It is quite common for customers in recent times to conduct their research online before making any sort of purchase, be it an established or startup firm. This huge change with regards to shopping has made marketers feel the pressure of developing new digital strategies that can help in generating more leads and conversions. Although this is relatively straightforward for brands/retailers selling everyday household items, food, and clothing, automotive businesses face a tough set of problems/challenges.

Since every car purchase requires extensive research and time to complete, automotive businesses are required to engage shoppers consistently. With the great competition in the digital world, if your business fails to utilize even one targeting opportunity, you may lose your prospective customer. This is where you need to link your digital efforts to successful online marketing campaigns, while trying your best to separate yourself from the “norm”.

Follow these tips below for modernizing your car dealerships outreach and gain a boost in overall sales and conversions to make a greater impact online.

Try Thinking outside the Box

When it comes to marketing your car dealership to customers, you need to go the extra mile in “targeting”. Many dealers make the mistake of targeting prospects only within certain proximity of their location, with the assumption that their demand is mostly local. However, nothing can be more misleading than radial determination, so do not make the mistake of tailoring all your content to a specific radius. This will only result in wastage of your automotive SEO efforts.

Think about it this way: low-income families and people in urban areas may not purchase a luxury car, although they live within the radius of an Acura dealership. Therefore, never focus your local SEO efforts on radial determination and instead try targeting specific zip codes. You can access public data broken down by zip code for gaining insights like sales history, age, and average income of prospects residing in a specific area, allowing you to “hyper-focus” your content.

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Consider your automotive SEO strategy as a basic experiment of pouring water from a bucket versus a pipette into a test tube. The more concentrated your funnel is, the better the overall results would be.

Personalize the Customer Experience

If you really want to differentiate your dealership from the competition and boost your automotive SEO results, nothing can be better than personalizing the customer experience. Each prospect will have a different version of your site available. Whether you’ve never visited the store, or just bought a vehicle, your automotive website should look different. How can you make this possible? Well, personalization is based on the history of viewers/readers on digital channels.

Therefore, you might want to integrate your customer data, which are your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Data Management System (DMS) within your website. Upon integrating these tools, your site will be able to track viewers and prospects the best way possible. It may say something like, “Hello Michael,” or if the prospect is visiting your site more than once, it might show “It’s great to see you again Michael, is it time to service your car?”

Therefore, there is no doubt that personalizing your customer experience can certainly give your business the boost it needs. You can use marketing automation software like HubSpot or DealerFire for personalizing your website to appeal to different consumers and target them more personally.

Adaptive Targeting

By personalization, you will be creating a custom experience for all the visitors on your site, based on their search history. Now, it’s time for you to take automotive marketing to a whole new level by working on adaptive targeting. As the name implies, this form of targeting involves selling and talking to those individuals who are showing interest in your website and its products. Why is adaptive targeting important? You do not want to talk to the entire database or everyone in your city.

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This will not reap any results whatsoever, as talking to everyone is pretty much the equivalent of talking to no one. This is why you must focus on only talking to people who are ready to buy or showing great interest in your dealership. Depending on the behavior of a customer, you need to speak to each prospect differently. This way, when you send an email, you can provide customers with links to sources that can help them out the most.

When you communicate with customers who walk in your dealership, some might express “price” as an important factor. Others may express larger concerns over safety or infotainment features.  To target the customers in a more personal way, you need to identify their key buying factors. By combing this with personalization, you can be sure the right person gets the right message. This leads to an increase of trust in your business and boost in open rates.

Diversified Content

As an automotive marketer, you are often guided by multiple SEO professionals to create articles/blogs, post them on social media, get reviews and testimonials, and use more platforms for marketing. All of this can get very overwhelming and complicated to understand. You will also have to face the additional pressure of constantly upgrading your content.  To simplify the approach, you need to follow the rule of three: any piece of content you create should be shared in three different ways.

For instance, if you write an article an article on end-of-the-year clearance sale, you can add it to your Facebook page, tweet it out, transform it into a landing page, send it as an email, or use it as a blog post on your website. The key is to repurpose the same content across multiple channels. Not only does this save you lots of time, but it also enables you to post quicker. If you already have a blog post written, writing a landing page or email will become easy to create, as you have the core content available.

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So, if you want to gain an edge over the competition, make sure to follow the tips mentioned above.