Automotive marketing can be challenging, to constantly reach customers, convert your audience and keep offers fresh! Automotive dealerships are facing more competition than ever and consumers are spending more time online to search for a vehicle. In order to say ahead of the competition, you’ll need to keep your marketing on point.
Here are some of the top tips for automotive marketeering in 2020.
1. Keep Offers Fresh
Make sure that you are keeping your advertised offers fresh each month! Consumers will pay less attention to your advertising if they start to realize you are running the same offers each month or running offers that aren’t as good as others in town. Sometimes there simply won’t be great offers available from your brand, in that situation you need to be creative and focus advertising on a different angle. Many times turning to trade-in offers or low-interest rates etc can be a great way to get around those months where your brand doesn’t have the most competitive offers available.
2. Landing pages!
SEO is becoming more and more important for car dealerships, with new players like carvana trying to win the overall online game in the auto space, and in general, firms making comparison shopping easier, this is resulting in more potential customers searching quite a bit online before visiting a store in person. Take this as an opportunity to stand out from your competitors and have great SEO to capture any inbound leads you can. Work with your marketing agency to build out a number of sharp looking highly SEO friendly landing pages for many different potential searches including all the current models your brand has for sale. Make sure all these pages look good and work well on mobile. Also, make sure to incorporate local search terms for your geographic area.
3. Fine Tune Digital
Your marketing team should be reviewing your digital data on a weekly basis, checking data trends, refining keywords and budget placement. Google PPC is the tried and true paid digital ad provider, but facebook allows for very targeted ad placements and can be quite inexpensive as well. You absolutely want to make sure you are tracking Facebook click throughs using pixels! A/B testing is incredibly important to continually optimize your digital ad spend. This allows you to test which ads perform better with specific audiences, by comparison testing copy, visuals and even offers you will pinpoint which ads work best. Generally different audiences prefer and respond differently to different types of digital ads.
4. Business Development and Email Marketing
Your business development team should be using a CRM to track their lead list and better plan when to reach out to potential customers. CRMs drastically improve the efficiency and analytical ability of any sales team. Many CRMs integrate very easily with common email marketing providers. Work with your marketing firms to create good looking email templates that can be used for a variety of purposes. Just like with digital, try to A/B test what works the best with your segmented email lists. We’ve found as a general rule, the more personalization and the shorter the email is, the better.
5. Reviews are very important
Reviews are an important part of your marketing and brand management strategy that you need to carefully consider. Make sure that you are using email, phone, in-person conversations and if needed, incentives to get customers to leave favorable reviews on google and facebook. These make a huge difference. Over time there will be the occasional negative review or comment, make sure to immediately respond to these in a highly professional manner that explains your side of the situation. Don’t go overboard, but share a positive customer review once or twice a week on your social media channels. These positive customer reviews can be used in email marketing or even broadcast video content as well! Always thank customers for leaving a great review.
6. Embrace Video
Videos can increase CTR and engagement by 40-70%. This is huge! Using high-quality video content in broadcast as well as your digital channels, social media and web site can be a great way to get more use, and thus more ROI out of a piece of content. Using video in digital ads will be a great step to get ahead of competitors, as many dealerships won’t take advantage of this. The investment in video is quickly recouped from the more efficient CTRs when used on multiple marketing channels.
7. Keep Social Media updated
Post a mix of content on social media at least a few times a week. Don’t repeatedly post the exact same type of content over and over, but keeping your audience engaged is a powerful way to not only increase your business with existing customers but also reach a new audience as your content is shared. Make sure to post any video content as it is released on the broadcast. We’ve seen some dealerships make the mistake of posting a larger number of posts within a few hours, or posting exactly the same canned, automated car videos or just tons of reviews. These are huge turn-offs to your audience. Again, you have to mix it up to be effective and post a variety of content. This can include, weekly positive review, service offers, car offers, a used offer once or twice a week, dealership news or events, blogs once a week or so, vlog style video content showing off a car, or a car review style video once a week, national brand news or reviews as well.
8. Take advantage of local festivals and partnerships
In person, one on one interaction between your staff and potential customers is a great way to build relationships, which ultimately is one of the most important measures of dealership success. Strongly consider making your brand known at local events, whether fairs, sports, schools etc. This will give your brand a human side that is more directly interact with community members. Showing that you support local causes is also important to your overall image within a community.
9. Go wide on broadcast
We generally recommend going wide with broadcast, cast your net over a range of local networks and air times. This is generally more effective than large numbers of spots within a short amount of time. There are potentially some exceptions to this, but as a general rule, getting in front of as many audiences as possible is a major factor in overall broadcast campaign success. Major sporting events, certain tv show premieres, news bookends are some exceptions we’ve utilized in the past with great success, but it drastically depends on the local environment and network details.
10. Don’t forget Service and Parts
Putting a little effort into marketing your service and parts departments can improve revenue and sales pretty quickly. You don’t want to constantly advertise the same service deals, but every few months, consider running a service specially with special service prices for a month, or even just a week or so. This can push a number of customers who potentially bought a car somewhere else to your location for service. Of course, this is a great potential opportunity if get their business in the long run for both service and sales.
11. Customer Service is EVERYTHING
It’s amazing how quick a car dealership can ruin its reputation, and hurt its image of customer service. Don’t let it be you. Constantly with all staff members to emphasize how important customer service and relationships are to everyone. Go the extra mile and make things right with a customer. Everyone makes mistakes and things happen that are out of our control at times, but when it does, do what’s right and pay for it, fix it for free etc. These are incredible opportunities to gain a customer’s trust and business for life when you a fix a problem that other stores might not have!
Check out more of our automotive marketing work HERE
Volan Media are automotive experts, having made hundreds of pieces of content for a variety of marketing channels, coordinating strategy and media placement, improving web traffic, and are veterans at working with various brands marketing requirements and compliance departments.
Give us a shout if you want to take your automotive marketing to the next level!
