Bringing on the New year means having more digital marketing tools at your fingertips for auto dealers! Periscope which is a tool I was very uncertain about has won me over in an extreme way, so much that I did a automotive marketing workshop for The Motor Dealers Association of Alberta to cap off an amazing 2015! Reason I love Periscope is because of it’s instant capability to connect with people via your smartphone LIVE. As I was testing out Periscope, I was immediately addicted as I could watch live events, people completely wasting time or some dude smoking grass in Los Angeles, all with a click of a button!

That being said, Periscope is a data waster as roughly 30 minutes of a live periscope could set you back about 400 megabytes worth of data so unless you have an amazing data plan for your smart phone, I would test the waters while hooked up to wifi. The downside to this I can assure you is some of life’s greatest moments and experiences don’t happen on wifi, so you may find yourself pulling out your phone to catch all that stuff on Periscope. Not to be worries as I am sure periscope is working frantically to make their platform a little more efficient, but when you are streaming live video, it is what it is!

Auto Dealers can make use of Periscope by:

1. Vehicle walk arounds on new inventory
2. Behind the scenes of what really happens at a dealership such as pricing, staff training and service!
3. Can host new owner nights allowing past, present and future customers the ability to get educated on basic vehicle maintenance or the benefit of one of those lovely pro packs!
4. A virtual test drive allowing your audience to perhaps see that brand new Ford mustang or newly released vehicle that is not yet open to the general public.
5. How a car deal is actually done and what exactly the process is depending on the dealers level of transparency.

2016 is the year that General Managers, Sales managers and marketing personnel will have to shift their mindset in order to shift into a gear that will keep up with the customer. I really think that we are in exciting times with the technology that is literally at our fingertips!

Visit the iTunes app store or Google Play store to download the app and get your first scope going! Once you do, follow me @ryanholtz1 so I can tap the screen and show you some love!

If you have periscope, I would love to know what you think! Drop me a line here.