tactics to support them. This combination, with promotions and metrics tracking, is what is driving results.

Sure, many will talk about providing relevant valuable content too. It’s important to acquiring and servicing customers, and is one piece of the puzzle. But what does that really mean? It means getting into the flow with the right message at the right time, based on comprehensive social identity data, and using a robust social relationship platform to manage it all. From there, we can touch the web experience, the email experience, and route online social activity in for handling during the ownership and consideration phases, to maximize results.

On Wednesday at 9:30 A.M., at the 17th Digital Dealer Conference & Exposition in Las Vegas, Cory Cox of Shoutlet will explore how to generate ROI, which drives sales, share, and satisfaction at his education session titled “Secrets to Social ROI Success.” Topics included will include:

• Leveraging social data to increase email and website effectiveness
• Improving lead flow
• Increasing paid social advertising performance
• Reducing costs

As an Industry Solutions VP at Shoutlet, Cory’s focus on the automotive industry looks at the impact a social marketing platform can have when used by automotive brands to optimize marketing through data, generate operational efficiencies, and improve customer care.

Shoutlet’s clients include large nationally recognized automotive dealer groups, advertising agencies, and major OEM brands across multiple makes among their over 700 recognized brands in 50 countries. Prior to Shoutlet, Cory worked for Ford Motor Company, Nissan North America, and Chrysler Group LLC as well as in the supply base at Dataium and autoWALL®. He has a BBA from The University of Texas at Austin and an MBA from George Mason University.