The world of digital marketing is incredibly vast and competitive. It entails the usage of various technological platforms, applications, and software programs to create virtual stations to find an abundance of information regarding the smallest of things. Subsequently, it plays an incredibly important role in the promotion of your car website. Any dealership wanting to gain success in the online word has to focus on its digital marketing strategy.
This may involve working on your Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Pay-Per-Click (PPC), Video Marketing, Content Marketing, and Mobile Marketing to keep up with the latest trends of ranking better on the SERPs of Google. Bear in mind that your rankings are incredibly important for gaining customers/prospects and driving more web traffic to your site. Are you planning to improve your automotive site’s rankings? Look at this guide below and avoid these seven don’ts of automotive digital marketing:
1. Closing Your Eyes on Mobile Marketing
Times have changed significantly over the past few years. Nowadays, people spend more time on the web through their smartphones rather than desktop PCs and laptops. If you are running an online car business, it is imperative that you include a strategy for mobile devices in your digital marketing arsenal. Create a user-friendly and intuitive mobile website that mimics the design of your desktop version. Compress images and improve navigation. Go through the mobile car shopping experience yourself to get a full understand on what needs to be done. Think like a customer rather than a business owner!
2. Focusing on Too Many Social Media Platforms
One of the biggest mistakes most car businesses make is creating profiles on several social media platforms without a solid plan. Bear in mind that it is impossible to build a presence on all social sites and remain consistent throughout your marketing. Always make sure to choose only 2 or 3 of the top sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to build your brand and create a prominent social presence. Once you get a hang on the best strategies for each platform, you can then target new audiences on different social sites like Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, and Snapchat.
3. Not Being Creative with Your Content Marketing
When it comes to helping your automotive website rank better, you need to think beyond “average”. The digital marketing world is filled with vast and extensive information that can be found on various websites in rephrased sentences and words. To make your dealership standout from the crowd, you need to be creative with your content marketing strategy. Trust only reliable sources for information and begin writing articles, blogs, PRs, or eBooks on latest car news, reviews events, technologies, innovations, etc. Display your brand as an expert in the industry rather than providing customers with the same old redundant information they can find elsewhere.
4. Poor Responsiveness and Navigation
Creating a website is more complex that most people would like. Apart from coming up with a unique and intuitive design, webmasters have to work on strategies for improving responsiveness, navigation, and page speed. Google places strict emphasis on creating websites that boast good speed. If you want your site to gain recognition in the marketplace, it’s time you create a website that boasts a simple, easy, and user-friendly design. Avoid using heavy Flash elements and don’t clutter your site with irrelevant information, countless ads, and fancy features. These will only confuse your customer and possibly drive them to another website.
5. Forgetting to Change SEO Tactics
As the top search engine in the online world, Google works incredibly hard in improving the overall shopping and user-experience for customers. Subsequently, the search engine giant regularly changes its SEO tactics and algorithms, which must be followed by all websites. If you aren’t keeping up with these changes, it may become difficult for you to rank better on Google. Try your best to find a good source of SEO information and follow it regularly to keep up with the changes. This way, you can make all necessary revisions to your car dealership website instantly. This can position you higher than your competition on the SERPs of Google.
6. Not Using Visual Marketing
While text-based advertising and marketing always drives good results, if you really want your website to excel – you must think beyond simple text. Leverage visual marketing to increase your conversion rates by as much as 86%. You can add videos on your landing pages, blogs, and articles to further elaborate your points or provide step-by-step instructions for how-to guides. You can strategically place quality graphics in the form of images, graphs, and infographics in your content. People will get the message much quicker than by reading. Images and videos also prove to be entertaining, particularly if you focus on the new visual marketing technique called “meme marketing”. This combines real life situations and humor with heartwarming and/or amusing images for getting points across.
7. Not Analyzing/Monitoring Strategies
The biggest mistake any car dealership website can make is to forget about analyzing and monitoring their SEO, SEM, PPC, video marketing, and content marketing strategies. Bear in mind that digital marketing is all about consistently tweaking and adapting to the new changes in the online world. You need to monitor your strategies to figure out what works for your website and what doesn’t. You can use free tools like Google Analytics to study your stats and track visitors. You can then use the information provided to tweak your site to its performance peak. You can even test article resource boxes, specific web pages, and the effectiveness of your advertisements. Find out whichever brings the best results and stick with it.
Last, but not the least, avoid wasting valuable time and build relationships with leaders in the marketplace to boost your sites trust and respect. Be reliable and answer all queries/questions from your customers instantly. Most importantly, don’t let your site go stale. Be consistent in all your efforts and respond to your customers in a timely and friendly manner.
