How should automotive dealerships adjust their marketing when new car volumes remain in a massive deficit to demand. 4th quarter is when your yearly sales goal is surpassed or you come up short, it’s a crucial time of the year for dealerships as you leverage sports and
Dealing With Vehicle Inventory Shortages
With new car inventory shortages across nearly all brands, and recent press releases from Toyota, GM, and others, the shortage isn’t like to resolve anytime soon. This means dealerships are having to figure out ways to thrive even with extremely limited new car inventory.
Turning to used offers, emphasizing service and parts are the major solutions in this situation. For new and used vehicles alike pricing is now in favor of the dealerships, with vehicles across nearly all makes and models rising in value/price. This means dealerships can make much more per unit than any time in the last decade.
Carefully planning vehicle pricing on both vehicles sold and trade-ins can is the single most important element to dealerships realizing significantly positive financial performance.
Marketing should be heavily communicating new and used car inventory and focus as well on driving potential customers interested in trading in or selling their vehicles. This will be the most effective method to generating used car inventory acquired at good pricing.
Multi-Channel Dealership Advertising Campaign
It’s easy for dealerships to lose cohesiveness as daily operations can be hectic but keeping cohesive marketing across all marketing channels without spamming boring social media content is key to maintaining your core marketing message that drives profitability.
Some dealerships post automated videos of each car daily or more, this is simply not the “correct” way to utilize social media channels, no one wants to watch that kind of content, and it will turn off viewers to future content.
Work with your sales manager or GM as your dealership plans monthly marketing and sales offers then build out a monthly content plan of varying types that can be used throughout the month.
Often we recommend pining the broadcast spot on social media channels for the month, perhaps posting a question that will let your audience talk back.
Want more effective ads? Want to sell more?
Leverage Prior Customers
Some of the easiest sales you will make are those that leverage prior relations and customer transactions.
Make sure that your CRM is pulling information from your service department and prior customer list, maintain contact with these customers through phone and email. Inviting these contacts to come test drive new versions of their vehicles etc is also a valid strategy.
When building Facebook marketing campaigns, using your current customer list as the core of a look-a-like campaign can be a great way to optimize a digital PPC campaign.
Often, marketing to prior customers who just purchased vehicles will be a waste of time, but building contact with customers who purchased a vehicle 2-3 years or more prior is great.
This customer database is a key method for generating both sales and more focused digital marketing campaigns.
Reviews from prior customers are incredibly important, more so than ever! Once a positive interaction has occurred, consider asking that customer for a review. Google’s search rankings now more heavily emphasize positive reviews for search ranking as well.
Consider shooting short testimonial videos, maybe a couple per month, then sharing them on your website and social media channels. These can also be sent in email marketing campaigns that include an offer to test drive a new car.
Dealership Marketing Media Planning
What type of media buys are you running on broadcast and cable?
Often, optimizing these buys to the evening news, special events, and sports events can yield effective.
As you work with your account executives from broadcast, cable, and radio networks, consult with them to build an effective multi month strategy through the remainder of the new year.
Dealership Sales Strategies
When was the last time your team had professional sales training?
Now, when inventory is scarce, large margins are possible, and closing trade-ins can yield larger results on both sides.
Even occasional sales training can keep your team sharper than competitors and prevent dulling of skills.
Just maintaining a disciplined approach to customer interactions and constantly reminding all members of your team from sales to service etc that customer relationships are key, can yield major future results.
Keeping ads fresh across all media channels is important, over time, running the same ads for 2-3 months will yield diminishing results. The 4th quarter is an easy time as well to plan fresh, different-looking creative video ads, incorporating fall, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and year-end sales, etc. These should all be leveraged as marketing themes across your media and ad content.
Video content, where applicable will be the higher ROI content you can create, whether used in social media, web, digital PPC, email, etc.
Automotive Digital Marketing Practices
A poorly setup digital campaign is an easy way to blow a lot of money with little to show for it. Work with digital PPC experts to properly segment audiences and set up thought through ad campaigns. Increasing your digital budgets to allows for weekly review and optimization will pay dividends in the long run. It’s important that your automotive digital PPC agency properly setups on conversion tracking, segmentation and adjusts campaign settings based on analytics.
Utilizing video, whether your broadcast ads, animated digital specific ads or even testimonials across Youtube, Instagram, and Facebook will also help to improve your total return on ad spend.
Creating a brand campaign that has your company name as a keyword is important so that competitors don’t have their own name higher than yours on google.
Another automotive marketing tip would be to bid on your competitors’ names as keywords. This will often yield results.
Want an automotive marketing audit? Get in touch!
We’ve worked with some of the largest automotive groups in the southeast to increase their use of video ads and build more cost-effective and efficient campaigns!
Volan Media is a top Knoxville video production, digital marketing and Knoxville advertising agency.
