A successful marketing plan is critical for the growth of your dealership. Coming up with a successful marketing campaign for the dealership website can be tricky. The automotive industry is highly competitive, and its trends constantly shift.
To that end, here are some of the best actionable tips to make your car dealership marketing campaign more advantageous.
1. Optimize Your Efforts at SEO
In today’s market, many car buyers begin their journey online. Increasing your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can increase the traffic you get to your dealership website, and this can gain you new customers. You need to ensure that your dealership makes the first page of results on both Google and Bing. Choosing your keywords carefully, ones that have a rather high volume of searches with low competition is one method of doing this.
Another method of increasing your SEO rankings is to list yourself in a variety of qualified directories. This can increase your chances of being located when customers search for local dealerships.
You might also begin a blog for the website or add a few new pages that will provide your customers with useful information. Including content helpful to car shoppers will drive even more traffic to your site while also increasing online leads. Some topics you might cover include:
- Pros and cons of each model
- Sales tactics you shouldn’t fall for
- How to change your oil
Focused content that adds value to your customers or intended customers can help drive traffic to your dealership page.
2. Blog for a Successful Marketing Campaign
Publishing content that’s educational on your blog is a great form of digital marketing that can help you ensure that you remain relevant to your customers while also boosting engagement on your website. You might utilize a blog in a variety of ways, but one of the best ways is to build trust with prospective car buyers.
A blog post can assist you with streamlining the process of buying a car as readers seek out the various car dealerships in their area. Knowing this, you can use your blog to build a relationship with them.
When they learn how you care for your community as well as that you’re an industry expert, your audience can gain confidence in knowing that they’ll get excellent customer service from you, both before and after the sale.
3. Emails to Your Target Audience
Email marketing continues to be a great marketing strategy for car dealerships that want to remain in touch with their clients. Consider this — how long have you had the same address for email? Your target audience tends to keep their email addresses for quite a few years too. Customize your strategy for email marketing based on services you offer, the seasons, or other helpful information necessary to car buyers. This can even include service reminders and blog posts, like:
- Is it time for that oil change?
- Winter/summer is coming, get your heaters/air conditioners checked.
- Check out the new models for 2023!
Emails like the ones above will remind customers to have their service work done, or come see the new models — either one of which will bring them into the dealership, giving you an opportunity to make a sale.
4. YouTube
Have you ever found yourself searching for a video about something you were thinking about buying? Your customers do this too. Before they visit your lot, clients might be searching for videos about a vehicle they’re interested in or even your dealership itself. YouTube is quite an influential tool for shoppers. The number of views for those videos that show features, test drives, and walkthroughs is quite high. Because viewers tend to use mobile devices for this as opposed to computers, your videos also need to be mobile-friendly.
5. Social Media
This can be a massive influencer when it comes to millennials and purchase decisions. Having an active feed means that you can notify your followers when you get new stock, which can be an incentive for them to visit, and it can help your business seem active and busy. It’s also a fantastic way to form relationships with both current and potential customers.
Facebook, often the top choice for many companies looking to utilize social media, is a spectacular place to begin. It offers the most adult users, and they tend to be the target audience for car dealers. Be sure you’re posting a variety of content, including testimonials, articles, videos, and more.
Twitter utilizes short posts that consist of only 380 characters or less. This is the ideal platform to advertise any current offers or update customers when you get new inventory. Make sure you include engaging photos to draw a bit more attention to what you’re posting.
6. Referral Program
You may be tempted to focus entirely on the vehicle side of your dealership, but you have to keep in mind that the customer service side of things can also help you when it comes to driving sales.
You might consider a referral program in order to encourage your customers to share their experience with your dealership among their family and friends. This can help you grow your lead database and your business overall.
One great way to do this is by using a loyalty program. This will reward customers for telling their family and friends about your business. It’s also a fantastic opportunity to get even more qualified leads in to talk with your salespeople about purchasing a new vehicle, all while helping those same salespeople earn more money.
Put Your New Successful Marketing Campaign to Work
An effective marketing strategy for car dealerships will increase sales with the generation of leads. It will engage with your existing customers in a way that’s meaningful and solidify the brand in the minds of the target audience.
Coming up with an actionable marketing strategy for your automotive dealership will take quite a bit of research and time.
Optimizing your efforts at SEO, creating a successful email marketing campaign, posting informational videos on YouTube, blogging about your business, being active and engaging on social media, and using a referral program can all help you grow your business.
Use these tips to add more sources for new leads and customers, encourage repeat business, and most of all, grow your dealership.